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Clive Davis was feeling proud.
In early April, the chief creative officer of Sony Music Entertainment addressed a gathering of more than 500 members of the New York University community and music industry who had gathered in Brooklyn to celebrate the 20th anniversary of NYU’s Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music, the school that the legendary music executive had endowed.
“It’s really incredible to see how far the program has come and how successful the students have been,” Davis told the crowd in a video message (noting he had a schedule conflict with a friend’s wedding). “There are students winning Grammy Awards in major categories, actually dominating the Billboard charts and occupying major positions at record labels, agencies and management companies.
“It’s great to see how my original concept for a new and original music program has become such a successful reality,” Davis added.
“What is my fond hope for the future? I hope students continue to find success and really emerge as the leaders in the 21st-century music business.”
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As if to highlight Davis’ assertion, earlier that same day in April, one of the most successful alums of the school, Maggie Rogers, announced her first arena tour, in support of her album Don’t Forget Me, which peaked at No. 6 on Billboard’s Americana/Folk Albums chart.
Among those gathered for this celebration of the institute, which is part of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, were Allyson Green, dean of the Tisch School, who said: “For the past 20 years, the Clive Davis Institute has fostered some of the industry’s most exciting new musical artists and creative business minds. Our outstanding faculty, leaders and staff cultivate an exciting learning environment that allows for both the freedom to experiment and the tools to navigate the competitive music world.”
D-Nice DJ’d the institute’s 20th anniversary party in April 2024.
NYU Photo Bureau
Successful alumni have included not only Rogers (whose career was memorably jump-started by a viral video of Pharrell Williams’ awestruck reaction to her recording of “Alaska” during an institute master class in 2016), but also Grammy-nominated producer Dan Knobler; Noah Yoo and Sedona Schat, aka Elektra Records act Cafuné; production duo Take a Daytrip’s Denzel Baptiste and David Biral, who earned album and record of the year Grammy nods for their work on Lil Nas X’s album Montero and single “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” respectively; singer-songwriter Nija Charles, who shared the album of the year nomination for her contributions to Beyoncé’s Renaissance; and Grammy-winning producer Andrew Watt.
The institute accommodates about 250 students who work toward a bachelor of fine arts in recorded music. Its Brooklyn campus, which the program moved into in 2020, offers a seamless flow of spaces designed to inspire creativity and collaboration. Facilities include Oscilloscope Laboratories, the Beastie Boys’ studio formerly located in Manhattan that member Adam Yauch’s widow, Dechen Wangdu, gifted to the school.
The school also hosts its share of guest speakers and performers — Davis, Williams, Alicia Keys, Benny Blanco, Chris Blackwell, Jay-Z, Mark Ronson, Paul Simon, Rihanna and Stevie Wonder among them.
Nick Sansano, chair of the Clive Davis Institute, recently sat down with Billboard to describe the school’s program, which, like the music industry itself, is constantly evolving and rooted in a bit of rebellion.
How involved is Clive Davis in the institute?
What he did was lay out the design and the idea of this holistic curriculum where someone would not just learn about an instrument or be a studio rat or only study music business or legal affairs. His idea was to take everything out of their silos so you have this program that is about music, about music production, about music business — but really what it’s about is leadership, entrepreneurship, thinking holistically, about the future of the industry.
I don’t think he imagined how successful the whole thing would be and how much he would get out of it. He definitely feels that authentic pride, and once in a while he’ll even call with ideas out of the blue. He’s so checked in, and that has been a game-changer for us.
Oscilloscope Laboratories, the Beastie Boys’ studio formerly located in Manhattan, was donated and reconstructed within the institute’s Brooklyn building, including details like takeout menus the group kept on hand.
Carine Puyo
How has the curriculum expanded over two decades?
We’ve always had this ethos around here to push change through and ask questions later, because it could take forever to change curriculum at a university and by the time you do it, you need to go to the next one. It was hard to navigate in the beginning. But the university understood ultimately that we needed to move at our own pace. And we proved ourselves competent. The more we handled our own affairs, the more room they gave us.
The curriculum is always changing as new topics come up and others become irrelevant. New this fall are Reggaetón Revolution, the history of reggaetón, and Creating a Narrative in Audio, a podcasting class from the editorial and journalistic side.
We’re now at a point where we’re very realistic, very pragmatic about what we teach. We have to go beyond the topic at hand and look at it on a really macro level. In the beginning we were trying to set modalities in stone, but we emphasize objectives now more so than specific methodologies because how we get there today will not be how we get there tomorrow.
Much of that evolution, I imagine, is driven by your faculty.
We have a very experienced full-time faculty — a lot of us have been here since the beginning or first few years — and a lot of adjuncts, who will come and go based on what we need. When we do a hip-hop course on the Art of the MC, we have Black Thought from The Roots come in. If we have a Lou Reed class, we go to a biographer. [Author-critic] Will Hermes has taught a number of classes for us. We’re always looking at “What are we offering? Where are the holes and who are the experts in the field or on that very specific topic?”
It’s also a great way to find full-time faculty. When people realize the vibe of the place and sincerity of it… Good people are incredibly difficult to find, and we’ll do whatever we can to keep them here.
Professor Bill Stephney (left) and Chuck D at the institute in April 2024.
Kyra Williams
Isn’t that how you became part of the institute?
I’m a music producer, mixer and engineer, and I came in the first year to give a talk about my work with Public Enemy, Sonic Youth and other New York-centric artists. It was a wonderful experience. The students were asking really thought-provoking questions and getting emotional about it. I said to [the institute], “I’ve never taught before, but if you want to take a chance…” The whole thing was a big experiment. I wasn’t the only experimental hire.
How engaged is your alumni network?
One of my priorities was to change the relationship with the alums, and we’ve made a really conscious effort to reach out. I want alumni to feel as if they never left. When we have an event, when we have guest appearances, we invite all the alums — and the reaction to that has been incredibly positive. We now have 20 years of alums. We have people who have some real influence, and our students definitely benefit from that.
What has been the biggest benefit of moving the program to Brooklyn?
Space, and having all our spaces consolidated. When we were in Washington Square and our Mercer Street location [in Manhattan], we had classes all over the city because we kept running out of space. It was all decentralized. And not only was it expensive, but our students were running all over the place.
Our goal was to centralize everything. We have rehearsal spaces, we have edit suites, we have studios, we have piano practice rooms, we have musicianship labs. We have The Garage, a 100-capacity venue, on the first floor, and we have access to a 200-seat auditorium. We are very self-sufficient at this point, and we designed the space the way we wanted to design it. We began five years before moving in. We saw potential and convinced the university to allow us to hire our own acoustic designers and studio builders.
We had a very specific vision. We want you to walk in and feel as though you are part of a professional environment, and that should dictate what you say, how you act and so on. A place you are proud of. The university loves it. We are the showcase; everyone comes here.
Clive Davis (left) and MSNBC’s Ari Melber at the Clive Davis Institute in 2023.
NYU Photo Bureau
Still, a lot of learning also takes place outside this building. What’s the experiential component like?
We require a minimum of two internship credits, but most students are doing way more than that. It runs the gamut from the obvious major labels to some recording studios to smaller publishing companies. We have someone working full time on establishing and looking after these relationships.
We did a partnership with Atlantic this past year, and part of it was — along with some songwriting camps and some A&R sessions and field trips to their offices — a certain amount of priority internship opportunities for our students. We are trying to solidify more of those executive internship programs.
We prefer when a student comes with an idea and then we vet it. We don’t immediately say no to anyone. And we closely monitor [internships]. There are [labor] laws and there are NYU-mandated requirements, and you could run afoul of both. It doesn’t happen very often, but that doesn’t mean we don’t watch.
The institute’s offerings don’t come cheaply. The NYU website says the university’s general cost of attendance — tuition, food and housing — for the 2024-25 academic year is $87,488. How do you justify that cost and ensure a diverse student body?
We don’t just give people the sticker price and then that’s it. The university works with them, Tisch works with them, and then we as a department work with them on a very personal level. Most of our students who apply for financial aid do get substantial aid. And something new that’s just kicking in this fall is an NYU-wide policy that covers full tuition for students whose families make under $100,000 a year, which is a huge help.
Being so aware of the sacrifice many families make to get their kids here — it affects the overall tone of the institute because we realize that’s how much we need to give back. But we also have to deal with student issues we wish we didn’t, like students who can’t sustain. There are a lot of factors that go into it, including just living in New York, and we get involved with things like housing and food. We have supporters and financial donors that help us with professional development. We are able to do showcases; students are able to travel, to get concert tickets, to go to an exhibit. We just took eight students to Milan for a week. The year before, we took them to Norway. In January, we’ll take them to France. We’ll go that extra mile and subsidize.
Ultimately the goal of the department is to be free, through a large endowment, which we know is possible because we’re seeing it happen. We saw it at NYU Medical School, and we’re seeing it at other universities. [NYU Medical School became tuition-free in 2018 after raising the majority of the endowment needed to sustain the program.]
Professor Bobby Wooten and artist-in-residence Corinne Bailey Rae at the institute in February 2024.
Sam Hollenshead
How else does the institute use financial support to bolster the program?
A priority here is equity having to do with women and music. We’re working with the history that, for so long, women were excluded from production and some other business areas. It’s important to rebuild a certain amount of trust that has eroded over the years.
Our classes now are usually more than 50% women. We have a student-run organization called PAM, which stands for Producers Against Misogyny, and our Audio Engineering Society student chapter is run by women. We support these student groups and their events.
We also host a Future Music Moguls program, which is fully funded for high school students. It’s a whole-day affair on a Saturday during the spring semester where we give a mini version of our curriculum. Engaging with high school students is important to us — and a great way to recognize future talent.
How do you view the overall role of the institute in the music business?
Our ultimate goal is, we would like the music industry to change for the better, but we are not going to do that by banging on the walls and asking to get in. We’re going to do that by busting it out from the inside. Meaning, our students will infiltrate the industry — and we’re seeing that change now.
This story appears in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Joe Jonas’ upcoming album is not technically his solo debut: Back in 2011 during a Jonas Brothers hiatus, the middle JoBro released Fastlife, a club-aimed rhythmic pop foray featuring contributions from Lil Wayne and Chris Brown that couldn’t quite turn the then-22-year-old into a radio star. “I have so much love for those songs — they actually aged pretty well!” Jonas says today with a wide smile. “But it feels like a different person.”
Fastlife might as well be a lifetime ago for Jonas, now 35. Since then, he found his radio hit with 2015’s “Cake by the Ocean” as the leader of pop collective DNCE, then reunited with his siblings Nick and Kevin in 2019, for a Jonas Brothers comeback that produced the No. 1 smash “Sucker” and a global arena tour, among other achievements.
Jonas also married actress Sophie Turner in 2019, welcomed two daughters, then experienced a very public divorce in 2023. “I was going through a lot of life changes,” he says of the past few years, “finding out who I was as a person and father and friend, and living under the microscope of what the music industry can be. And I think, at such a crazy time in my life, I looked to music as an outlet.”
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The result is Music for People Who Believe in Love, a solo album full of unvarnished thoughts and sonic experiments that Republic Records will release Oct. 18. The full-length doesn’t sound anything like Fastlife, but it doesn’t resemble Jonas Brothers or DNCE, either. Jonas lands on a shimmery pop sound that synthesizes a wide array of influences, from garage-rock to alt-pop to ’90s country, while singing about navigating life’s uncertainties and finding gratitude amid loss.
“Things you can’t imagine/Remind you of what you’ve always had/Maybe they need to happen/So you know the worst ain’t all that bad,” he sings on “My Own Best Friend,” a pleading anthem marked by mournful whistling. Elsewhere, Jonas races through a fuzz-heavy synth workout on “Velvet Sunshine,” offers a gently strummed “lullaby to my kids” on “Hey Beautiful” and, on the wide-reaching lead single, “Work It Out,” addresses his “head full of insecurities” while slipping into falsetto over a percolating beat.
Jonas says that Music for People Who Believe in Love began with the song “Only Love,” a funked-up and flirtatious pop-rock jam that he originally conceived with his brothers. During the writing process in Australia as they worked with producer Joel Little, “I noticed that the song was going toward the direction of some personal stuff that I went through,” Jonas recalls. “So I go to Kevin and Nick, ‘Hey, can I use this as a catapult to go explore what this sound could be, and also what I’m trying to figure out emotionally?’ They were very supportive — Nick said, ‘Well, damn, I really like that song. But I get what you need to do, so go for it.’ ”
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Jonas quickly went to work, corralling studio whizzes including Alexander 23, Justin Tranter, Jason Evigan and Tommy English to Los Angeles’ House of Blues studio and knocking out the majority of the album in two-and-a-half weeks. Following the sunny Jonas Brothers full-length The Album in spring 2023 — and then a slew of tabloid headlines detailing his divorce last fall — Jonas says that hunkering down on a more personal project ultimately proved to be therapeutic.
“It was scary at times, and also freeing,” he says. “I’m not trying to come for anyone on this album. I’m not trying to put stuff on blast. I have a beautiful life that I’m grateful for. I’ve got two beautiful kids. I’m a happy person, and the music needed to resemble that — but also, the journey to get here.”
Republic vp of marketing strategy Alyssa LoPresti adds, “This campaign starts and ends with Joe. From his personal taste in music, which is highlighted by [his] notable and exciting choice of collaborators, to the way he’s engaging with fans on his platforms and the content he’s filmed to support the release, it is all authentic to who Joe is and reflective of this chapter of his life.”
Jonas says that more album tracks, and their featured guests, will be unveiled in the coming weeks following the July release of “Work It Out,” and that he’s “definitely” planning to showcase the album live, potentially around release week.
If Jonas’ last solo project was a bid for stardom when he was still figuring out who he was, Music for People Who Believe in Love represents a check-in from an artist at peace with his choices. “At the core of it,” he says, “if this body of work helps people through what they’re going through, that’s all I can really wish for.”
This story appears in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.
When the idea for the Americana Music Association emerged in the late 1990s, it came from a community that shared a vision. A collective of artists, label executives, journalists and radio programmers all believed in promoting music driven by ideals and creativity rather than revenue. The nonprofit launched in 1999 and held its first convention in Downtown Nashville the following year with performances from Rhonda Vincent, Sam Bush, Jim Lauderdale and Rodney Crowell. In 2002, the first Americana Music Honors & Awards show was held lauding Lauderdale, Buddy & Julie Miller, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Billy Joe Shaver and T Bone Burnett.
Over the past 25 years, the association has worked to fashion a community that supports an ever-growing, ever-evolving slate of artists whose roots music styles include country, folk, bluegrass, R&B and roots-rock. The Avett Brothers, Carolina Chocolate Drops (whose members then included Rhiannon Giddens), Mumford & Sons, Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile, Margo Price, Sturgill Simpson, Brandy Clark and the late Levon Helm have had sterling career successes under the Americana banner, followed by the recent ascension of Noah Kahan, Wyatt Flores, Kaitlin Butts, Charley Crockett, Tyler Childers and Allison Russell.
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The Americana genre is “just a home base thing, for me — I’ve built my whole life within this community, including my family and my kids,” Carlile told Billboard last year when she received Grammy Award nominations in the pop, rock and Americana categories. “We’re just rooted in our Americana people. And what Americana really is is a rejection of some of the exclusive tenets of country music — I mean that politically; I mean that sonically. In terms of diversity, Americana is where you’re going to see it the most.”
Jed Hilly has been key to the Americana Music Association’s growth. After serving as head of label for Orbison Records, Hilly became the association’s executive director in 2007 and has been a foremost advocate for the genre. He sees the organization’s mission in simple terms: to advocate for the authentic voice of American roots music. During Hilly’s tenure, the Recording Academy expanded its Americana/roots categories at the Grammy Awards (there are now four), while Billboard updated the name of its Folk Albums chart to Americana/Folk Albums and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary added the word “Americana.”
In recent years, acts including Carlile, Crockett, Russell, the late John Prine, Billy Strings and The War and Treaty have won honors in top categories at the Americana Music Honors & Awards, and the association now boasts 4,000 members. In addition, the annual Nashville-based AmericanaFest has served to highlight a diverse array of talent, with last year’s event showcasing 200 acts with performances spanning 48 venues across the city. The 2024 AmericanaFest will take place Sept. 17-21.
As the Americana Music Association celebrates its 25th anniversary, Billboard spoke with Hilly about the organization’s beginnings, its evolution and the genre’s current surge in popularity.
Tell me about the origins of the Americana Music Association.
In the late ’90s, there was a movement against commercial country radio, which had dropped artists like Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, Rosanne Cash and the list goes on. The movement was started by Jon Grimson and Rob Bleetstein, [who were instrumental in launching] an Americana chart for [music publication The Gavin Report], where they cherry-picked the stations that were still playing that kind of music. Then in 1999, when about 30 people got together at South by Southwest in Austin, they wanted to start a trade association like others had done.
The credit goes to the founding fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, people like Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, Rodney [Crowell]. We truly have changed the landscape of music. We’ve given prominence to those artists who otherwise might not be heard. Music in the ’90s became more commercial, with less artist development. SoundScan really shifted the landscape. But as T Bone Burnett says, “If you make a great album, you make a great album.”
Jed Hilly onstage during the association’s Honors & Awards nomination ceremony at the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville on May 7, 2024.
Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images
The Americana Music Association has done significant advocacy work in expanding the roots and Americana recognition at the Grammy Awards.
That was the first thing I was working on. Hats off to Robert Plant, Alison Krauss and T Bone Burnett [whose 2007 Raising Sand earned five Grammys, including album of the year]. We welcomed that album before it [went] on to win Grammys. It was our album of the year in the fall before the Grammys, when they were nominated and won all those awards. When Robert went into the press room at the Grammys with four or five Grammys stacked up, someone asked him which was his favorite, and Robert said, “Actually, it was the one we won in Nashville last fall.” That opened the doors. I engaged [the Americana Music Association’s] membership to support the Recording Academy’s membership [because the academy’s philanthropic division], MusiCares, is an organization I so respect. Significantly, the Americana album category became the fastest-growing category, percentagewise, for the Grammys.
In recent years, top Americana Music Honors & Awards winners have included the bluegrass-rock sounds of Billy Strings, Charley Crockett’s old-school country and soul sounds, the songcraft of John Prine, the strong voices of Brandi Carlile and Allison Russell and the country-soul sounds of The War and Treaty. How do you define Americana today?
Music evolves. Billy Strings crosses a contemporary line. Maybe a more radical version would be Mumford & Sons with that first album. They crossed a contemporary line. With blues, if Muddy Waters is the baseline, Bonnie Raitt made a contemporary form of the blues. [Bob] Dylan and the band [went] electric at [the Newport Folk Festival] — that was not folk music anymore; it was something else. I believe that it’s important for art forms to maintain their integrity. In 1955, rock’n’roll was Elvis Presley; 1961, it was Chubby Checker; and fast-forward to U2 winning [the Grammy for best rock performance by a duo or group with vocal] for The Joshua Tree. It evolves.
I also give credit to Danna Strong, who was the first Americana Music Association employee and is still our director of education and programs and conference producer. Danna came to me in 2010 and said, “No one’s honored Muscle Shoals. How do we do that?” We honored everyone in Muscle Shoals and asked Rick Hall [who has been called “the Father of Muscle Shoals”] to accept the award, but honored everyone who was part of that.
Did that change the way you looked at the awards?
We recognized inspiration as part of the criteria for a lifetime achievement award, and that came in part from Porter Wagoner. In my first year, I was reluctant to honor Porter and I hate that I was reluctant, but I was figuring things out. Porter, to me, was the epitome of country music, and I felt we were something different than country music. But I realized people like Buddy and Rodney all did Porter songs on their albums. That opened the door to other ideas, like [honoring] Richard Thompson [and] honoring Booker T. and the M.G.’s. That’s not what you would think of as the down-the-middle Americana at the time. It was about looking at the greater landscape of inspiration.
The Americana Music Honors & Awards is slated for Sept. 18 in Nashville, and the awards have become more inclusive in honoring the work of pioneers such as Mavis Staples and Allen Toussaint, but also celebrating the artistry and musicianship of contemporary artists including Brandi Carlile and Allison Russell.
Diversity is important. I woke up after the [Americana] awards show in 2013 or 2014 and realized that all of our lifetime achievement honorees were basically white, middle-aged men. Americana is the contemporary form of music that is derived from multiple roots genres. The best way I know to go about that is to find people who feel welcome in the community and show them off. The McCrary Sisters have been our in-house band for as long as we’ve been doing this, and they are extraordinary. We have partnered with the National Museum of African American Music. The Fairfield Four as a quartet deserves to be recognized and honored — let’s put a spotlight on that. Our goal is to be open and welcoming. Do we have a long way to go? Sure we do. Americana is a great American art form, and it’s an opportunity that welcomes all walks of life with an authentic approach to making music. I do believe that if everyone in the world listened to Americana music for one hour, the world would be a better place.
Over the past few years, artists such as Zach Bryan and Noah Kahan, who have a roots-driven sound, have dominated all-genre charts. They aren’t based in Nashville, but they are having a huge impact in driving listeners to seek out more Americana sounds. What is your take on that impact?
Americana’s rockin’ right now. Noah has participated in several events, and he’s nominated for artist of the year this year. When The Lumineers took off, we embraced them early and nominated them for emerging artist of the year. They didn’t really know what we were doing, so we sat down with them, and as time went on, they were like, “What can we do to help?” They did a show during AmericanaFest at The Cannery [Ballroom], so 700 people got to see them perform. I hope Zach will join us someday. I think he’s an Americana artist — he’s not a country artist, in my humble opinion. But we look at Wyatt Flores and Sierra Ferrell, Nathaniel Rateliff, Jason Isbell and Brandi Carlile selling out massive rooms. Whether or not Americana has a mainstream [radio] hit, we can build careers.
This story appears in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.
I’m not getting too stressed about bridge lyrics,” says Benjmn, 29. “Because there’s like a 100% chance it’s going to get translated.”
The Los Angeles-based topliner is closing in on his ninth straight hour of songwriting today. And like the 10 other lyricists and producers Universal Music Publishing Group has assembled at Arcade Studios in New York, he won’t stop until he’s achieved perfection. Benjmn, who has written for acts like ENHYPEN and Le Sserafim before, and his cohorts here are all proven K-pop hit-makers, so they’re well aware that much of today’s work will be rewritten in Korean. Still, he and his collaborators on this particular track — 31-year-old SAAY from South Korea and 34-year-old Sandra Wikstrom from Sweden — will continue fine-tuning their already pristine bridge for at least 15 more minutes before moving on. Are there enough syllables? Is it dragging? Can the melody be more expansive?
They know that the punchier the lyrics, the likelier it is that major K-pop labels like HYBE, JYP Entertainment and SM Entertainment will pick up their demos for artists to record. Their current target is a boy band on the rise that UMPG knows is looking for its next hit, although the track — a swaggering dance tune tentatively titled “GLUE” — may very well go to another of the ever-proliferating K-pop groups. (Because of the unpredictable nature of where songs end up and the prejudices a label may have if it sees a song title publicly attached to other acts, UMPG declines to comment on the precise artists for whom the musicians have gathered.)
The three rainy days these writers and producers will spend here mark just the second-ever international K-pop camp UMPG has held in the United States as it pushes to capitalize on the opportunities the genre offers its roster of talent, rounding up its most experienced creatives from all over the world and charging them with completing three songs a day in small groups. After the camp concludes, UMPG Korea senior creative A&R executive Yena Kim will pitch the nine finished tracks to the big three labels, which constantly send her hyperspecific briefs outlining what they’re looking for and for whom; for now, she walks from room to room ensuring everyone understands their assignments.
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“Ultimately, we want releases,” explains UMPG’s head of its global creative group, David Gray. “We can sign K-pop writers and say, ‘Go get us K-pop cuts.’ But we can also be proactive and creative. Let’s put our best K-pop writers together, bring them briefs from Korea and keep it small, focused and strategic so we have the best chance of getting results.”
Benjmn (left) records vocals for an R&B-inspired demo produced by Sam Klempner.
Nina Westervelt
Jeppe London (left) and Lauritz Emil work on a song with guitars.
Nina Westervelt
On day one of camp, delirium is already setting in. “We should do a song called ‘Jet Lag,’ ” Benjmn jokes before he, SAAY and Wikstrom start spitting out catchy rap bars seemingly effortlessly, despite their lack of sleep. “Jet lag, jet lag, gotta go get bags/All around the world, I’m getting whiplash,” they sing, taking turns adding lines.
Down the hall, 28-year-old BLVSH from Germany and London-based Josh McClelland, 27, are writing for the same boy band, penning a punk-rock heartbreak anthem called “Close the Door.” Producer duo Jeppe London, 28, and Lauritz Emil, 26, both from Denmark, speak in rapid-fire Danish while recording electric guitar passes to find a sweet spot between Demi Lovato and Linkin Park, both of whom label SM sent as references. The room’s shared credits include tracks for BTS, ENHYPEN, NCT and TWICE, and an expertise in the subtleties of writing for K-pop artists shows.
“You’re looking for fun keywords instead of poetic structure,” explains BLVSH, who earned a No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 last year for her work on Jimin’s “Like Crazy.” “It’s more [about] attention-grabbing visuals and hooky words.”
They also labor over how pleasing each syllable sounds, the cadence and differentiation of each line, whether the melodies will sit in the band members’ varying vocal ranges and how easily choreographers will be able to pair the lyrics with snappy dance moves — all elements they say they don’t necessarily think about when writing for other genres, as many of them started out writing outside K-pop. Phonetics are key, even if most lyrics do end up getting reworked by translators, who generally earn a 12.5% split in royalties when the song is finished; BLVSH and McClelland say Korean labels are more likely to bite when they can imagine from the get-go how a song will sound once translated, which is why the writers make sure to infuse their demos with sharp consonants to mimic the Korean language. (For example: Saying a love interest looks “picturesque” grabs their ears far more than a simple “pretty” or “good.”)
SAAY (left) listens to a demo while BLVSH tinkers on piano.
Nina Westervelt
Max Thulin produces a track in Logic Pro.
Nina Westervelt
It’s also why the writers focus less on storytelling and more on a certain vibe or attitude in their songs, which they strive to convey even when recording their demos. By nature, many of them are far less extroverted than the acts they write for, so it’s entertaining to watch Benjmn cringe as he listens to a take of himself singing with Justin Bieber-esque sultriness, or to see 31-year-old Feli Ferraro of Los Angeles intuitively flip her hair and pop her hips while recording sexy-confident raps for a song called “8” that’ll be sent off to a brand-new girl group SM is developing (the campers know nothing of its top-secret lineup).
The songwriters aren’t fazed when translators alter the meaning of their lyrics; they understand it’s an often necessary part of ensuring they still rhyme and flow well in Korean. Still, it’s always ideal artistically when their work stays as close to the original as possible — and there are ways of increasing the chances that it does: As McClelland puts it, “Let’s make sure this lyric is fire.”
Toward the end of the day, everyone takes a short break to mingle and eat dinner; last year, UMPG learned that the ever-diligent writers prefer bringing in meals to avoid taking time away from their songs, and tonight’s comes from Joe’s Home of Soup Dumplings. SAAY and Wikstrom excitedly make plans to visit the Times Square Disney store while they’re in town. But there’s minimal time for this kind of pleasant catchup. A mountain of empty plastic containers in their wake, everyone instinctively filters back into their respective rooms.
Most end up staying until 10 p.m. There’s more work to be done.
From a publisher’s perspective, everything changed for global K-pop in 2020. That’s when BTS earned its first Hot 100 No. 1 with “Dynamite” — and the genre “exploded, that’s for sure,” quips Daniella Rasho, international A&R executive at UMPG U.S., who oversees the camp alongside Yena Kim.
“People have seen what BTS has done,” she continues. “Now every K-pop label is like, ‘I’m going to have the next BTS. I’m going to have the next one that goes global or is on U.S. radio.’ ”
“[Korean] labels are aiming for hits on the Billboard charts,” Kim adds. “The artists, most of them now all speak English, as well as local A&Rs. The whole thing is changing. It wasn’t like this five to six years ago.”
As K-pop’s global reach has expanded, so too has foreign songwriters’ interest in the genre, which rapidly transformed from one of the least popular international markets for songwriters to one of the most competitive. It’s an appealing space: Western pop stars are often inclined to stick with the same close circle of collaborators, but K-pop labels are quite open to taking songs from outsiders. Thanks to K-pop fans’ propensity for buying multiple physical variants of singles and albums, the royalty checks for songwriters and producers tend to be higher, too.
Western stars like Taylor Swift have also prioritized writing their own music, while K-pop fans value the glossy, high-production performances their idols have spent years training to execute more than the names on a song’s billing, allowing more space for career songwriters to notch credits. Rasho has a theory as to why: “American audiences want to relate to pop stars. For K-pop, people want to be them.”
Front row, from left: Jeppe London, Celine Svanback, Feli Ferraro, Benjmn and Max Thulin. Middle row, from left: Sandra Wikstrom, SAAY, Sam Klempner and BLVSH. Back row: Josh McClelland (left) and Lauritz Emil.
Nina Westervelt
SAAY (left) with Sandra Wikstrom who reads lyrics off her phone.
Nina Westervelt
Plus, the campers say that K-pop labels are in some ways more forgiving than their Western counterparts. They’re used to receiving detailed feedback on their demos and getting ample opportunity to rewrite or add parts to a song, and Ferraro explains that some will “Frankenstein” pieces of different submissions together to achieve the desired result. “They’ll find a home for it,” says the Connecticut native, who co-wrote “Run BTS” and Le Sserafim’s “Unforgiven.” “It doesn’t feel like you’re wasting your time at all.”
Seeing the many opportunities K-pop presents for its roster, UMPG has sprung into action over the past few years organizing writing sessions all over the world. Kim handpicked each creative at this year’s camp based not just on skill, but also on who would be most suited to the song briefs at hand — “Specific labels like some writing styles more than others,” Rasho explains — and who would get along best as collaborators.
Figuring out the latter is an art in itself. At last year’s camp, Gray recalls that “there were tears” during a creative dispute over a song that would turn out to be TWICE soloist NAYEON’s “Something.” It ended up being one of the most high-profile releases the inaugural camp created, with the EP it was on, NA, reaching No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart in June.
Next, Kim tailored small groups around who could best match the demands of the individual briefs, which reflect just how tuned in to global trends K-pop labels are. JYP requested a solo song akin to Tate McRae’s “Greedy” for a member of one of its girl groups, while others cited Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” Chappell Roan, Caroline Polachek and Charli xcx’s brat as references.
K-pop’s sonic evolution is a big reason why UMPG’s approach, gathering writers from all over the world, works so well. Swedish and British producers like Max Thulin, 30, and Sam Klempner, respectively, “bring their experimental, cool sounds,” while Germans are masters of “fun, electronic pop,” Rasho says.
“The U.S. writers come and do their rap thing — they have that swagger,” she continues. “They bring out something new and different in each other. They bring the best of their territories, too.”
Celine Svanback records vocals for a girl-group demo.
Nina Westervelt
Celine Svanback and Josh McClelland records vocals.
Nina Westervelt
Only at the end of camp, when all of their songs are finished, do the writers let UMPG treat them to dinner offsite — Cecconi’s on Broadway. Over drinks, McClelland jokes that Universal saved money on hotels by having two couples present. Benjmn and Ferraro are married, and Emil is engaged to fellow Dane Celine Svanback, 28; both couples met in past writing sessions. But aside from a few others from the same close-knit territories who’ve worked together before, like McClelland and Klempner, it’s the first time many of the campers have met — although, in the course of conversation, Benjmn and Thulin realize they share credits on a previous song created remotely, Le Sserafim’s “Eve, Psyche & the Bluebeard’s Wife.”
Most of them, it seems, fell into the K-pop world unintentionally, whether they were headhunted by labels or indoctrinated at the nudging of UMPG. It wasn’t the first choice for many but now, it’s become perhaps their best avenue to flex their creative muscles, writing pop, hip-hop, rock and R&B all under the ever-expanding K-pop umbrella.
“It’s not just one sound,” says Wikstrom, who never did come up for air long enough to visit the Disney store. “That’s what I really love — you’re not tied to anything. I used to think, ‘No, I don’t want to do K-pop. I don’t even know what K-pop is.’
“Then, I realized,” she continues, her eyes widening. “K-pop is everything.”
This story will appear in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Mr. David Washington stands on the grounds that he has tended for decades, amid the Georgia Pines that flood much of the property, as the early-morning June heat creeps across the lawns. Now in his 70s, he’s quick to laugh and does so often, each one punctuating his thick, Southern drawl as he tells the story of the day, some 35 years ago, when Mr. James Brown called out to him and changed his life.
It was the late 1980s, and Mr. Washington, as everyone calls him, had gotten off a 12-hour shift at the cotton mill in Graniteville, some 14 miles away, and gone straight to Mr. Brown’s estate in Beech Island, S.C., when the Godfather of Soul summoned him to the house’s front porch. He had a series of pointed questions for his groundskeeper: Did he smoke? Nothing other than his Newports, Mr. Washington said. Did he drink? He and his wife would have a glass on special occasions, but that was all. Well then, Mr. Brown wanted to know, why were his eyes so red? He explained about the mill job; that his part-time work for Mr. Brown was a way to make ends meet; that he had been on his feet, by then, for hours on end. Well, that wouldn’t do, Mr. Brown replied.
“ ‘You go back down to that plant and tell them you’re putting in your two-week notice — what you make down there, I’ll pay you double if you come work for me,’ ” Mr. Washington recalls the boss saying before breaking out in another laugh. “I said, ‘Yes, sir, Mr. Brown!’ ”
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Over the next 15-plus years, Mr. Washington became more than just Mr. Brown’s full-time groundskeeper. He became a driver, an assistant, a confidant and, after Mr. Brown’s maid fell ill, something of a jack of all trades. “I started working in the house: running his bathwater, doing his grocery shopping, making the bed, babysitting; I did a little bit of everything around here,” he says. “He didn’t like to be by himself, so sometimes I’d sit right in the house with him and we’d watch Westerns, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, the news.” Mr. Washington was the one who, in late December 2006, drove Mr. Brown to the hospital after his dentist heard something in the Godfather’s chest and recommended he get it checked out; and he was there, in the early hours of Christmas Day, when the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business succumbed to pneumonia and took his last breath.
More than 17 years after he made the drive back to Beech Island alone, Mr. Washington is still here. He has kept watch over Brown’s house through a succession of three estate trustees, a Christie’s auction, a 15-year legal battle among Brown’s heirs over his assets and, now, under the stewardship of Primary Wave, which purchased the assets of his estate in December 2021 for a reported $90 million. Primary Wave — the publishing, marketing, branding and content firm that touts itself as being in the “icons and legends” business and also has stakes in the rights of Whitney Houston, Bob Marley, Prince and more — acquired Brown’s publishing, master-royalty income, name and likeness rights and the Beech Island property, with its 60-plus acres, the mansion in which Brown lived since the late 1970s and everything in it, including a dozen cars, two tour buses and even the food that had remained in the cabinets since his death. The company also retained Mr. Washington to look after the place. “He’s our resident historian,” says Donna Grecco, Primary Wave’s asset manager who has overseen the cataloging and archiving of the estate. “He’s a treasure.”
James Brown, who grew up picking cotton so he could afford food and clothes, kept cotton branches in vases around his house to remind himself where he came from.
Andrew Hetherington
The Brown estate in Beech Island sits on 62.8 acres on James Brown Boulevard, behind wrought-iron gates and down a sloping drive that passes through a lake and several other outbuildings. The house is built around an Asian garden in the center, where he liked to sit.
Andrew Hetherington
Primary Wave, founded by veteran label executive Larry Mestel in 2006, has a long history of reinvigorating the intellectual property of music’s giants, both living and departed, whether through new remixes, samples or interpolations of their work, partnerships with brands (its first major success, in 2008, was a sneaker deal with Converse that featured Kurt Cobain lyrics on a line of shoes) or big-ticket content plays like the 2022 Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Several estate and asset deals the company has done came with troves of personal items and memorabilia that took months to sift through and organize.
But the Brown deal marked the first time the company acquired an actual house. (After finalizing the acquisition of 50% of the Prince estate in August 2022, Primary Wave now also owns a stake in Paisley Park.) And what the company found on the compound, which sits just across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga., was a home almost entirely preserved as it was on the day Brown died, down to the Christmas tree that still stands in the foyer, with unopened presents underneath.
To walk through its rooms is to step into a moment frozen in time: big, clunky TVs and VCRs by brands long out of business; Christmas decorations on the mantel; a matching collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books in his office; phone books on the shelves. Mirrors, elephant motifs, bamboo poles and marble are everywhere. Inside Brown’s personal hair salon there’s a basket of dozens of hair curlers, with bottles and cans of hair product lining the shelves. A mix of cultural artifacts — African, Native American, Indian, East Asian — adorn every room; each light switch cover is a photo of Brown holding a street sign with his name on it. Grecco, with her team’s help and Mr. Washington’s expertise, has been working to restore everything to precisely where it was during Brown’s life, before a series of museums (including the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) and the one-time auction resulted in some items shifting around and being moved in and out.
“When we first came into this house, there were boxes everywhere,” Grecco remembers. She and a team of archivists went room by room, photographing everything, scanning documents, protecting clothing, entering information into spreadsheets and documenting where things were found and where they should go. “We’ve had this estate for two-and-a-half-years — we’re still doing it,” she says. “You put together a plan of how to approach it from the most delicate and respectful angle knowing that this isn’t a museum — this was somebody’s living space.”
Mr. David Washington, who worked for Brown for decades later in the star’s life, with Brown’s Rolls-Royce, one of several luxury vehicles — including a red Thunderbird and a ’42 Lincoln Continental — that came with the estate when Primary Wave purchased it. Mr. Washington’s favorite? “Big Red,” the lawnmower he stores at the top of the hill.
Andrew Hetherington
Brown’s bedroom was a centerpiece of his house; opposite the bed (with his monogrammed pajamas), heart- shaped mirrors flank an old TV on the wall. In the corner is a movie director’s chair, from the set of either The Blues Brothers or Rocky IV, both of which he appeared in.
Andrew Hetherington
At the same time, the rest of Primary Wave got to work, and the executive team went down to Beech Island to walk through the property. “When we are stepping into the full gamut of an artist’s life and you can touch the cars and go on the tour bus, it helps us with our ideation and what we’re going to do on a marketing level and a content level,” says Ramon Villa, Primary Wave’s COO. “The closer we are to the assets and we see how the artist lived, it helps us ideate more.”
Already, some of the team’s ideas have had an impact. In 2022, Primary Wave licensed Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” to Amazon for its Mother’s Day “Woman’s World” campaign; the ad won a Clio Award in January for best use of music in film and video. The following month, plant-based milk company Silk featured Jeremy Renner singing Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” in a Super Bowl ad. The Netflix films You People (“The Payback”) and Shirley (“Think [About It]”) also dipped into the catalog, while the upcoming Peacock film Fight Night incorporated “The Boss” into its trailer and The Wonder Years used “I’m Black and I’m Proud” in a period-specific scene. “A lot of what we’re trying to connect the dots to is either period-specific projects in film and TV or just more generally catalog-based projects,” Primary Wave head of global synch Marty Silverstone says. In partnership with Republic Records, the estate also put out a previously unreleased archival song, “We Got To Change” — recorded in August 1970 — in tandem with the February release of a four-part A&E docuseries, James Brown: Say It Loud.
In fact, one of the challenges Primary Wave faces as it looks at content opportunities for the Brown estate is that so many things have already been done. In 2014, a biopic starring Chadwick Boseman, Get On Up, was released to positive reviews. Around a dozen other documentary-style or live performance-based films on Brown have come in the past 20 years. “There’s been a lot done,” Primary Wave partner/chief content officer Natalia Nastaskin says. “But there are so many stories that are part of Mr. Brown’s life.”
Brown’s salon, which also contained a spa and footbaths (for feet that were constantly dancing onstage), was full of dozens of the same product — he was so meticulous about his hair and appearance that when he found something he liked, he would often buy it in bulk out of fear it would sell out or be discontinued.
Andrew Hetherington
This photo of Brown holding the street sign that leads to his home adorns nearly every light switch in the house.
Andrew Hetherington
Nastaskin cites films such as 2023’s Air, about the creation of Michael Jordan’s Nike empire, and 2020’s Academy Award-nominated One Night in Miami…, centered on a meeting between Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown, as examples of how a figure like Brown could appear in a major film without making another cradle-to-grave biopic. “It’s about isolating these very important moments in time and focusing on them, and focusing on ways that they haven’t been dissected before,” she says. A live-theater project is also in the works.
But for an artist who dominated music for decades, then earned a second life as one of the most-sampled talents in hip-hop, Primary Wave is looking far beyond the obvious opportunities to keep Brown’s legacy front and center for future generations. “With new media and emerging platforms and things like [artificial intelligence], we get a ton of incoming traffic with wanting Mr. Brown, wanting to create the next ABBA: Voyage experience that is based on Mr. Brown’s live performances,” Nastaskin says, referencing the successful virtual concert series of the Swedish band that debuted earlier this year. “We’re having those conversations, but we’re very selective because it’s very hard to get Mr. Brown right as an avatar. It has to be perfect, and if it’s not perfect, then we’re not interested in doing it.”
The first thing most people notice when they get to Augusta is the heat. The summer has barely begun, but the heat already wraps the city like a cocoon, standing at 98 on the thermostat but more like quicksand on Broad Street. Anyone in their right mind is indoors, giving the streets an almost Potemkin feel, though one man lounging in the shade with a trumpet outside an empty club called The SOUL Bar hints at the history that thrums below the surface.
Brown was born in South Carolina but raised in Augusta, and the murals, statues and soul references that permeate the city reflect his continuing influence. He’s an icon, a genius and means many different things to many different people. “Entrepreneur, self-made, proud, confident,” says Bennish Brown, president/CEO of Destination Augusta, which promotes tourism in the city. “A lot of Augusta’s history and progress is tied to the way James Brown lived his life: constantly innovating, evolving and always looking for opportunities that made sense.”
Primary Wave takes special care of Brown’s iconic suits and jumpsuits, which can be particularly susceptible to the passage of time.
Andrew Hetherington
The front living room of Brown’s home, featuring a photo of him and his eldest son, Teddy, above the fireplace; a phonograph on the hearth; and a bar in the corner. The house is full of mirrors, bamboo and motifs such as elephants.
Andrew Hetherington
Though the Brown house is technically in South Carolina, Augusta lies just 8 miles away. And the city will be an important partner in Primary Wave’s ultimate vision for the house: a Brown version of Elvis Presley’s home-turned-museum, Graceland.
In pursuit of that, Primary Wave will document the continuing restoration process through a development deal with Page Turner, the licensed real estate agent/TV producer who hosts HGTV’s Fix My Flip. “We want people to be able to come and peek behind the curtain of James Brown’s home and have a space with some creative and educational opportunities, too, because education was pretty important to him,” says Primary Wave’s Songhay Taylor, who runs point on all things house-related.
But there is one important distinction between Graceland and the Brown home. “Memphis is a city that gets a lot more tourists and traffic as a music city,” Villa says. “So as we look at what is a realistic approach to having his house be open to the public, we’re working with the city of Augusta as they try to build up their tourism to make a comprehensive plan.” That, Destination Augusta’s Brown says, could include marketing the estate as the focal point of a regionwide attraction with James Brown at its center — “a dream come true.”
A photograph of Brown and his father, above the service flag that adorned his dad’s casket during his funeral. Brown had a sometimes contentious relationship with him, though he later purchased a house for the elder Brown in Augusta in the ’60s.
Andrew Hetherington
James Brown’s “Sex” jumpsuit in the music atrium of Brown’s home in Beech Island, S.C.
Andrew Hetherington
To many, Augusta is most synonymous with The Masters, the crown jewel of global golf tournaments, played each April at Augusta National Golf Club. But Brown’s story aligns better with how locals see themselves and their city than The Masters, the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business a better avatar than the golfers who visit once a year to play an exclusive course. Brown, after all, pulled himself up from sharecropping roots to the top shelf of culture; from picking cotton to shaking hands with the Pope; from dropping out of school to working with a half-dozen successive American presidents on free education initiatives for kids across the country. (His estate stipulates that his master-recording royalties support educational opportunities for Georgia and South Carolina youth; Primary Wave has honored this by contributing a portion of all revenue to a permanent trust run by Brown’s family.)
His story was one version of the American dream — good, bad and ugly. And there was an ugly. Brown’s sterling musical reputation is deeply scarred by allegations of domestic violence against a series of wives and girlfriends, often spurred by alleged drug use, as well as arrests for assault and drug possession for which he served a prison sentence in the late 1980s, among other lurid incidents and accusations, particularly near the end of his life. “We’re not running from that aspect of him, but we’re also paying homage to what he did throughout history, the trails he blazed and the things he stood on from education to Black empowerment, entrepreneurialism, his principles,” Taylor says. “It’s about not ignoring the human elements of him, but also celebrating him as well.”
If things go to plan, Augusta will soon be even more widely known as the home of James Brown — the City of Soul, perhaps, or of Funk — where his legacy and influence are on full display. (As Brown put it in an interview featured in the A&E docuseries, “I created funk. God and me.”) “In order to create an overall immersive experience, we need the city of Augusta to help tell those stories,” Taylor says. “Where he shoeshined, where he buck-danced, where he would do shows, where he went to church — all of those things that are part of the overall story.”
Brown died on Christmas Day in 2006, and this tree has remained standing — with presents underneath — in the foyer of his home ever since.
Andrew Hetherington
Two tour buses parked on the lawns of the Brown estate from the Living in America Tour in the ’80s. One housed the band, the other equipment.
Andrew Hetherington
And for some, that story is not entirely in the past. Mr. Washington recounts that long, lonely drive back to Beech Island from the hospital on Christmas Day, passing through the wrought-iron gates for the first time since the boss had gone.
“I come down the hill — you could see right to the porch — and it looked like he was standing out there with his hands folded up,” he says. “I was like, ‘Mr. Brown, you know you got pneumonia, you need to get back in the house!’ And then the closer I got, his spirit just faded away.” For a few days afterward, he remembers the house alarm going off for no reason, lights flickering in different rooms, an unsettling feeling.
He has other memories, too — driving back-and-forth with Mr. Brown to Atlanta, going down to church on Sundays and then visiting Mr. Brown’s mother in the nursing home afterward, stopping for fried chicken on the way back. “I’ve got a lot of good memories of him,” he says. “Any time he’d crack a joke or something…” Mr. Washington trails off, then laughs again. “I could visualize his face right there. I know it’s been some years, but it seems like he’s been gone just yesterday.”
For more exclusive photos of the James Brown home, read here.
This story will appear in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.
In the back room of an industrial art space in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, A$AP Rocky is venting. Not about the muddled reaction his first official AWGE clothing collection garnered at Paris Fashion Week. Not about the devoted fans who keep asking what’s going on with A$AP Mob, the long-dormant hip-hop collective he co-founded nearly two decades ago. And, surprisingly, not even about the potshots Drake sent his way during the Rap Civil War that took place earlier this year.
Nah, tonight Rocky is venting about children’s TV shows — Cocomelon, to be specific. “That s–t is driving me nuts! Don’t tell my girl I said that,” he says before flashing his million-dollar smile, tonight speckled with platinum and diamonds, and letting out a laugh. “I’m totally joking, I don’t give a s–t. She’s tired of it, too, probably.”
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His girl, of course, is Billboard chart-topping, Grammy Award-winning, billionaire business mogul Rihanna. The two first met over a decade ago when they were rehearsing for their joint performance of her “Cockiness” remix at the 2012 MTV Video Music Awards. The following year, Rocky joined the North American leg of her Diamonds World Tour as the opening act; a few public appearances together later — 2018’s Louis Vuitton show at Paris Fashion Week, Rihanna’s 2018 Diamond Ball and the 2019 London Fashion Awards — speculation began swirling that the two were more than just friends. By 2021, after a series of high-profile outings including a Bajan vacation, the two stylish superstars made their relationship official when, in a GQ interview, Rocky called Rihanna “my lady” and the “love of my life.”
Tonight, however, Rihanna is simply a “great mother” — to their two children, 2-year-old RZA Athelston Mayers and 1-year-old Riot Rose Mayers — and an inspiring partner. “It’s crazy how we find balance with our chaotic schedules,” says Rocky (born Rakim Mayers). He’s wearing a custom black AWGE suit that he designed himself, complete with the multiwaist pants that he’s popularized recently. “[The relationship] is going great. I don’t think there’s a more perfect person because when the schedules are hectic, she’s very understanding of that. And when the schedule’s freed up, that’s when you get to spend [the] most time together. It’s all understanding and compatibility.”
AWGE suit, shirt and tie.
Ruven Afanador
That may seem a bit rich coming from one half of the couple who seems to relish keeping their fans endlessly waiting for their next project to drop. But despite not releasing an album since 2018’s TESTING, Rocky’s schedule has been surprisingly hectic — and music has kept him surprisingly busy in recent years. He went on his Injured Generation Tour and headlined major festivals (multiple Rolling Louds both in the United States and abroad; Montréal’s Osheaga in 2022) — much to the chagrin of the pundits and haters who wondered how a guy with little to no new music (and fewer plaques and Billboard chart-toppers than many of his contemporaries) was getting all these looks.
To be fair, it’s not as if Rocky hasn’t tried — if he had it his way, the streets would be flooded with his product. For one thing, there was the small matter of his July 2019 arrest in Stockholm, where a jury found him guilty of assault. (In a bizarre turn of events, then-President Donald Trump called for his immediate release but, according to Rocky, was unable to make anything happen.) And over the past six years, every time he’s gotten into a good creative groove and amassed a worthwhile collection of songs, they’ve been prematurely leaked to the public. “At this point I’ve been working on music for six years, but they leak my music and I get over it and say, ‘F–k it,’ ” he says. “They leak a lot of the music and it ruins it. Like my ‘Taylor Swift’ video. I was pissed off about it, so I never released it.”
In case you haven’t been keeping up, he’s not referencing a video featuring The Eras Queen — he’s talking about the trippy visual for a song named for her that found its way onto the internet last year. Directed by Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia, it would have felt right at home on The Eric Andre Show, while the music was Rocky’s usual brand of experimental, location-agnostic, luxury rap.
Today, Rocky seems confident that he’s in full control of his creative output and says he’s finally ready to drop his long-awaited fourth album, Don’t Be Dumb. He’s only been working on it for the past year but he believes, like most artists discussing their new work, that it’s the best album he’s ever made. (During the course of reporting this story, he does push its release date from Aug. 30 to the fall.)
Don’t Be Dumb skews slightly heavier topically and goes deeper than Rocky’s usual vainglorious works. The 35-year-old jack-of-all-that’s-fly chalks this up to him getting older (“I’m an OG now”) and wiser and the world being bats–t crazy at the moment; one of the first songs he recorded for the album is a grim, experimental track called “Shroom Cloud” that deals with “current affairs and world wars and, you know, the world dying and whatnot.”
“At times like this, only two types of people strive and survive,” Rocky theorizes. “I’m not trying to sound like I’m glorifying wars, [but] I think artists and druggies, they make it through. I mean, what was the hippies doing? They was getting high at Woodstock and f–king and having a great time and having these hippie babies who subsequently had us.”
AWGE suit, shirt and tie; Ray-Ban sunglasses.
Ruven Afanador
Tough times have been occupying Rocky’s thoughts for at least the past year or so. German expressionism — the popular art movement born in 1919 that focused on the artist’s innermost fears, desires and turmoil — has been a major influence on not just this album, but all his recent artistic endeavors. When asked to describe who he is at this moment, he says, “Grim.”
“In this very moment, it’s very grim. That’s an abbreviation,” he explains. “It’s infusing German expressionism with ghetto futurism.” When making Don’t Be Dumb, Rocky tried to get one of its most famous American practitioners, director Tim Burton, to lend a hand and create the cover art. The two couldn’t align their schedules to make it happen, but Rocky was able to play him the album. “I sat and I played the album for Tim Burton, and he was f–king with it heavy,” he says. According to Rocky, when the Beetlejuice director heard it, “he was rocking his head and he’s like, ‘Wow! I didn’t know you made that kind of music!’ ” And though he couldn’t get Burton himself involved, Rocky did succeed in nabbing the director’s longtime collaborator, composer Danny Elfman, to contribute musical snippets throughout the album, including on a song produced by The Alchemist.
Don’t Be Dumb will still feature the kinds of collaborators Rocky’s fans expect, like rapper and friend Tyler, The Creator, and an all-star roster of producers including Pharrell Williams, Mike Dean, Hitkidd, Madlib and Metro Boomin, as well as some they most definitely won’t, like Morrissey. But getting such a crew on your album when you’re as famous and renowned as Rocky isn’t a feat; the hard part is making all of those disparate sounds work together to make something cohesive and accessible.
“You got to know yourself,” Rocky says when explaining how he connects everything. “You got to know, ‘OK, this is too much. This is too far. This is overkill. This is not enough.’ That’s what I think makes you a unique artist: when you could determine what’s needed. And what’s unnecessary.”
A$AP Rocky knows himself very well. The painter Jackson Pollock once said that “every great artist paints what he is” — and the joy of discovering new artists is watching them figure out the best version of what they are. But A$AP Rocky entered the game seemingly fully formed, with a well-hewn aesthetic, image and point of view. Sure, some of his outfits and songs from 2012 may make him cringe today, but that’s the price you pay when you’re on the cutting edge of culture.
Few rappers have the innate self-confidence that Rocky has had since he first burst onto the scene in 2011 with “Purple Swag” from his debut mixtape, Live. Love. A$AP. Along with his Harlem-based crew, A$AP Mob, Rocky reenergized New York rap by melding the promethazine-drenched sounds of Three 6 Mafia with the swag and styles of his Harlem hood. New York rappers before him had hopped on tracks with Southern rappers — Jay-Z and Ma$e come to mind — but they all did so either on their own terms or those of the guest MC. Rocky, aided by his late collaborator and mentor Steven “A$AP Yams” Rodriguez, utilized the internet to break down geographical walls and make some of the first post-regional rap. Their style literally changed the game: No longer did rappers have to sound like the city in which they were born. Influence could come from anywhere your Wi-Fi could take you.
AWGE jacket, shirt, belt and pants; Puma sneakers.
Ruven Afanador
Even as his star grew brighter, Rocky never rested on his laurels, using his albums as laboratories to cook up what he felt the game was missing. His heavily anticipated studio debut, Long. Live. A$AP, expanded on the NYC-meets-Memphis amalgamation of his 2011 mixtape by bringing in a slew of collaborators from across the musical world including Skrillex, Santigold, Drake and Kendrick Lamar. The album cemented Rocky and A$AP Mob as the ones to push NYC hip-hop into a new era — and also proved, for better or worse, that Rocky knew how to swing for the fences for a pop hit. At. Long. Last. A$AP, released in 2015, five months after Yams’ untimely death at 26 from an accidental overdose, was another departure, with Danger Mouse and Juicy J joining Yams as executive producers. The album slinked from track to track, mixing psychedelic rock with modern trap and acoustic folk, the lattermost courtesy of a guitarist named Joe Fox whom Rocky met on the street while traveling in Europe.
It was a critical and commercial success, topping the Billboard 200 — Rocky’s second straight No. 1 album — and proving that he had a clear and unique creative vision. And he was concurrently demonstrating that vision wasn’t limited to his music. At a time when Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) was revolutionizing sartorial horizons for Black men everywhere, Rocky was working to push the style game even further. He partnered with up-and-coming brands like Hood by Air that sold the kind of garments most fans never imagined they’d see a rapper wear. Before Rocky, it wasn’t common to see a rapper rock a kilt, or tight leather pants or a handbag (or a satchel, quite distinct from a simple “purse,” as he taught listeners on his and Tyler, The Creator’s “Potato Salad”). He helped make all of that not just cool, but normal.
“I grab inspiration from so many different places, genres and cultures, and I make it original. Originality is a skill set. I think I have a talent in finding and recognizing that in people,” Rocky says. That skill set helped him launch AWGE in 2016. A collective that’s part record label, part clothing brand and part creative agency, AWGE has allowed him to explore each of his diverse passions.
But it took until earlier this year for Rocky to produce an entire collection worthy of a runway show at Paris Fashion Week. Titled “American Sabotage,” the collection featured pieces that looked as if they came straight out of an ’80s sci-fi flick. Rocky calls it “ghetto futurism” and, much like everything else he does, he believes that despite the mixed reviews the show received, it’ll be the norm sooner than later. (On the latest tease for the new album — the song “Highjack,” which takes Rocky back to the block with a woozy but airy beat that melts into a folk-rock ditty, assisted by indie artist Jessica Pratt — he reminds listeners that he was the one who started most of the trends they enjoy today: “Before we dropped ‘Peso’ on you n—as, you ain’t like Raf,” he raps in his usual laid-back lilt, referencing Belgian fashion designer Raf Simons.)
To hear him tell it, it took him these many years just to learn how to really make clothes. “You learn the game before you play it. Crawl before you walk. I wanted to do what was right,” Rocky says. “I’m from New York. I’m a Black man. The fact that we premiered my first show in Paris, France, with some of the biggest people in fashion? It was just surreal.” At that moment, he says — even amid a crowd that included some of the biggest names in art and culture — he was just Rakim.
“I’m not cocky in the sense where I’m like, ‘I got the president’s number in my phone right now!’ Until you sit back and say, ‘Oh, s–t. Pharrell and Pusha T and Malice is [at my show], man.’ That’s support,” Rocky says. “[Designer] Tremaine Emory is here to show his brother some support. Kris Van Assche, he gave me my start [as a face of Dior when he was artistic director of Dior Homme] and they signed me in 2015. [Tiffany & Co. executive] Alex Arnault was here. My girl was here! There were so many people, and I’m so appreciative of them coming to see me do my thing because I wasn’t about to fall flat on my face. We made sure of that. It’s like I said: Any critique, save it, ’cause my mindset is already like, ‘This is what it is. This how everyone should look. This is what it’s going to be for the next couple seasons. So get with it or get left.’ ”
AWGE suit, shirt and tie.
Ruven Afanador
AWGE’s most successful division so far, however, is its record label — and a lot of that success is due to the imprint’s first signing, Atlanta’s Playboi Carti. Rocky first met Carti when Carti was crashing at a friend’s house in New York. Carti’s 2017 debut mixtape became an internet sensation, spawning the hits “Magnolia” and “Wokeuplikethis,” and his debut studio album, 2018’s Die Lit, debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, solidifying both his burgeoning star power and Rocky’s prowess as a music executive.
The success of Carti’s debut made him a sort of cultural folk hero, the inspiration for memes and entire subreddits dedicated to deciphering his coded language and Dracula-meets-suburban Hot Topic fashion sense. But more importantly, he became rap’s new vanguard, with his next album, 2020’s Whole Lotta Red, spiritually picking up where Rocky’s third, TESTING, left off. Both albums eschewed popular rap tropes, sounds and themes for something wholly original; both got mixed reactions, but Carti’s transformed him into a cult hero.
When I ask if Carti is the future of rap, Rocky gets serious. “That’s where rap is. I knew that’s what it was going to be. What do people expect? We not just signing people to be signing people. We want to be the best of the best and that’s all it is, and his s–t speaks for itself.
“Statistically, what I’m saying is right. Sonically, theoretically, what I’m saying is right,” he continues. “Because there’s a Pharrell that comes with [each] generation. There’s a Jay-Z that comes with [each] generation. There’s a Kanye West that comes with [each] generation. There’s a 50 Cent that comes with [each] generation. The people that’s been most influential in the past 10 years, nine times out of 10 comes out of our camp. If not, we rubbed off on them or they picked up some type of influence. That sounds cocky, and I didn’t want to go there with it, but I swear it’s true. Behind the scenes. On the scene. I promise you.”
AWGE jacket, shirt, belt and pants; Puma sneakers.
Not content with leaving his mark on music and fashion, Rocky looked to Hollywood early in his career. After landing a bit role in the 2015 coming-of-age indie film DOPE executive-produced by Williams, in which he basically played a fictionalized version of himself — a young, fly, street-smart dope dealer — Rocky began looking for newer and better opportunities. “I’m tired of being a gangster,” he says. “I guess because I’m so removed from being a gangster in real life. They always want to cast me on some gangster s–t.” He pauses for a moment, reconsidering. “I ain’t tired of being a gangster, I’m lying. But I need to play a doctor or a lawyer or some s–t. A therapist. Something.”
Outside of fashion, film is the art form he’s most serious about now. “When I do movies, I show up on time. I’m rehearsing. I’m practicing, I’m reciting. I literally take it as a real job. Nothing else matters,” he says. “I’m a Method actor, so I embody whatever character I’m playing at the moment.” His upcoming projects include Spike Lee’s much-anticipated High and Low, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 opus starring Denzel Washington. It’s damn near impossible to not pick up anything when working alongside two legends like Denzel and Spike, right?
“Denzel is still a heartbreak kid,” Rocky says with a smile, clearly comforted by this discovery. “That man going to be 101 years old and he still going to have girls fainting and s–t. So I learned how to keep my pizzazz even when I’m his age. I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be aight. I’m Young Denzel. I’m Himzel, you heard?’ ”
On Sundays during the summer, Melba’s, a locally beloved soul food restaurant on 114th Street that’s been a Harlem staple for close to 20 years, partners with neighboring businesses along Frederick Douglas Boulevard to host big outdoor parties. Go at the right time, and you might catch some Harlem royalty partaking in the live music, food and drink and general good times.
On this particular Sunday, around 3:30 p.m., A$AP Rocky is strolling through the crowd, his hair in tight cornrows, his ensemble of a button-down shirt and jeans unusually unassuming. (His teeth, on the other hand, are adorned with enough diamonds to fund an indie film.) He slinks into Melba’s trying to go unnoticed, but even in his everyman outfit that’s a fool’s errand. He’s Harlem’s hometown hero, and as soon as he steps inside, people jump up to ask for a photo. A police officer approaches him and tries to convince him to attend a local event. Another Harlem legend, fashion designer Dapper Dan, just happens to be stopping by to grab a bite and embraces Rocky.
When we step back outside Melba’s, true chaos erupts. A throng of Harlemites encircles Rocky, clamoring for a moment with the local superstar. Despite it all, Rocky remains calm and courteous. He poses for what seems like 100 photos, even helping some elderly women with their phone cameras. Some people walk up just to tell him that they remember him and his mother, who grew up around this corner; one man sees us and crosses the street to tell Rakim that he’s proud of him. Rocky says the man once babysat him. “People calling me by my first name; he said ‘Rakim.’ That’s how I knew he knew me,” Rocky explains, still basking in the tumult of the crowd. “If it would’ve been A$AP or Rocky… But that man said Rakim. So you turn around and respect your elders and show love and grace, and I think that’s what’s most important. This is somewhere I would consider raising my family. You know what I’m saying? Seriously. If I found a brownstone nice enough to, you know what I mean?”
AWGE suit, shirt and tie; Ray-Ban sunglasses.
Ruven Afanador
Rocky says he comes back here often, though the response from the public makes it seem like he’s an exotic whip you would only see in magazines or YouTube influencer videos. People lean out of windows screaming, “Harlem!” or “I love you, Rocky!” Cars zoom by and screech to halt; as we walk to Morningside Park, one slowly pulls up next to us — worrying, at first, though it turns out to be a group of women so nervous that they simply yell, “I love you! You’re so fine!”
It’s clear that Rocky revels in this. Being in Harlem brings him back to his childhood: to the days long before he became known as the Pretty Motherf–ker, before he became involved with one of the most famous women on the planet.
We walk to his first childhood home, an apartment building on 118th Street and Morningside Avenue. He says he would like his children to have a Harlem upbringing even if they’re not raised here. “I think being in Harlem allows you the freedom of walking to the store, walking to the park, getting clear in your mind, going to the swings, being more present and active,” he says. “I think if you live in a suburb somewhere, you’re probably more inclined to just go to work, go to the mall, driving and s–t. Here is just present. You are more in the thick of it.”
But surely Rocky and Rihanna’s kids won’t be able to live the same kind of childhood he did here in Harlem, right?
“Yes, they do,” Rocky snaps back. “Man, let me show you little RZA last night, bro. Look, this is my little man right here.” He pulls up a video of Rihanna and RZA walking and playing along a cobblestone street in SoHo, as if that indicates the type of life the child of a billionaire creative couple can live. “They still human. They human beings,” he tells me.
AWGE shirts, tie and pants; Ray-Ban sunglasses; Bottega Veneta shoes.
He doesn’t have a Range Rover (he drives a Hummer EV), but, to paraphrase Cam’ron, Rocky is a changed man. He’s no longer the rambunctious kid from Harlem who was trying to prove to the world how much iller than everyone he was. For a guy who already had a supreme sense of self, he’s even more comfortable in his own skin. For example: Instead of launching into a full-on rap beef when it was reported that Drake sent a few disses not only his way but Rihanna’s as well, Rocky simply hopped on “Show of Hands,” a bonus track on Future and Metro Boomin’s We Still Don’t Trust You, and threw a few light jabs his way.
“You got to realize, certain n—as was throwing shots for years. I ain’t in the middle of that s–t,” he says, looking off into the distance. “That’s not how I retaliate right now. I got bigger fish to fry than some p—y boys. It is real beef outside. It is real. N—as getting really clipped and blitzed every day. N—as sniping n—as every day. That little kitty s–t ain’t about nothing.” His voice trails off as he looks at the photos of his kids on his phone.
This story will appear in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Cash Cobain is exhausted when he arrives at Billboard’s Manhattan office in late July. But that’s to be expected when chasing the momentum of a breakout hit like “Fisherrr.”
The rapper’s last few months have been a blur, from performing an impromptu park jam this April in New York’s Union Square after his Irving Plaza show was shut down (due to police concerns about crowd size) to featuring on his first Billboard Hot 100 entry in June to recently hitting the studio with Frank Ocean. Cash has quickly become a staple — and propellant — of hip-hop today, particularly in New York City.
The 26-year-old (born Cashmere Small) grew up in the Bronx listening to his grandparents’ Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder CDs alongside Biggie Smalls, 50 Cent and Aaliyah and developed an early interest in music production. His mother bought him drum pads and Yamaha keyboards, while he taught himself how to incorporate samples into his trap and drill-inspired beats on a jailbroken version of FL Studio.
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As he carved out his sound, he was careful to avoid impersonating his biggest inspirations, telling Billboard earlier this year: “ I wanted to add my own flavor… I didn’t want to bite guys like Southside and Metro [Boomin].”
Cash Cobain photographed on July 25, 2024 in New York.
Elianel Clinton
The result is a style all his own, best known as sample drill. As the name suggests, Cash’s beats often incorporate other tracks in some capacity, whether he’s flipping Snoop Dogg and Pharrell’s “Beautiful” on Don Toliver’s “Attitude” — which peaked at No. 58 on the June 29-dated Hot 100 — or Ciara’s “Body Party” for his song of the same name with Chow Lee.
He’ll even snatch a sample out of thin air: “I can be in the elevator or watching a movie,” he says, “and if I like the song or hear a part that I can use, I’ll Shazam it.” Ironically, the music discovery app is also how Cash’s team realized “Fisherrr” was gaining traction.
His A&R at Giant Music, Daniel Byrnes, says they first noticed that Shazams for the song were taking off in New York and that it coincided with a spike on TikTok. “That’s when you know it’s time to go to radio,” says Byrnes. “We then hired [independent] radio plugger GOAT Troy Marshall and Shazam started going even crazier. Then [the song] broke the Top 100 Shazams in the country and it was No. 1 in New York for weeks. Nothing was touching it.” By May, “Fisherrr” debuted on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay and Rap Airplay charts, and it has since reached the top 10 on all three.
Cash was initially connected to Byrnes through his co-managers, William Foster, Glyn Brown and Makeda Tewodros. (The Bronx rapper started out independent, beginning his career under the guidance of Casanova and his 2x Entertainment label, but eventually decided to seek out new management around 2020.) And while his new team wasn’t focused on getting him a record deal at first, Byrnes jumped when the time was right. “[He] was just one of those people that was always there, continuously checking on us and checking on Cash’s growth,” Tewodros says.
Giant signed Cash in June 2023, and the rapper has leaned into his social media savvy since then, becoming notorious for previewing unreleased tracks on Instagram that he then deletes as the official release nears. “He’ll hide the song, or he’ll archive it after a day or two, and everyone’s like, ‘Where did it go?,’” Tewodros says. “Then they’ll start to chase for it.” Adds Cash: “I’m not the type to post a snippet and then you never hear it,” he says. “Nah, it’s going to be on the album.”
Cash Cobain photographed on July 25, 2024 in New York.
Elianel Clinton
The strategy is exactly how “Fisherrr,” which Cash started teasing on TikTok and Instagram in January, started to thrive. As Cash recalls, when he walked into the studio at the top of 2024, producers FckBwoy! and WhoJiggi were already cooking up the beat. “I cut it up,” he recalls. “The beat was taking too long to drop; I didn’t like that. I wanted it to drop right away.”
From there, he and Bay Swag “started going crazy” in the booth — humming some of the song’s bars as he remembers its creation. Over an intoxicating loop, Cash and Bay Swag go back and forth like a horny Jadakiss and Styles P, with easy-to-remember one-liners like, “And your ass fat, know you eat your rice and your cabbage too/She a savage too, I’m a savage too, it’s compatible.”
The song soon started bubbling on social media and in the streets thanks to a From the Block performance clip from its release day in February that went viral. A couple weeks later, when Brooklyn rapper Kareem Gadson (aka Reem) did “The Reemski” dance to the song — in which he dances like a cobra to the tune of a snake charmer — “Fisherrr” grew even larger. “Once Reem came out with the dance, it was over,” says Cash. Byrnes felt the same way, saying the team dropped their own marketing plans to focus on the dance. “You couldn’t plan for it to be that big,” says Byrnes in astonishment. “Everyone on social media was doing the dance.”
To capitalize on the song’s momentum, Cash came quickly with a remix in April, tapping his old friend and fellow Bronx rapper Ice Spice. “Shout out to Makeda, I know she wants her credit. She made it happen,” Cash says playfully. “There were some ideas and names thrown about and I think we all kind of unanimously agreed Ice made the most sense,” adds Tewodros. “It felt really New York, so we felt like this would be the best amplification for the song.”
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The remix not only resonated with fans, but more importantly, with Cash himself. “I felt loved when I heard her verse. She had the whole flow, it was fire. She was on some Baddie Drill s–t.” Following its first full tracking week, “Fisherrr” debuted on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs at No. 33.
Cash has been an opener for Ice during her stateside Y2K! trek since the end of July, and he’ll continue on the tour through August. And come Aug. 23, he’ll drop his sophomore album, Play Cash Cobain. “He’s in the zone,” says Brown. Everyone on his team shares a similar sentiment. “I saw him cook up a beat in a bowling alley parking lot and record it in like, 12 hours — and it sounds like another hit,” says publicist Sam Hadelman. “He’s making the best music of his life right now.”
“Straight sexiness. Back to back, play it out — no skips, sexy music,” Cash adds, previewing what fans can expect. “I just want to show y’all I’m really serious about this. I’m not no one or two hit wonder — I am here to stay.”
From left: Glyn Brown, Cash Cobain, Will Foster, and Makeda Tewdoros photographed on July 25, 2024 in New York.
Elianel Clinton
A version of this story will appear in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.
The path to 50 has not always been easy for Journey, whose members have been celebrating the milestone on the road, including a summer stadium tour with Def Leppard.
Over the decades, there has been rancor amid the music, lineup changes and lawsuits, periods of uncertainty and open-ended hiatus.
And yet the wheel — in the sky and elsewhere — keeps on turning for the group whose first show, at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, ushered in 1974.
Legacy has a lot to do with it, of course. Journey’s catalog features a dozen platinum-or-better sellers, including two albums — 1981’s Escape and 1988’s Greatest Hits — that are certified diamond by the RIAA for sales (including downloads and streams) exceeding 10 million units.
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The band has notched 18 top 40 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, and one would be hard pressed to attend a sporting event where the 1981 hit “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” (also famously played in the finale episode of The Sopranos) isn’t piped over the PA.
Given those accomplishments, Journey’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017 was long overdue.
Meanwhile, since the end of the pandemic, the act’s current lineup — including co-founding guitarist Neal Schon, longtime keyboardist-guitarist Jonathan Cain and, since 2007, Filipino frontman Arnel Pineda (whom Schon discovered on YouTube) — has been headlining arenas. And its summer stadium tour, which began July 6 at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, reprises its 2018 bill with Def Leppard.
“They’ve sold out every ticket everywhere we go — it’s kind of crazy, and well-deserved,” says Jeff Frasco, Journey’s agent at Creative Artists Agency. “The songs are amazing; people want to hear them. Combine that with putting on a great show, and it’s great. They give people their money’s worth.”
All of that has somewhat mitigated the rancor of the past decade, which has included legal skirmishes that led to management changes and the departure of original bassist Ross Valory and longtime drummer Steve Smith, as well as trademark disputes with Steve Perry, singer of the band’s biggest hits. Schon and Cain have gone at each other, too, in well-reported conflicts over business issues that spilled into social media, most recently in 2023.
The good news, according to drummer Deen Castronovo — who played with Schon and Cain in the late-1980s group Bad English — is that “everybody has mended fences,” he says. “They’ve made amends and we’re all on one jet again, and it’s all for one and one for all.”
Clearly, “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” seems to be not just a song title, but an ethos for the band.
Fifty years is a big milestone for any act. What has kept Journey around and active — and successful — for this long?
Neal Schon: Well, it all started with the songs themselves, and I think we got some things right a long time ago and continue to bring it live. We made our statements and continued to move forward in writing new music.
Jonathan Cain: It’s something you respect and you’re grateful for; that’s how I feel about it. For me, it’s 44 years, and I’ve always felt like it was the highest honor to join such a prestigious band and then to be able to contribute and take it to another level.
Schon: Our fans are so loyal to us, and we have young fans now whose parents were fans of ours and now they have their own kids who are coming to the concerts, too, and they love the music. Bands usually disband because they stop growing, but we keep growing and getting new fans. That keeps it alive.
Take us back to Journey day one.
Schon: I had just come out of Santana and almost formed a band with Greg Errico and Larry Graham from Sly & The Family Stone. Then Herbie Herbert approached me; he was my guitar tech [in Santana] and he said, “Look, I’m starting a management firm. I want to manage you and wrap a band around you.” I was definitely looking for something to do. Herbie and I had always gotten along and he believed in me, and it just went from there.
Journey has been through a lot of changes — 18 members, give or take — and some major shifts, like when Steve Perry joined in 1977, or Cain in 1980, or Arnel Pineda in 2007. How has the group been able to navigate those changes and remain a draw?
Schon: I think the creativity. Any new person in a band brings out a different side in the chemistry in a band. We definitely had that chemistry between the three of us — me, Jonathan and Perry — in the old band, and we’ve shown signs as well in the [current] band.
Cain: The music’s bigger than [the band members]. Journey has always connected with the audience. It really comes down to the integrity of the songs and the message. It was positive music — which [critics] loved to hate. (Laughs.) A song like “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” has a huge connection because there are a lot of small-town girls and city boys wanting to get on the midnight train to anywhere. We worked hard to write songs [for the fans] about their lives.
It’s no secret there has been a lot of drama, especially over the past few years. You two seemed to be at each other’s throats and yet managed to pull it back from the brink. How?
Cain: Just looking at the big picture: The music is louder than the noise of the grumbling and the arguments and the disagreements and stuff. The show must go on, right? It’s just the drive of knowing that there are fans out there that don’t care about our differences but care that we show up and play for them. They care that we carry on, so we’ve got to put aside our differences for them.
Schon: The one thing I can tell you is Journey is everything to me. Journey comes first, and I’m going to do anything I need to do to prevail and make sure that ship does not go down. You have to forgive and you have to move forward. We’ve chosen to do that.
The band is managing itself these days, right?
Schon: Yes. It’s like myself, my wife, Jonathan and his wife. It comes down to how much you understand what your situation is about. I would tell a young player, “Get involved in [the business]. Know what’s going down with the contracts, understand it, trademark yourself. If something shady comes by, know what question to ask.” It took a long time to learn all that, but I’m happy we have.
If you could only have one album to hand to someone as a representation of Journey — and not Greatest Hits — what would you choose?
Schon: Infinity [released in 1978]. To this day, that’s one of my favorite records. There are many bigger records, although that was no slouch of a record, and musically it’s very, very creative. We did an amazing job of turning that corner, of keeping some of the past and moving forward into the future with Steve on board and everything. It was like a new era for us.
Cain: I’d have to say Escape. That’s our biggest record, and there was no accident it was. It still sounds fresh and it connects with people. I think the chemistry between all of us at the time, we were just a good, good band. We were on fire, young dudes with a mission.
You put out Freedom in 2022, which was your first new studio album in 11 years. Will there be another?
Cain: A single here, a single there. I’ve just written a new song; hopefully we can get it out there. Albums don’t really matter much anymore. You have to accept reality and adapt to it. Fortunately, I’ve got a lot of albums under my belt. I’m just happy the catalog is continuing to cook along.
Schon: I continue to be creative; we all do. We recorded [Freedom and] we recorded way more than what ended up on the album, a lot of great stuff that wasn’t used, so there is some stuff like that. But the business now is really about live performances and about whatever you can do with merchandise.
Speaking of live, you’re out this summer again with Def Leppard, like the two bands did in 2018. What are you anticipating?
Cain: It’ll be fun. It’s a rock’n’roll show, and there’s nothing better than playing in a big, open space and a place where you don’t have to worry about the echo coming back at you. It’ll be nice just letting it blow; a full-on rock experience.
Schon: We love those guys. We’ve always had an amazing time with them. We’ve had great chemistry together going way back to the first tour we did with them, when [lead singer] Steve Augeri was in the band.
Are there any archival projects in the pipeline related to the 50th anniversary or otherwise?
Schon: There’s lots of stuff I don’t think has ever been heard, live, from the early band. But I don’t think there’s anything from the older band, the ’80s band, that hasn’t been put out.
Cain: There was an album that came out in Japan, The Ballads, that I think would be a huge seller back here. You could even have [Volumes] 1 and 2; there are enough songs.
Has a stage musical or biopic about Journey ever been considered?
Cain: We’ve been down that road. I worked with Anthony Zuiker [creator of TV’s CSI franchise]; he’s a huge Journey fan and he had these songs in mind to create a play. And Perry shot it down. He didn’t want to know about it. Then [Zuiker] came back to me again; he had this Journey-Cirque du Soleil idea, and we were supposed to get something else with Netflix, the same producers who did the Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary. Right now, I think that’s in the hands of Steve Perry to say yea or nay. You can’t use his songs without his permission, obviously.
So that’s another gorilla in the room. Arnel has been with the band 17 years now. Steve wouldn’t even sing with you at the Rock Hall induction. People are always asking about it, but is it time to stop and realize he’s never coming back?
Schon: I love Steve’s voice. I just wish he continued singing. If Steve wanted to be heard, he’d be heard. He came with his last solo record [2018’s Traces], and it showed hope that he was going to get out there and start doing things again. Without seeing him do it, I can’t answer something like that.
Cain: I just wish the guy well. Arnel is the longest tenured of any lead singer that we’ve ever had and he has crushed it for all those years, so you got to go, “How lucky are we to have a gentleman like that?” And [Perry] is always going to be judged on his contributions [to Journey] and the legacy he left behind. He wins more than he loses.
This story originally appeared in the July 20, 2024, issue of Billboard.
In the past year, the Latin music industry transitioned from a singles-driven market to an albums-focused world, with both new and established artists crafting cohesive sets. The Latin Grammy for album of the year has historically prioritized daring concepts and artistry above popularity when deciding the winner, and while legacy acts have historically dominated the category, recent honorees such as Rosalía tend to return for encores. And Karol G’s triumph in 2023 with her commercial blockbuster, Mañana Será Bonito, may now allow for ultra-popular albums to take home the ultimate artistic prize.
Come Sept. 17, 10 nominees will be announced — here are five of the most likely.
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Young Miko, att. (The Wave Music Group)
In the world of reggaetón, Miko is an outlier: blonde, petite and openly gay. For a genre steeped in machismo, it’s a remarkable flip of the script. The album balances her party-girl persona with rap lyrics that aren’t afraid to put others in their place with effectively eloquent punches, having fun without ever becoming gratuitous. Plus, Miko has good taste on her side, tapping Jowell & Randy for an old-school reggaetón touch.
Fonseca, Tropicalia (Sony Latin)
Fonseca’s Tropicalia is a labor of love, designed to elevate the artistry of tropical music with its rich palette. The Colombian singer-songwriter introduced his new oeuvre with last year’s “Si Tu Me Quieres,” which won best tropical song at the Latin Grammys and features bachata star Juan Luis Guerra singing Fonseca’s pop-infused brand of vallenato. That accordion-tinged sound is the foundation of an album full of poignant moments, but Fonseca also expands: He collaborates with Gilberto Santa Rosa and Chucho Valdés on a beautiful Cuban bolero, with Alex Cuba on a contemporary song and with Colombian salsa stalwarts Grupo Niche on a jazz-tinged salsa, all united by his ability to make fans swoon with music designed for the dancefloor.
Kany García, García (5020 Records)
García has twice been nominated in this category, but the third time may be the charm with an album that expands and redefines the scope of the traditional Latin singer-songwriter. Her work has twice won her best singer-songwriter album, and her songsmith qualities shine again in her melodic lines and eloquent yet colloquial lyrics. Autobiographical opener “García,” for instance, is a master class in storytelling in under three minutes. But García also digresses, going with gusto into Mexican music territory with Eden Muñoz, Christian Nodal and Carín León on three riveting tracks. “We’re in constant evolution, and as an artist, I love that I can insert what I’m going through in each album I make,” she previously told Billboard.
Peso Pluma, Éxodo (Double P Records)
Peso Pluma continued his hit-making campaign with Éxodo, his second top five album on the Billboard 200. But unlike its predecessor, Génesis, which won the Grammy this year for best Regional Mexican music album, Éxodo is a double album highlighting the two sides of Peso. Side one is full of Mexican music featuring several collaborations with artists of his generation, including Junior H, Tito Double P and Luis R Conríquez; side two is devoted to urban and pop, featuring bilingual collaborations with Quavo and Rich the Kid. While exploration of many genres is a mainstay of Latin music today, it is rarely in these two directions, and much less with this success. And though Génesis is also eligible for this award given its release date, Billboard’s bet is on the newer, more adventurous Éxodo. It’s to be noted that Peso was not nominated in any category at the 2023 Latin Grammys, an omission that can be rectified this time around.
Shakira, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran (Sony Latin)
At 47 years old, Shakira refused to be quietly scorned, releasing her retribution of an album, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, following a cheating scandal and public split from Gerard Piqué. Instead of wallowing on the full-length, Shakira gets even, famously proclaiming she makes her own money on “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53,” which won song of the year at the 2023 Latin Grammys. The album is filled with lyrics that double as social media fodder, but it’s also clever and artistic, placing a wickedly funny song like “Puntería” with Cardi B alongside such achingly vulnerable tracks as “Acróstico” and “Ultima.” Backed by an impressive array of collaborators that also includes Karol G, Rauw Alejandro and regional Mexican groups Grupo Frontera and Fuerza Regida, Shakira has managed to stay current and return to the top on her own terms. Should she win, this would be her second album of the year trophy, following her 2006 triumph with Fijación Oral, Vol. 1.
This story will appear in the July 20, 2024, issue of Billboard.
At the Latin Grammys, there is perhaps no category as coveted as best new artist, a launching pad for future stars through the years. There’s also no category as confounding. The first winner was Ibrahim Ferrer in 2000 at the age of 72; Joaquina won it last year at 18 years old. In 2022, Angela Alvarez, 95, split the prize with 25-year-old Silvana Estrada.
And while the award has gone to talents who are relatively unknown, as well as those who have more public-facing major-label support, the rules are clear: Contenders must release a minimum of three singles/tracks or one album during the eligibility period. An artist who has previously released more than three albums and/or more than 15 singles is not eligible. Here are five contenders with a strong shot at scoring a nomination this year.
DARUMAS
What do you get when an Argentine bassist, a Cuban singer-guitarist and a Haitian vocalist unite? DARUMAS — an all-women U.S.-based trio comprising Aldana Aguirre, Ceci León and Vedala Vilmond — defies every stereotype of what Latin girl groups sound like. The three expert musicians play a tight mix of old-school funk, R&B and Motown, with Spanish lyrics and plenty of attitude. Named for the traditional Japanese daruma doll, DARUMAS are not cutting corners when it comes to honing their sound, resulting in an act that puts musicianship at the forefront.
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Iván Cornejo
Though Cornejo and Xavi espouse a new Mexican sound, Cornejo uses traditional Mexican instrumentation as his foundation and also leans into electric guitar for some rock’n’roll angst. The result is a sound that’s weary — his biggest hit is titled “Está Dañada” (“She’s Damaged”) — but relatable. (Cornejo writes all of his material.) He has placed 15 entries on Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart, and his second album, Dañado, ruled Regional Mexican Albums for 37 nonconsecutive weeks. In 2022, Cornejo became the youngest act to win new artist of the year at the Billboard Latin Music Awards.
Xavi
At 20 years old, Xavi has been making noise in the new Mexican music scene since last year. In January, “La Diabla” topped Hot Latin Songs for 14 weeks, setting a record so far this year. In May, he scored another No. 1, on Regional Mexican Airplay, with “Corazón de Piedra.” Both songs were co-written by Xavi (real name: Joshua Xavier Gutiérrez), who calls his sound tumbados románticos, a hybrid of corridos tumbados with a twist of romance and heartache. His music has a young, avid fan base that straddles both sides of the border but has the potential to expand much further.
Ela Taubert
Like labelmate (and 2023 Latin Grammy best new artist winner) Joaquina, Colombian singer-songwriter Taubert is a graduate of producer Julio Reyes Copello’s Art House Academy, signaling just how seriously she takes her craft. The 23-year-old writes convincingly about love and loss with immediately relatable lyrics set to catchy, midtempo pop arrangements reminiscent of Miley Cyrus. Following the release of her debut EP last year, Taubert is slowly but steadily gaining steam, as her new single, “Cómo Pasó?,” has reached a No. 12 high on the Latin Pop Airplay chart.
Latin Mafia
Freshly signed to Rimas Entertainment (home to Bad Bunny), Latin Mafia balances fun — with its childlike single covers — and moodiness with R&B and touches of reggaetón. Made up of twin brothers Milton and Emilio de la Rosa and their older brother Mike, the trio grew organically in Mexico as a fully independent act, amassing 6 million monthly listeners on Spotify, playing Coachella and catching the ear of Rimas vp Junior Carabaño. “I can’t wait to write their next chapter together and make history,” he previously told Billboard.
This story will appear in the July 20, 2024, issue of Billboard.