Music News

Where do we start with 2024? The elephant in the room, the Kendrick Lamar and Drake feud, was a seismic event that reverberated throughout the year’s pop culture, leaving rap purists scrambling to dissect every haymaker thrown in this illustrious battle. And who could forget when Future soared like MJ, securing a three-peat on the […]

Lil Wayne has been very candid about the hurt feelings he felt when he was passed over to perform at next year’s Super Bowl halftime show in his hometown of New Orleans in favor of “Squabble Up” MC Kendrick Lamar. Now, Weezy has revealed that he’s spoken K-Dot and not only is it all good, but he’s rooting for Kendrick to “kill” the gig.
“I’ve spoken to him, and I wish him all the best and I told him he better kill it,” Wayne told Skip Bayless on his show on Monday (Dec. 16), during which the host revealed that he remains “baffled and angry” that his guest was not tapped to perform on the biggest stage there is in his own backyard.

“For whatever reason I believe it’s over my head,” Wayne said as part of what he described as the “general” reason why he thinks he was passed over for the gig during what is traditionally the most-viewed TV program of the year. “I don’t know why, period. Obviously I believe that it’s perfect… I do not know why.”

Trending on Billboard

Personally, however, Wayne, 42, had some other thoughts. “The person I am? I straight look at it like, ‘you ain’t there, you gotta get there,’” said the MC with more than three decades in the game, as Bayless shook his head and called him the undisputed “G.O.A.T.,” then doubled-down on the fact that the game is being played at the Caesars Superdome in the Big Easy. “It just makes no sense to me. I don’t get it… their politics played… I don’t know,” Bayless said.

“That’s another part of it, there’s things I can’t control,” Wayne said. Asked if he was better with it now than he was when the news first dropped, Wayne smiled and said unequivocally “no.”

Wayne added, however, that he’s talked to the people he trusts and his management team about his feelings and told them, “I want to get to the point where I’m undeniable. I want them to walk in there and have 10 other choices and whoever’s in charge says, ‘no, you have to go with him!’”

Bayless then read the lyrics to the new Lamar GNX song “wacced out murals” — which Wayne said he was not familiar with — in which K-dot raps, “Used to bump Tha Carter III, I held my Rollie chain proud/ Irony, I think my hard work let Lil Wayne down.” Looking confused and doubling-down on saying it was his first time hearing those lines, Wayne parsed it by suggesting, “I think he’s [Lamar] a fan like I’m a fan of his music (he’s a fan of my music)… he saw what everybody else [saw] and he saw how much it meant to me. I think that’s all he mean… obviously he can’t control that. He didn’t let me down. It ain’t like he can control it.”

Wayne then described talking to Lamar and telling him that “he better kill it. You gotta kill it.” He also noted that Lamar did not need to explain the “wacced out murals” lyrics to him. “I think he means he made it there, his hard work is the reason he made it there and obviously let me down is me being upset and disappointed about not getting that spot.” If anything, Wayne said the lyrics showed that Lamar “has a heart” and that he cares about the situation.

Back when the news broke in September, Weezy was very candid about being passed over. “First of all, I want to say forgive me for the delay. I had to get strength enough to do this without breaking,” said a somber Wayne in an Instagram post. “I’mma say thank you to every voice, every opinion, all the care, all love and support out there. Your words turned into arms and held me up when I tried to fall back.”

At the time, he said the news “Hurt. It hurt a lot. You know what I’m talking about. It hurt a whole lot. I blame myself for not being mentally prepared for a letdown. And for automatically mentally putting myself in that position like somebody told me that was my position. So I blame myself for that. But I thought that was nothing better than that spot and that stage and that platform in my city, so it hurt. It hurt a whole lot.”

The let-down cam after Wayne openly admitted last February that he coveted the halftime slot. “I will not lie to you, I have not got a call,” he said on YG’s 4Hunnid podcast. “But we all praying, we keeping our fingers crossed. I’m working hard. I’m going to make sure this next album and everything I do is killer, so I’m going make it very hard for them to … I want to just make it hard for them not to highlight the boy.”

When Bayless asked if there was any chance Wayne might make a last-second cameo during the set to show that it’s all good between the two undisputed rap legends, Weezy said no way, noting that he will be out of the country on February 9.

Watch Wayne wish Kendrick well below.

After months of delays and speculation, SZA has finally announced the release date for Lana, the long-awaited deluxe edition of her chart-topping album SOS. The project is set to arrive on Friday, Dec. 20, as confirmed via a teaser video shared on social media.

Explore

Explore

See latest videos, charts and news

See latest videos, charts and news

In the clip shared Monday (Dec. 16), Stiller channels his inner superfan, dramatically lip-syncing to what’s presumed to be SZA’s new track “Drive” while driving through a rainy night.

If the scene feels familiar, it’s because Stiller also once made an iconic lip-syncing cameo in Jack Johnson’s “Taylor” video back in 2003 — except this time, he’s swapping a guitar for a steering wheel.

Trending on Billboard

Lana has been in the works for over two years, with SZA first teasing it as “a whole other album” packed with outtakes and new tracks. In a recent interview with British Vogue, she reflected on her evolving creative process. “I think I am making music from a more beautiful place. From a more possible place versus a more angsty place,” she explained.

“I’m not identifying with my brokenness. It’s not my identity. It’s shit that happened to me. Yeah, I experienced cruelty. I have to put it down at some point. Piece by piece, my music is shifting because of that, the lighter I get.”

The deluxe release marks another chapter in the SOS era, which has been nothing short of massive.

Following its release, SOS debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart with 318,000 equivalent album units – the third-highest debut week of 2022 – and shattered the record for the biggest streaming week for an R&B album by a woman, with 404.6 million official on-demand streams for the album’s songs, according to Luminate. It spent 10 total weeks atop the chart, and became the first R&B album by a woman to hit the double-digit mark since Mariah Carey’s self-titled debut posted 11 weeks at No. 1 in 1991.

With Lana now confirmed, the release perfectly aligns with SZA’s upcoming stadium tour alongside Kendrick Lamar, kicking off in 2025. As part of their highly anticipated Grand National tour, presented by Live Nation, pgLang and Top Dawg Entertainment, the duo are setting off on a North American stadium tour beginning in April 2025.

The Grand National tour will kick off in Minnesota on April 19 and make its way through major cities across the country including Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, the New York area, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Detroit, Chicago and even Toronto before wrapping up in Washington, D.C., on June 18.