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Cornell University has canceled Kehlani’s upcoming performance, which the singer was slated to perform on campus at the university’s annual Slope Day on May 7. According to The New York Times, Cornell president Michael I. Kotlikoff emailed students and faculty on Wednesday (April 23) to make his decision to cancel Kehlani’s performance official. Explore Explore […]
Bad Bunny is hopping back over to 30 Rock to make his grand return to Saturday Night Live, with the show announcing Thursday (April 24) that the Puerto Rican rapper will perform on its season-ender episode following a musical guest debut from Benson Boone two weeks prior. SNL‘s 50th season will officially wrap May 17 […]
Five For Fighting‘s Grammy-nominated “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” became an anthem of solidarity and a No. 14 Billboard Hot 100 hit in 2001 after it was repurposed as a tribute to the victims and first responders of the horrific Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. The gentle piano ballad on which band mastermind John Ondrasik sings “I’m more than a bird, I’m more than a plane/ I’m more than some pretty face beside a train/ And it’s not easy to be me” in his homage to heroes who have the right to bleed provided succor at a time when Americans were wounded to their souls over the deadly assault.
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Now, Ondrasik’s song has gotten a second life as a means to call attention to the estimated 59 Israeli hostages still being held hostage in Gaza in the wake of militant group Hamas’ murderous Oct. 7, 2023 attack in which around 1,200 Israelis were murdered and 250 were taken hostage.
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Ondrasik told NPR on Wednesday (April 23) that he re-wrote some of the song’s lyrics at the behest of the mother of 24-year-old hostage Alon Ohel. “When they reached out, I’m like, ‘of course. I’m honored to do this.’ And very quickly, it became clear that ‘Superman’ should be the song,” Ondrasik said, noting that some original lines, such as “Find a way to lie about a home I’ll never see” didn’t fit the assignment.
“I couldn’t have that line, ‘a home I’ll never see,’ because we all hope and pray they will see – and many of the hostages have come home,” said Ondrasik, who traveled to Israel last April to perform the song in Tel Aviv’s so-called “Hostages Square” on Ohel’s piano; he also released another song, “OK (We Are Not Okay)” last year to honor the hostages. The new “Superman” lyrics find him singing: “Found a way to fly to a home I will soon see.”
Ondrasik, 60, who is not Jewish, told NPR that for him, “this is a moral issue. It’s not political. It’s not religious. Everybody should be demanding to release the hostages. It’ll put much more pressure on Israel to end this war.”
The singer uploaded a new video for the song to YouTube on April 14 — two days after the start of the Passover holiday — with a message of hope, writing, “The strength and perseverance of our hostage families, while enduring over seventeen months of unimaginable torment and devastation, often seems Superhuman. I am honored to collaborate with current hostage Alon Ohel’s mother Idit, brother Ronen, and family and friends with this new version of ‘Superman’ to support Alon and all hostages and their families.”
Check out the new video Ondrasik recorded with footage from Hostage Square below.
Miami’s long-running festival III Points has announced the phase one lineup for its 2025 edition.
The two-day fest will feature sets from artists including 2Hollis, Michael Bibi, Peggy Gou, Darkside, Barry Can’t Swim, Indira Paganotto, Nina Kraviz, Sean Paul, Anotr, Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso, Denzel Curry, L’Imperatrice, Mk.Gee and Turnstile.
III Points 2025 will happen Oct. 17-18 at its longtime site at Miami’s Mana Wynwood. Tickets go on sale Thursday (April 24), with lineup additions to be announced in the coming months.
2025 will mark the festival’s 11th edition since it launched in 2013. The festival was founded by a trio of Miami natives, and over the last decade, has become a standout event on the U.S. electronic festival circuit, while also helping elevate Miami as one of the crown jewels cities in the country’s electronic scene.
The festival, which partnered with Insomniac Events in 2019, has a strong focus on local culture, typically booking many acts from the Miami scene and bringing in food and craft vendors who reflect the city’s thriving local culture.
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“I think it’s just very authentically Miami, and a real time capsule of Miami sonically and visually right now,” III Points co-founder David Sinopoli told Billboard in 2023. “I think people feel that when they come.”
“We’re thrilled to be bringing III Points back to Miami for its 11th installment”, Sinopoli adds in a statement. “It is not easy navigating a forward-thinking, multigenre festival in the North American music landscape nowadays 一 but I believe our commitment to our Miami music community has been the guiding force for us.”
See the III Points phase one lineup below:
III Points 2025
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Katy Perry must be feeling nostalgic for her brief time in space, as the pop star brought two fans dressed as astronauts up on stage with her at the kickoff show of her Lifetimes Tour Wednesday night (April 23).
In a clip from the show posted on X, Perry chats with her crowd at Arena CDMX in Mexico City between songs while walking around on stage when she spots two fans wearing blue NASA suits. “You guys look so good,” she gasps. “You just got back from space!”
“I want these gentlemen to come on stage, because they are dressed like my most current timeline,” she adds as the rest of the audience cheers, later snapping a selfie with the fans on stage.
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Wednesday’s show marked the first of more than seven months’ worth of performances blocked off on Perry’s global trek, which supports her most recent album, 2024’s 143. She also played several hits from past albums — while dressed in various spacey outfits and at one point suspended from the ceiling by wires — such as Billboard Hot 100-toppers “Dark Horse,” “E.T.” and “Roar.”
It was also the former American Idol judge’s first concert since returning from her 11-minute trip to space, with Perry joining Gayle King, Lauren Sanchez and more passengers on Blue Origin’s first-ever all-women flight crew on April 14. While hurtling through the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere, the musician sang part of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” and filmed a video revealing the Lifetimes Tour’s setlist.
Upon returning, Perry emerged from the rocket, kissed the ground and told reporters that the expedition had been “the highest high.”
“It is surrender to the unknown, trust,” she continued. “This whole journey is not about just going to space. It’s the training, the team, it’s the whole thing. I couldn’t recommend this experience more … It’s about making space for future women and taking up space and belonging. And it’s about this wonderful world that we see right out there and appreciating it. This is all for the benefit of Earth.”
But while Perry has said that she views the flight as being empowering for women, many people — from Emily Ratajkowski to Olivia Wilde — have criticized the trip as a waste of resources. “What’s the point?” asked Olivia Munn on Jenna & Friends. “Is it historic that you guys are going on a ride? I think it’s gluttonous.”
The “Firework” singer hasn’t directly addressed the hate, but at Wednesday’s show, she reportedly asked the crowd, “Has anyone ever called your dreams crazy?”
David Thomas, the howling lead singer of long-running Cleveland-bred post-punk rockers Pere Ubu has died at 71. The band announced the news on its Facebook page on Wednesday (April 23), revealing that the leader of the group — as well as their equally noisesome precursor, Rocket From the Tombs — had died after an unspecified “long illness.”
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The tribute added, “On Wednesday, April 23 2025, he died in his home town of Brighton & Hove [in the U.K.], with his wife and youngest step-daughter by his side. MC5 were playing on the radio. He will ultimately be returned to his home, the farm in Pennsylvania, where he insisted he was to be ‘thrown in the barn.’”
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The group noted that Thomas had been working on a new album with his band, aware that it would be his last. “We will endeavour to continue with mixing and finalising the new album so that his last music is available to all. Aside from that, he left instruction that the work should continue to catalog all the tapes from live shows via the official bandcamp page,” they said, adding that the singer’s autobiography was “nearly completed” and that they will finish it for him. They ended with a quote from Thomas, which they said, “sums up who he was better than we can”: “My name is David F–king Thomas… and I’m the lead singer of the best f–king rock n roll band in the world.”
David Lynn Thomas was born in Miami on June 14, 1953 and began his career in rock as the lead singer of the short-lived proto-punk Cleveland band Rocket From the Tombs after a stint writing for the Cleveland Scene alternative weekly newspaper under a variety of aliases, including Crocus Behemoth. Though they reveled in obscurity during their original one-year run from 1974-1975, and never released an album, the band’s distorted, frenzied sound — inspired by Detroit punk godfathers the MC5 and The Stooges — was a precursor to the worldwide punk revolution that exploded in the U.S. and U.K. in the mid-1970s.
After the band’s split, two members, guitarist Gene “Cheetah Chrome” O’Connor and drummer Johnny “Johnny Biltz” Madansky, went on to form legendarily shambolic Cleveland punk band the Dead Boys. Thomas and guitarist Peter Laughner teamed up to launch the artier, spikier Pere Ubu, whose name wast a riff on the outré 19th century French play Ubu Roi.
The avant garde group inspired by the sound collage techniques of musique concrète released its debut single, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” in late 1975 on Thomas’ indie label, Hearthan Records. After a handful of follow-up singles, their debut album, The Modern Dance, dropped in 1978, signaling a purposeful deep-dive into the noise pool from jump on album-opener “Non-Alignment Pact,” which begins with 20 seconds of ear-piercing tones. During a period when such soft rock air bubbles as Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” and America’s “Tin Man” were topping the charts, Thomas’ unhinged howl and saxophone/keyboard player Allen Ravenstine’s free jazz strangulated stabs and otherworldly synth tones were an astringent antidote to mainstream AM radio fluff.
With a three-guitar attack combined with Thomas’ yelping vocals and his very un-punk like insistence on wearing suit jackets and a tie on stage, the band cranked out a series of influential, though little-heard-at-the-time albums over the next four years. The LPs included 1978’s classic, Dub Housing and 1979’s New Picnic Time, experimental, chalkboard-scratching noise bombs that helped inspire future acolytes from Sonic Youth to the Pixies and Gang of Four. With a constantly rotating group of players surrounding Thomas — co-founder Laugher left after the band’s first few singles and died in 1977 of pancreatic cancer — the band released three more albums, 1979’s New Picnic Time, 1980’s The Art of Walking and 1982’s Song of a Bailing Man before breaking up.
Thomas continued his experimental journey on a series of solo albums with his bands the Pedestrians and and Wooden Birds in the 1980s, before reforming Pere Ubu in 1987 for the recording of The Tenement Year, which leaned in a distinctly more pop direction (at least compared to the band’s earlier work), followed by 1989s’s Cloudland. Pere Ubu continued into the 1990s and early 2000s, releasing a string of albums including 1995’s Ray Gun Suitcase, 2002 St. Arkansas and their 19th, and final, studio effort, 2023’s Trouble on Big Beat Street.
In between Pere Ubu projects, Smith stayed busy with solo albums, Rocket From the Tombs reunions and experimental theater projects.
Check out some of Smith’s joyful noise below.
A new musical inspired in a Latin American true story is heading to Broadway, with music and lyrics by no other than Cuban-American superstar Gloria Estefan and her daughter, songwriter Emily Estefan. BASURA (Spanish for “garbage”) will narrate the journey of Paraguay’s Recycled Orchestra, a group of young artists who turn scrap material into instruments and music into possibilities.
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The Thursday (April 24) announcement coincides with the third edition of Billboard Latin Women in Music, just one year after Gloria Estefan received the Legend award.
Based on the award-winning documentary Landfill Harmonic, BASURA brings the sound of Paraguay’s Recycled Orchestra to the theater as a “heart-swelling reminder that even in the most unlikely places, you can build something beautiful,” according to a press release.
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The show will first run at the Coca-Cola Stage at Alliance Theater in Atlanta from May 30 to July 12, 2026, before heading to Broadway.
“This is a story that has been close to my heart for several years since I first encountered the determination and ingenuity of the young people of Paraguay’s Recycled Orchestra,” Gloria Estefan said in a statement. “Emily and I are thrilled for our music to be a part of telling their story in this original musical. We could not be more excited for BASURA to begin its theatrical life in a city as influential and diverse as Atlanta with a theater as consequential as the Alliance.”
BASURA is directed by Michael Greif (Rent, Dear Evan Hansen), with a book by Karen Zacarías (Native Gardens, Destiny of Desire). Alex Lacamoire (Hamilton, In the Heights) is the musical supervisor, orchestrator, and arranger; Patricia Delgado (Buena Vista Social Club) the choreographer, and Ken Cerniglia (Hadestown, Newsies) the dramaturg.
The show was produced in partnership with Michael Shulman (Sand and Snow Entertainment) and Colin Callender and Daniel Unitas (Playground). Wendy Orshan and Jeffrey Wilson of 101 Productions, Ltd will serve as general managers.
BASURA was developed, in part, with support from The Orchard Project and Ari Edelson, artistic director.
Haim have given their two-month notice. The sister trio revealed the title of their upcoming fourth album during an underplay gig at L.A.’s The Bellwether theater on Wednesday night (April 23), flashing the phrase I Quit on the screen behind them at their first full show in nearly two years. They posted a photo of the moment on Instagram, as well as a video in which the phrase appeared amid a jumble of flashing boxes, followed by a robotic female voice reading the phrase “I quite what does not serve me.”
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A cascade of other quits followed, including “I quit overthinking, I quit shame, I quit nicotine, I quit fear, I quit d–k, I quit judgement, I quit avoiding emotional intimacy, I quit my job, I quit caring about what you think, I quit waiting for an apology, I quit f–king around, I quit f–king everything, I quit f–king you, I quit wondering if someone will save me.”
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The barrage of loud quitting ended with the phrase “I quit new haim album coming June 20th.” The follow-up to 2020’s Women in Music Pt. III has been previewed so far with the first single, “Relationships,” as well as “Everybody’s Trying to Figure Me Out.”
According to Setlist.fm, the show opened with the second new single, followed by a run of classics including “The Wire,” “Want You Back” and “Forever,” and the live debut of new tracks “Down To Be Wrong” and “Blood in the Streets,” with the latter featuring a surprise appearance by Addison Rae, who rolled around provocatively on stage in a long white tank top and sunglasses during the performance. The show ended with an encore run through “Relationships.”
The 1970s pop anthem “Down To Be Wrong” is due out on Thursday (April 24), with a video slated to drop on Friday (April 25). Haim will be back at Bellwether on Thursday night for a second show.
Watch Haim’s album title announce and “Down To Be Wrong” preview below.
Sammy Hagar‘s guitar playing on his upcoming single “Encore. Thank You. Goodnight.” was divinely inspired. That is, if you are one of the many who believe that his late Van Halen bandmate Eddie Van Halen was our greatest six-string god.
“About two months ago, I had this dream and Eddie came. We were in a room like this, [with] a bunch of people around. It was just like he’d been gone. It was not like he was passed, but he had just been out of my life and we hadn’t seen each other for a while,” Hagar told Ultimate Classic Rock about the inspiration for the song back in 2022. “He’s going, ‘Man, let’s write some music!’ I said, ‘Yeah, f–k it, man. Here, let’s go!’”
Hagar described huddling in a corner of a room with Van Halen — who died in Oct. 2020 due to complications from throat cancer at age 65 — and watching the guitar guru play him a lick that sounded just like “the last lick that Eddie Van Halen showed me, when I went back for the [2004] reunion tour and when he was a mess. I said, ‘Eddie, show me your newest s–t,’ because every time I’d be around him I’d say, ‘Show me your newest s–t.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, check this out!’”
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In the dream, Hagar said Van Halen showed him “this harmonic thing… he slid up to a chord, like a slide guitar. We wrote a song with that lick.” The next morning, the veteran rock singer and guitarist said he got up and wrote the new song, which he titled, in part, “Thank You” because he’d used “the f–kin’ lick that he showed me in the song.”
And while the track came together too late to be included on Hagar’s 2022 Crazy Times album with his band the Circle, on Instagram earlier this week Hagar said he “can’t wait” for the world to finally hear his tribute to his late bandmate. Hagar took over as VH’s lead vocalist from 1985-1996 and again from 2003-2005, and like his predecessor, original VH singer David Lee Roth, had a sometimes contentious relationship with EVH. “I can’t wait for the world to hear this very special song Joe [Satriani] and I wrote as a long overdue thank you to Eddie Van Halen for the music, the good times, and the dream that inspired this track, ‘Encore, Thank You, Goodnight.’”
The post describes the song that also features Satriani, drummer Kenny Aronoff and former VH bassist Michael Anthony as “inspired by a dream and brought to reality through introspective lyrics, powerful chords and rhythmic guitar and drums.”
Northern Irish hip-hop group Kneecap have responded to calls from Sharon Osbourne to have their U.S. work visas revoked following their airing of anti-Israel messages during the trio’s second Coachella weekend appearance. In an email to Rolling Stone, group member Mo Chara (born Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh) said that the messaging was in keeping with their career-long views on Palestine.
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He said the group have talked about Palestine “at every single gig since the band’s formation, long before [the deadly Hamas attack on Israeli civilians] October 2023 as the oppression and brutal occupation of Palestine has been ongoing for 77 years.”
Kneecap claim that their anti-Israel messages were censored on the livestream of their set during the first weekend of Coachella, but at the end of their show last Friday (April 18) they closed by projecting the phrases: “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people… It is being enabled by the U.S. government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes. F–k Israel; free Palestine.” The audience then reportedly broke into a “Free Palestine” chant.
“Not the only thing that was cut – our messaging on the US-backed genocide in Gaza somehow never appeared on screens either,” Kneecap wrote on their social feeds in response to reports about the first weekend feed cut. “Back next Friday Coachella and it’ll be sorted,” they promised before the controversial second weekend set.
“We believe we have an obligation to use our platform when we can to raise the issue of Palestine, and it was important for us to speak out at Coachella as the USA is the main funder and supplier of weapons to Israel as they commit genocide in Gaza,” Chara told RS. “As I said from the stage, ‘The U.S. government could stop the genocide tomorrow.’ It’s important that young Americans hear and know it.”
He added that the band didn’t initially realize their political statements were not viewed when the YouTube livestream was cut off. “We only heard about it the next day and haven’t heard from anyone officially,” he said. “It’s not surprising, large companies don’t like to hear the truth unless it suits their narrative and pocket.”
Chara said the “Free Palestine” chant is something that “happens at all of our gigs from Spain to Scotland and Ireland to Iceland because people know what’s happening is wrong and are angry about it. The crowd chanting ‘Free Palestine’ at Coachella was a message of solidarity to the people of Gaza from regular Americans who want to see an end to the genocide, despite their government’s arming and funding Israel.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, insiders claimed Goldenvoice CEO Paul Tollett was “blindsided” by Kneecap’s actions. In lengthy note condemning Kneecap’s actions, Osbourne decried what she called the politicization of Coachella, saying that this year’s shows will be remembered “as a festival that compromised its moral and spiritual integrity… Goldenvoice, the festival organizer, facilitated this by allowing artists to use the Coachella stage as a platform for political expression,” she said of the event, where a number of other acts, including Green Day, Bob Vylan and Blonde Redhead, respectively, altered lyrics to reflect the plight of Palestinian children and displayed Palestinian flags on stage. “At a time when the world is experiencing significant unrest, music should serve as an escape, not a stage for political discourse,” Osbourne said.
“While festivals like Coachella showcase remarkable talent from around the globe, music’s primary purpose is to unite people. It should not be a venue for promoting terrorist organizations or spreading hate,” London-born Osbourne added, ending with a call for the “revocation of Kneecap’s work visa.”
“As someone with both Irish Catholic on my Mothers side and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage on my Fathers side, and extensive experience in the music industry, I understand the complexities involved,” Osbourne, who has managed husband Ozzy Osbourne for more than 45 years, added. “Goldenvoice’s claim of being ‘blindsided’ by Kneecap’s performance seems implausible given the circumstances. I know for a fact that certain people in the industry had written to Goldenvoice, airing their concerns around the booking of Kneecap.”
In the wake of Hamas unprovoked attack on Israeli citizen on Oct. 7, 2023 in which nearly 1,200 mostly civilian Israelis were killed and nearly 250 were taken hostage, Israel has waged a devastating war against the militant group in the Gaza Strip and West Bank in which a reported 50,000 people have been killed and most of the territories’ infrastructure has been decimated. One of the most devastating attacks on Oct. 7 was a raid on the EDM Nova Music Festival celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, where Hamas militants killed 364 civilians, as well as wounding and sexually assaulting scores more.
Kneecap’s actions at Coachella are in keeping with what has been described as a long-held solidarity between the people of Northern Ireland and Palestinians based on the 800-year British occupation of Ireland that lasted until 1921.
Organizers of the Nova Festival have invited Kneecap to view the Nova Oct. 7 6:29 a.m. – The Moment Music Stood Still: The Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Los Angeles — a chronicle of the Hamas attack on the music fest brought to the U.S. by HYBE America CEO and former Justin Bieber manager Scooter Braun — to “experience firsthand the stories of those who were murdered, those who survived, and those who are still being held hostage,” according to RS, which reported that Chara did not respond to questions about whether they’d accept that offer.
The call from Osbourne to have Kneecap’s visas revoked for their anti-Israel sloganeering comes as the Trump administration has been targeting universities for defunding and revoking the visas and/or deporting students who it says participated in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Kneecap, which also features members Naoise Ó Cairealláin (stage name Móglaí Bap) and JJ Ó Dochartaigh (stage name DJ Próvaí), are slated to launch their largest North American tour to date in October.