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It was a few weeks ago that Max McNown’s agents at Wasserman Music told the country upstart that his Feb. 11-12 sold-out Bowery Ballroom shows in New York City needed to move to accommodate another artist.
The agents, Jonathan Insogna and Lenore Kinder, initially pushed back against the highly unusual move until they discovered a few days later that it was because Sir Paul McCartney was playing surprise gigs at the 575-capacity room those nights. Ultimately, McNown’s management team, Live Nation, the Bowery and Wasserman quickly went into action to shift McNown’s two shows to the 1,200-capacity Irving Plaza in Union Square the same nights, and McNown ended up with an amazing story to tell.
When his agents were first asked to move the shows, “Honestly, we were a bit confused,” McNown tells Billboard. “My agent told me this was an unusual situation that a venue would ask you to move so we kind of knew there was something bigger going on, but our first response was, ‘I’m sorry you want us to do what?’”
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Shortly thereafter, when he and his team put the pieces together to realize he was getting bumped for the legendary Beatle, it all made sense at that point. “Paul wanted to play in a smaller venue and make it special. We had sold out Bowery months ago, so moving into a bigger venue and being able to accommodate more fans was great for us. A win-win in every way,” McNown says, but joked, “I am disappointed we weren’t able to get him to open for us.”
Though McCartney’s team didn’t give a reason for the specific date, Feb. 11 marked the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ first gig in the U.S at the Coliseum in Washington, D.C.
McCartney’s team was extremely gracious and did offer McNown tickets, but he was unable to go since he was doing his own shows a mile up the road. McNown admits he was tempted, though. “I honestly really wish I could have pulled it off” to go to McCartney’s show, he says. “I always say touring is a job and there were too many people counting on me to play my own show to skip out on it. But yes, the term ‘tempted’ is an understatement.”
The Oregon singer-songwriter, who was Billboard’s November Country Rookie of the Month and topped Billboard’s Emerging Artists chart, first hit the Hot Country Songs chart last year with “A Lot More Free,” which reached No. 29, as well as peaked at No. 15 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart. His new album, Night Diving, came out Jan. 24. His new single, “Brown Eyes (Better Me for You),” is at radio.
Though he’s only 23, McNown is a lifelong Beatles fan. “My elementary school teacher would always sing ‘Yellow Submarine,’ ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Hey Jude’ every single Friday in my fourth and fifth grade class,” he says. “He always felt it was important to keep the younger generations educated on the true icons of musical history. Because of him, I know every word to those songs, and each of them now hold a level of nostalgia in my heart that’s pretty unmatched.”
His favorite Beatles song is the gorgeous “Blackbird,” which McNown may, in homage to Sir Paul, now record and post on his Instagram, he says. “I discovered that song on my own after being introduced to [The Beatles’] music in school at a very young age, which made it extra personal/special for me.” He’s also a big fan of “Yesterday,” “Here Comes The Sun” and “Twist and Shout.”
Since attending the shows wasn’t possible, McNown would love some merch or even an autograph, he says, but he’ll settle for an amazing story of the night he was bumped for a Beatle. “It is definitely something I’m sure I’ll be talking about for some time,” he tells Billboard. “This last few years have felt like one dream sequence, from going viral, to Kelly Clarkson covering my songs and now swapping venues with a Beatle. It’s unbelievable.”
Though McCartney is playing his third show at Bowery tonight, McNown couldn’t attend because he’s on his way to Boston for his show Friday night (Feb. 14).
When Chappell Roan won best new artist at the 2025 Grammys, she used her platform on Music’s Biggest Night to demand that labels provide “a livable wage and healthcare” for artists. While her speech was greeted with applause from many artists and industry players at the ceremony, not everyone was cheering — the most outspoken case being an op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter where former music exec Jeff Rabhan called Roan “too green and too uninformed to be the agent of change she aspires to be today.”
The op-ed was widely shared — and widely criticized, leading to a backlash to the backlash as artists like Charli XCX and Noah Kahan came to Roan’s defense, speaking up in her favor and joining her in donating to healthcare support for developing artists. (Various industry organizations have donated as well.)
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“It is clear that young people, artists and/or writers, have had enough of record labels and tech companies taking advantage of them,” Justin Tranter tells Billboard. The songwriter, who co-wrote hits for Justin Bieber (“Sorry”), Imagine Dragons (“Believer”) and Roan (“Good Luck, Babe!”), had an immediate, visceral response to the THR op-ed in a comment on Instagram: “Please delete this. Now.”
Roan’s critics doubled down on their grievances, too, and the discourse — which has clearly hit a nerve in the industry — continues.
“Songwriters have been ringing this alarm for years,” says Michelle Lewis, a songwriter and executive director of Songwriters of North America (SONA). “When her speech started, my phone blew up. Everyone knows this is my fight. [Roan] said ‘healthcare’ or ‘health insurance’ like three times.”
Lewis, whom Tranter recommended Billboard speak to about this topic, says, “It’s in the industry’s best interests to jump in” on the healthcare discussion before it reaches a head, particularly with so many artists and songwriters struggling to make it in a streaming economy that pays some creators a fraction of what they would have made in the physical media era. Lewis acknowledges that Roan using terms such as “employee” and “livable wage” opens up a “hornet’s nest,” but she says it’s time to find “inter-industry solutions for more vulnerable” people working in music. “Let’s stick with health insurance,” she says. “That’s something I think we can find a workable solution around.”
“No change is going to happen right now, but I can promise you that serious conversations are being had. I can promise you labels, managers, executives in our business are going, ‘We need to figure this out,’” insists Tranter. “If you don’t follow young people’s lead, at some point you will lose. That is the huge takeaway from this conversation.”
Here, Tranter speaks to Billboard about Roan’s speech, the “misogynistic” THR op-ed and why healthcare options that do exist for artists come with asterisks.
When Chappell was giving her acceptance speech for best new artist, what were you thinking?
First off, her getting the award is such an honor. I feel it’s the greatest honor of my career to be the tiniest, tiniest part of her journey. What she chose to speak about in this unbelievable moment — not gonna lie, it brought a little misty tear to my eye. I was blown away and inspired at her fearlessness. It’s genuinely moving.
When you read the op-ed criticizing her for the speech, what were you thinking?
I thought it was such a pro-corporation, pro-old guard, old person [take] and extremely misogynistic. For him to think that because she is a young woman she has no clue what she’s talking about is so gross. And to find out this person has apparently worked at educational [institutions] for young artists and musicians? And this is the energy he is putting toward his students, the energy of ‘let the corporations continue to treat you terribly’? The whole thing was heartbreaking, to be honest. His article was heartbreaking. Also laughable to be that out of touch. Gen Z has had enough. It’s never been a good idea to not support young people.
Do you think this is a case where the old guard sees change potentially coming and is trying to stop it?
Whether its artists or songwriters being taken advantage of, it’s reaching a boiling point. When it comes to artists, labels need artists to do more work than ever. And that’s no one’s fault, it’s just how technology has changed. The artist has to be the head of their marketing department, it’s just a fact. Now the labels need the artist to write, sing, record, tour and be the head of their own marketing department. The industry is asking for us to do more and more and yet don’t want to give them more and more. Luckily, Gen Z knows better and is going to fight for themselves. It’s amazing to see.
There’s also the mental health component of healthcare. Being an artist on a major label comes with an occupation hazard most jobs don’t entail – national scrutiny about your work, your appearance, your opinions.
In most jobs whether you do good or bad is not in the court of public opinion. It’s very stressful to be a professional creative where the whole world gets to watch and see how you did at your job that day.
From your perspective, as someone who works with artists and industry insiders, what’s the tone of the conversation around this since the Grammys?
Everyone feels excited that with Chappell opening that door and with Raye speaking out for songwriters at all the different awards she’s won. Everyone finally feels like young artists are using their voices to help everyone. This business is old and a mess — there aren’t overnight solutions to any of these conversations — but the fact that these conversations are being had by such public figures is such a joy and will lead to change finally. Michelle Lewis and I speak frequently about healthcare for songwriters. There have been brilliant people fighting this fight in the darkness for a while now, so for someone like Chappell or Raye to say it in bright spotlights is very exciting.
Artists signed to major labels are sometimes eligible for healthcare through SAG-AFTRA. Can you walk me through your experience with that?
In SAG-AFTRA, you have to make a certain amount a year [$27,540 in covered earnings to qualify] to be eligible for their health insurance. So the year you sign your deal and the year you get your advance, you can probably afford health insurance. If you know it exists. If your deal was big enough and you have a good enough lawyer and a good enough business manager and they can walk you through all of these things. Very real chance you might have a manager who is amazing but they were your friend in college and you busted your asses together and you’re learning [the industry] together. That’s no shame to that manager — they probably are the right manager for you — but they might not know these things because it is so hard to figure out.
Then in year two, maybe your advance is gone and you’re not earning. You’re back in the studio and figuring out your next step. And it has to be specifically money that’s going through SAG-AFTRA. A brand deal isn’t going to count toward that, a touring gig isn’t going to count toward that. If you don’t make that your second year, all of a sudden you lose your health insurance. But you’re still signed to one of the largest entertainment companies in the world.
I have my health insurance through SAG-AFTRA and lucky for me there are songs like “Believer” from Imagine Dragons and “Cake By the Ocean” by DNCE that get so many continual film and TV syncs that my health insurance is covered. But if you’re a songwriter or artist that doesn’t have a song that gets used in film and TV over and over, you might be an artist that most people know of — or a songwriter that most of the industry has heard of — but if you don’t have a song that is getting synced like crazy and has money going through the SAG-AFTRA system, all of a sudden you don’t have health insurance.
That’s why it’s so beautiful for Chappell and Raye to be raising their voices. They are not fighting for themselves. They have broken through; they are now fighting for the next generation of writers and artists. That’s why it felt so condescending for him, the writer, to be like, well, when Prince and Tom Petty took on the industry, they were decades in. Well, no – that’s why it’s so beautiful that Chappell did it on what some might consider her first night of household-name status. To me, that is so much more inspiring. To fault her for that is wild.
You do see a tendency for people to celebrate activism that happened decades ago while decrying contemporary activists for ‘doing it wrong’ in some way. What do you think the next steps are?
The big win a week later is look how many conversations are happening. And I’m honestly kinda grateful that very misogynistic article was written because it’s kept the conversation going longer. We live in such a quick news cycle and here we are still talking about it. Okay, boomer, thank you for booming so hard, now we’re even angrier. By the way, I’m old – I’m Gen X — but I think like a young person when it comes to equality. I’m so glad this boomer boomed because now we have something to be even angrier about, and anger is going to fix this problem.
Since filing for divorce from ex-husband Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) in 2021, Kim Kardashian has mostly kept quiet about the couple’s relationship, how they are co-parenting their four children and whatever feelings she might have about West’s repeated public meltdowns in which he spouts hate-filled antisemitic invective for days on end.
But in Thursday’s (Feb. 13) episode of The Kardashians, Kim opened up a bit about what may have caused the dissolution of the couple’s marriage while bonding with sister Khloé about her own marital issues. After having an emotional reunion with her ex-husband, retired NBA player Lamar Odom, after nine years apart, Khloé said she got married “too quickly” to Odom.
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Though their marriage lasted only five tumultuous years, Khloé said she “wouldn’t change a thing” about marrying the man she called the “love of my life,” lamenting that if it weren’t for Odom’s well-publicized struggles with substance use they might still be together. “I know I picked the right person at that time,” she told Kim and their mother, Kris Jenner, in the episode.
Kim seemed to relate to the sentiment, seemingly referencing her struggles with West, saying, “That’s the hardest part. I’ve been there. When you don’t foresee something happening that really changes a person’s personality and then they’re not the same person and you can’t ever get that person back, but you can’t live with the new person. I get it.”
Kim had more to say in a confessional segment, adding, “It’s tougher when you don’t want your marriage to end off of personal reasons but circumstances change that force your marriage to end. When you weren’t planning on that and that’s not really the outcome you want but there’s no other option, I think it makes it harder to get over.”
While the SKIMS founder never specifically named West in the episode of the Hulu series, it appeared as if she was referencing their relationship, which ended with Kardashian stating in a petition to be considered legally single in early 2022 that Ye was “creating emotional distress” by sharing “misinformation” about their private family matters.
While the reality star was open to talking about what she said at the time was West’s struggle with bipolar disorder during their relationship, the rapper recently claimed that his now-wife, Bianca Censori, has told him that he was mis-diagnosed and is likely on the autism spectrum.
Kardashian’s comments on the show — which is taped months before the episodes air — came just a few days after West deleted his X account following a four-day spree of virulently antisemitic posts in which he declared once again “I’m a Nazi” and “I love Hitler,” before briefly offering a shirt emblazoned with a Nazi swastika for sale on his Yeezy site.
The offensive posts have once again caused serious professional fall-out for West, who has been criticized for spreading hate speech by the ADL and fellow artists, as well as being dropped by his booking agent and hit with a lawsuit by a Jewish staffer who alleged that he compared himself to Hitler and threatened her because she is Jewish.
Madonna fans are getting something better than chocolates or roses for Valentine’s Day this year: the promise of new music. On Instagram Thursday (Feb. 13) — just one day before the day of love — the superstar shared a video slideshow of photos showing off her recent time in the studio. In some pictures, she […]
Brandon Lake’s “That’s Who I Praise” continues its domination on Billboard’s Christian Airplay chart (dated Feb. 15) as it reigns for a 10th week. It drew 5.2 million in audience Jan. 31-Feb. 6, according to Luminate.
The song ties for the longest rule of the decade. Housefires and JWLKRS’ “I Thank God,” featuring Blake Wiggins and Ryan Ellis, began its 10-week stay at No. 1 in December 2023.
Meanwhile, Lake has a stake in one of the songs tied for second place. Elevation Worship’s “Praise” —— featuring Lake, Chris Brown and Chandler Moore — ruled for nine frames beginning last May; Katy Nichole’s “In Jesus’ Name (God of Possible)” started its own nine-week No. 1 run in April 2022.
Since the Christian Airplay survey launched in June 2003, the longest-leading No. 1 overall is MercyMe’s “Word of God Speak,” which dominated for 23 weeks starting that August.
The 34-year-old Lake, from Charleston, S.C., co-authored “That’s Who I Praise” with Steven Furtick, Benjamin William Hastings, Zac Lawson and Micah Nichols, the lattermost of whom also produced it. It became Lake’s fourth Christian Airplay chart-topper.
“I’m completely blown away,” Lake beamed to Billboard when the single hit No. 1 on the multimetric Hot Christian Songs chart in October. “To hear that this song is connecting with so many hearts out there is humbling and just unreal.”
Dewand’s First No. 1
On Gospel Airplay, Jevon Dewand’s rookie single, “Without You,” featuring Zacardi Cortez, Gasner the Artist and Jazze Pha, climbs 3-1 (up 12% in plays).
The Atlanta-based Dewand co-wrote and co-produced the song. It’s is the lead single from his same-named album, released last June.
“Without You” becomes the first Gospel Airplay leader for Dewand, Gasner the Artist and Jazze Pha, while veteran Cortez banks his seventh No. 1.
The song marks the first freshman entry to lead Gospel Airplay since Will Smith’s turn toward the genre with “You Can Make It,” featuring Fridayy and Sunday Service, led for a week in December. It became the first No. 1 for all three acts.
Over the past year or so, Jelly Roll has been open about his dedication to working to transform his health. Last year, he ran his first 5K, taking part in Tom Segura and Bert Kreischer’s 2 Bears 5K.
Now, the country star is gearing up to run his second 5K race in May in Tampa, Fla, and he’s intent on helping others who also want to change their health for the better. The “Halfway to Hell” singer told fans on Instagram Feb. 11 that he is launching Jelly Roll’s Losers Run Club as he gears up for the race.
In the video, he also told fans just how much his poor health was impacting his daily life, and how that inspired him to want to change.
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“A little bit over a year ago, I literally struggled to walk down my hill to the mailbox, y’all. I mean, it was really bad,” Jelly Roll said in the video. “And I’d let myself get to the point of being absolutely just disgusted with myself. I was just sick and tired of it, and I was like, ‘Man, I’m gonna figure this out. And about the time I was trying to find something to motivate me, I saw that Tom Segura had teased doing a 5K By May, and I knew right then that if there was ever a place that I was gonna feel safe trying to do my first 5K, it was going to be at the 2 Bears 5K.”
As he launches Jelly Roll’s Losers Run Club, the star said he’s launching a Facebook group, and has teamed with the Strava app to help others train for the race and stay motivated. Jelly Roll’s trainer Ian Larios will be helping people who take part with lifestyle, nutrition and exercise coaching. Meanwhile, ultramarathoner Matthew Johnson put together two plan options — one for beginners, as well as an intermediate plan — for partakers to train for the race.
“Matthew Johnson has the fastest time running across the state of Texas,” Jelly Roll said in the video. “This man is an absolute machine. I love everything about him, the fact that he is dedicating the next 12 weeks of his life to try and help me and a bunch of people like myself to run in a 5K.”
“What we are trying to inspire here is just change and belief and community,” Jelly Roll summarized of the group’s mission. “Somewhere where you can go and feel judgment-free when you’re trying to figure this thing out. I know how rough it was at first and how embarrassed I was to just be sucking snot and air every time I walked down the driveway. But it felt so good to have friends and people behind me, telling me I was doing the right thing. … I believe that we can create huge change right here. I believe a huge group of people can come together right here and encourage each other to become what they always dreamed they could be.”
Watch Jelly Roll announce his Losers Run Club below:
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Whether it’s her career or scorching hot sauce, Lady Gaga isn’t a quitter. And after conquering the Wings of Death on a new episode of Hot Ones posted Thursday (Feb. 13), the superstar got deep about the times she pushed through the urge to “walk away” from her career.
After conducting a life- and career-spanning interview with Gaga about her music, technique and rise from struggling New York City club performer to global icon — all the while the “Rain on Me” singer took bites of increasingly spicy chicken like a champ — host Sean Evans had just one more question for his latest guest to close out the interview. “What’s the closest you’ve ever come to walking away?” he asked.
“That is an incredibly deep question to ask me in this panic mode,” Gaga replied, blinking through the pain of the lingering, peppery heat.
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“I missed the community that I had in New York, and that was really hard,” she continued, reflecting on her days as a performer at Manhattan venues such as The Slipper Room. “There were definitely times where I felt like maybe I should walk away.”
“I know for sure that I never would,” the musician added. “I would definitely say that I was tested, and I always didn’t give up. And I’m still doing it, so it must mean I want to do it.”
Gaga’s stint on Hot Ones comes just a few weeks ahead of her highly anticipated seventh studio album, Mayhem, which arrives March 7. Following singles “Disease” and Bruno Mars duet “Die With a Smile” — which is currently on its fifth week at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the A Star Is Born actress shared a third single, “Abracadabra,” during the 2025 Grammys broadcast Feb. 2.
Speaking of the Grammys, Gaga and the Silk Sonic star also took home some new hardware at the ceremony, winning best pop duo/group performance for “Die With a Smile.” The win marked Gaga’s 14th total — meaning she’s come a long way since the early days of her career when she may have wanted to throw in the towel. Reflecting more on how she got her start, Gaga also confessed to Evans that she used to call booking reps for venues pretending to be her own manager. “I’d be like, ‘She is so hot right now,’” she recalled, laughing.
Watch Lady Gaga’s Hot Ones episode above.
Want to ruin a friendship? Just tell your bestie that you don’t like the person they’re dating.
Most people learn that lesson the hard way somewhere in their teens or 20s. And Broken Bow artist Lanie Gardner, by writing “Buzzkill” about a guy’s difficult girlfriend, has discovered that saying it in a song can create the same negative outcome.
“I guess he still had some sort of feelings for this girl, so before it ever came out, it ended a friendship with him,” Gardner recalls.
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Oddly enough, the guy misread the song’s story. “Once he left that girl, the new girl – he thought it was about her,” Gardner continues. “When he left that [new] girl, it kind of revived a friendship. But it was just funny how that song has caused some ripples in real life.”
“Buzzkill” is the product of a writing session on Jan. 30, 2024, at the East Nashville home of writer-producers Katie Cecil and Chris Ganoudis. It was only the second time they’d collaborated; their first co-write had produced an emotionally dramatic piece, and they wanted to explore something different in their follow-up session. As they settled in with conversation, Gardner confessed her annoyance about a woman whose attachment to another friend had become an intrusion on her crew.
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“Literally, we would all be having fun, you know, out and drinking, and she would come around and she would start fights and mess with him the whole day,” Gardner says. “I just remember thinking, ‘Man, what a buzzkill.’”
Gardner hadn’t intended to build a song around the situation, but when she introduced that “buzzkill” phrase into the conversation, it made an immediate impression. “I was like, ‘Let me write that down,’” Cecil says. “You know, sometimes you kind of catch the title in the middle of someone’s venting session.”
The scenario had comedic possibilities, so Ganoudis developed a fast-paced mix of acoustic guitar rhythms and programmed 808 bass drum. It felt a little like rockabilly and a lot like the energy of KT Tunstall’s “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” and the track set an atmosphere that encouraged cheeky observation. The woman is portrayed derisively in the song’s opening salvos as a “Barbie doll, show stopper, beauty queen” and a condescending “Miss Hollywood takin’ over Tennessee.” Cecil and Ganoudis relocated from California about four years ago, and exaggerating about the women in the story came naturally.
“For lyrical purposes, you kind of have to make things the most dramatic version of themselves, to make it fun to sing and to drive the point home,” Cecil says. “So we were comparing this girl to the most insufferable L.A.-type girl you might come across who’s moved to Nashville but clearly just doesn’t fit in.”
Unlike Gardner and the “Buzzkill” woman, Gardner and Cecil worked well together, hunkering down on the song’s spirited lyrics. Ganoudis pulled on headphones and focused on the track separately, building the verses in a minor key and the chorus in a parallel major.
“You can’t sing the verse melodies over the chorus, or chorus melodies over the verse,” Ganoudis says.That brighter-sounding chorus allowed for more acerbic talk, and the protagonist insists on giving her friend an honest assessment of his girl: “They ain’t gonna say it but you bet your ass I will/ Yeah, buddy, she’s a buzzkill.”
“It’s not good to hate on people,” Gardner observes, “but it’s sometimes good to maybe call certain actions out.”
When they finished writing “Buzzkill,” Ganoudis supplied a track with plenty of energy, created by a spare number of instruments. But those sounds were routinely fattened, making the day’s production sound larger. “I’m really kind of minimalist in in my approach a lot of the times,” Ganoudis notes. “It’s just maximizing each one of those parts, so having less parts that do more, so that the bass is saturated in a way to make it take up the room that I want it to take up.”
Gardner laid down a vocal for it, caught up in the story’s surly sarcasm. “We did go back in and tighten some things up, but we were just such in a zone with ‘Buzzkill’ the day we wrote it, we didn’t have to recut the vocals again,” Gardner says.
Ganoudis took his time finishing the demo, turning it on Feb. 12 once he felt it was good enough to compete with anything else Gardner might be considering.
“When the labels are hearing it and the management’s hearing it, that’s a reflection of what we do,” Cecil explains. “That’s always good to get it sounding where we feel super confident that it will be a contender for a release.”
Ganoudis filled “Buzzkill” out further, playing nearly all the instruments on his own, while creating a framework with some intentional, built-in contrast.
“It’s kind of like a middle-up, middle-down approach,” he says. “The middle-down frequency spectrum of the track is pretty pop, you know. It’s got 808, it’s got a sample kick [drum] – like, there’s no live drummer on this thing. But then the top up is pretty honky tonk. That’s all live, you know. There’s no programming on the top up, with the guitars, and there’s some steel and all that.”
Ganoudis hired guitarist Gideon Boley to rip a fierce solo in the middle of the production, and Gardner returned to stack some tight harmonies on top of her original vocal. She threw in a bundle of ad-libs, too, including an off-the-cuff “one more for the people in the back” that adds to the glibness of the performance.
“That’s honestly one of my favorite parts of the song,” Cecil says. “I was like, ‘We gotta put that in there.’”SiriusXM picked it up, German choreographer Sascha Wolf developed a linedance for it, and Jonathan Craig produced a pool-hall video, released Feb. 3, that plays up the out-of-place snobbery of the buzzkill girlfriend. And just in case country broadcasters decide “Buzzkill” can aid their undying desire for more uptempo singles, Ganoudis fashioned a radio edit that replaces the “ass” reference in the chorus with a sneaky “whoop!”
Meanwhile, the friendship that “Buzzkill” killed appears to have survived, in part because the friend’s second relationship did not.
“All of a sudden,” Gardner says with a laugh, “we’re friends again.”
2 Chainz was one of the Atlanta artists Kendrick Lamar named in the third verse of “Not Like Us” who had worked with Drake in the past before proceeding to call him “not a colleague” but a “colonizer.” And now, the “Watch Out” rapper is sharing his thoughts on the mention.
Chainz stopped by The Breakfast Club on Wednesday (Feb. 12) with Larry June and The Alchemist in support of their Life Is Beautiful album, and Charlamagne Tha God asked the rapper formerly known as Tity Boi about Lamar name-dropping him on the Drake diss that arrived last May.
“I just think it was kind of like some wordplay, ’cause Drake and I got a song called ‘No Lie,’” said the rapper, who has teamed up with Drizzy in the past for other tracks, including “All Me,” “Big Amount,” “F–kin’ Problems” and more. “And so when he said he lied, it just felt like, I don’t know, but I didn’t take it as no kind of way. I don’t think he was taking a shot at me.”
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He continued: “I’ve heard all type of instances where somebody want me to say something back. I just think it was a moment where it was about Atlanta artists.”
On the Grammy-winning track, which went on to top the Billboard Hot 100 and break the record for most weeks atop the Hot Rap Songs chart, Lamar rhymes: “2 Chainz say you good, but he lied/ You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars/ No, you not a colleague, you a f—in’ colonizer.”
June, meanwhile, said he hasn’t heard “Not Like Us” in its entirety. “I never heard that full song,” he said. “I f–k with everybody. I just didn’t particularly hear that song fully. I heard a lot of it on Instagram and stuff like that. But I was doing the album with him at the time, so I wasn’t really listening to too much s–t like that.”
The Alchemist, who produced “Meet the Grahams,” expanded on how the diabolical Drake diss came to be, noting it was actually built around a gospel sample. “Yeah, that’s a gospel record. Yeah, the sample was,” he said. “I wanna be Switzerland really. Leave me out of it, but they end up making me the battleground … I had sent the record to Dot months before that happened and I heard it when everyone else heard it.”
Watch 2 Chainz, Larry June and The Alchemist talk about “Not Like Us” on The Breakfast Club below:
The producers of the 2025 NAACP Image Awards seem to understand that we could all use a laugh these days. Two days after announcing that comedian Dave Chappelle will receive the President’s Award during the awards show on Saturday, Feb. 22, they are coming back with the news that The Wayans family will be inducted into the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame.
Wayans family members include Keenen Ivory Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Damon Wayans Sr., Kim Wayans, Damon Wayans Jr., Damien Dante Wayans and Chaunté Wayans. Works created by Wayans family members include the Scary Movie film series, The Wayans Bros., In Living Color, Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, White Chicks, My Wife and Kids, and Little Man.
The Hall of Fame Award is presented to individuals or groups who have been pioneers in their respective fields, and whose influence continues to shape their industry. The Wayans Family are the fifth recipients primarily known for comedy, following Richard Pryor (1996), Bill Cosby (2007), Eddie Murphy (2021) and Good Times star Esther Rolle (1987).
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The 56th NAACP Image Awards are set to air live from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on Saturday, Feb. 22, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on BET and CBS. This year, the broadcast will be extended 30 minutes to 2.5 hours.
“For decades, the Wayans family has been at the forefront of comedy, breaking barriers and opening doors for waves of entertainers,” Derrick Johnson, NAACP president and CEO, said in a statement. “Their trailblazing work in television, film and stand-up has transcended pop culture and cemented their legacy. Recognizing their achievements with this induction is a celebration of a multi-generational legacy that continues to advance and uplift communities.”
“The Wayans family revolutionized comedy by blending cultural commentary and fearless humor,” added Connie Orlando, EVP of specials, music programming and music strategy at BET. “From In Living Color to blockbuster films, their influence spans generations, breaking barriers for Black entertainers and redefining mainstream comedy. Their ability to push boundaries while resonating with diverse audiences has left an undeniable mark on the industry.”
Keenen Ivory Wayans created the groundbreaking sketch comedy series In Living Color. That Fox series launched the careers of such Hollywood heavyweights as Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Lopez, while setting new standards for diverse storytelling. Wayans won a Primetime Emmy in 1990 as an executive producer of that series, which was voted outstanding variety music or comedy series. Wayans received six nominations for his work on that show. His brother Damon Wayans received four.
By visiting the NAACP Image Awards’ website, the public can vote to determine the winners in select categories. NAACP will recognize winners in non-televised categories virtually on Tuesday, Feb. 18, and Wednesday, Feb. 19, on its YouTube channel and at the 56th NAACP Image Awards Creative Honors Friday, Feb. 21.
Cynthia Erivo, Keke Palmer, Kendrick Lamar, Kevin Hart and Shannon Sharpe are competing for entertainer of the year. GloRilla received the most nominations in the music/recording categories, with six, followed by Doechii, Lamar and Usher, with four nods each. RCA Records received 11 nominations, the most among record labels.