State Champ Radio Music
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CCM singer Brandon Lake recently surprised his “Hard Fought Hallelujah” collaborator Jelly Roll with some stellar news about their hit collab. In a video he shared on Instagram on June 20, Lake surprised Jelly Roll with a plaque commemorating that “Hard Fought Hallelujah” had been certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), […]
Trying to keep track of every one of Nick Cannon‘s 12 children is a difficult task for most — and apparently, it’s not particularly easy for Cannon himself.
During an appearance on The Really Good Podcast with host Bobbi Althoff, Cannon was asked to list out each of his 12 children’s names. The actor and host told Althoff “I usually get in trouble” when trying to name each of his kids, but proceeded to try his best.
“I’ll lay them all out for you, keep me honest. There’s ‘Roc, ‘Roe, Golden, Powerful, Rise, Onyx, Legendary, Zion, Zillion, Zen,” he said, before trailing off. “See this is where … How many [are left?]”
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In the spirit of keeping him honest, Cannon named Moroccan and Monroe, the twins he had with Mariah Carey; Golden Sagon, Powerful Queen and Rise Messiah with Brittany Bell; Onyx Ice Cole with LaNisha Cole; Legendary Love with Bre Tiesi; twins Zion Mixolydian and Zillion Heir with Abby De La Rosa; and the late Zen with Alyssa Scott.
The only two kids Cannon missed in his list were his two latest children: Beautiful Zeppelin, who he had with De La Rosa; and Halo Marie, who he had with Scott.
Elsewhere on the podcast, Cannon explained to Althoff why he has so many children, with the Drumline star saying that he has what he calls a “king complex” when it comes to procreation. “You know, Black men, we always be like, ‘What’s up king?’ I really think I’m the king,” he said, before explaining to Althoff that kings of the past would have lots of children to “enlarge their territory.”
Watch a clip from Cannon’s interview below:
Lizzo is feeling “Good as Hell” these days, and she’s not shy about sharing how she’s lost weight. In a wide-ranging interview with podcaster Trisha Paytas on the Just Trish podcast episode that dropped Thursday (June 19), the star opened up about the various ways she’s tried to get in shape — including weight-loss drugs.
“Wooooooohoooooo! I feel like I worked really really hard, and was intentional with what I did with my body,” the singer said when Paytas asked her how she felt about her weight loss. “So when I get compliments … I really receive it. … I don’t take it any weird way because I tried to do this.”
When the podcaster noted that she thinks Ozempic would be the only way she herself could lose weight, Lizzo confirmed that she has tried the drug. “I’ve tried everything,” the four-time Grammy winner shared. “It’s just the science for me. Calories in vs. calories out. Ozempic works because you eat less food — it makes you feel full. So if you can just do that on your own and get mind over matter, it’s the same!”
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But ultimately, it wasn’t Ozempic — which is a diabetes medication used off-label to help with weight loss — that helped Lizzo lose weight. It was changing her diet. “What did it for me was … well, actually, was not being vegan, ’cause when I was vegan, I was consuming a lot of fake meats,” she shared. “I was eating a lot of bread. I was eating a lot of rice, and I had to eat a lot of it to stay full, but really I was consuming, like, 3,000 to 5,000 calories a day.”
The star — who has been open about her weight-loss journey and has shared videos of herself working out and eating healthy — explained that she was vegetarian for about 10 years, and moved on to a vegan diet in 2020, before giving it up in 2023. “So for me, when I started actually eating whole foods and eating, like, beef and chicken and fish, like, I was actually full and not expanding my stomach by putting a lot of fake things in there that wasn’t actually filling me up,” she shared.
Lizzo continued by noting that it was a trip to Japan that had her start to eat meat again. “I heard the Japanese diet is the healthiest diet in the world, so I was there and I was like, ‘I’m going to try the food here,’ and my body was so happy. My body was like, ‘More, more please!’”
While adding meat back to her diet helped Lizzo on her weight-loss journey, she emphasized that just because it worked for her, doesn’t mean it’ll work for everyone. “I don’t like to tell people too much about releasing weight, like what I did. I don’t want people to do what I did and it doesn’t work for them. Everybody’s body’s different!” she said. “I don’t know what your bloodwork is like. I don’t know how your body breaks down food, sugar. I don’t know. But I know for me, I just had to start eating meat again.”
Watch Lizzo’s interview on the Just Trish podcast above. The discussion about weight loss begins a little after six minutes in.
When Morgan Wallen’s I’m the Problem tour kicks off Friday (June 20) at Houston’s NRG Stadium, all eyes will be looking to see if he continues his trend of walking out to the stage with local pro athletes. It’s become a highlight of the shows and the walk outs — broadcast on the venue’s jumbotrons […]
Kacey Musgraves is recuperating after sustaining an injury from a fall while in Mexico. In a post to Instagram Stories on Friday (June 20), Musgraves shared an image of an x-ray shot of her ribs. She wrote over the image, “Sooo I’m in Mexico with a f—in’ broken rib. Wednesday night it was raining and […]
Since blasting onto the scene with his breakthrough hit “Beautiful Things,” Benson Boone has become the internet’s favorite punching bag. But instead of trying to prove them wrong, the singer decided to lean in with his latest music video.
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On Friday (June 20), Boone dropped the tongue-in-cheek music video for his new song “Mr. Electric Blue,” off his just-released LP American Heart. From the start of the clip, Boone goes out of his way to play with all the worst things the internet has to say about him when he walks into “Industry Plant Records” wearing a t-shirt that simply says “one hit wonder” for a frank conversation with his sleazy agent (played by his frequent songwriting collaborator Jack LaFrantz).
“Have you not been on the internet? Everything is terrible, Benson! We put all of our money into ‘moonbeam ice cream’ and the backflip, and it’s done absolutely horrible,” LaFrantz’s character tells an exasperated Boone. He informs the singer that he owes his faux label $10 million, and suggests that he find “a new gimmick” like “good songwriting.” At the suggestion, Boone deflates: “You know I can’t do that.”
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What ensues is a madcap montage, where Boone takes as many odd jobs as he can to raise the money. He walks dogs (while wearing another T-shirt that says “”), mows lawns (for a company called “Auto-Tune Trimmers”), washes cars (with bumper stickers declaring “mustaches are lame”) sells his sparkly jumpsuits and even opens a moonbeam ice cream truck. Of course, that still doesn’t stop the criticism from coming — when he’s recognized by a little girl as “the guy who sings ‘Beautiful Things,’” she quickly humbles him: “Your music is terrible.”
For his hustling and hard work, Boone makes a grand total of $168, but begs LaFrantz’s agent to give him another chance. But his agent assures him that he found a better solution, saying he “sold your entire catalog to retail chains, fast food chains and movie theaters,” promising that “you’ll be the most overplayed artist in the world, and I’ll be rich.” A dejected Boone sighs and smiles, saying “that’s all I’ve ever wanted,” before celebrating his ubiquity.
It’s far from the first time Boone has commented on the way people perceive him. The singer posted a TikTok back in April, explaining that he could understand people not liking him or his music if there were more people offering concrete reasons for their distaste. “I just read a comment that said ‘idek why I hate Benson Boone but it feels right,’” he wrote on the video. “Like WHAT!!? how am I supposed to improve after reading that? At least say something valid like ‘he low key just flips everywhere can he [do] anything else?’”
Watch the full video for Boone’s “Mr. Electric Blue” above.
There’s no question that Broadway‘s Hamilton was (and still is) one of the most engrossing musicals on the Great White Way, but according to an original cast member, Madonna herself had other things to focus on. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news During his Thursday (June 19) appearance […]
06/20/2025
Simply the best new dance tracks of the week.
06/20/2025
Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill have been playing music together for some 48 years, most of them in Simple Minds. Kerr assures us that familiarity has bred fondness; he even says the “parallel story” in the band’s 2023 documentary Everything Is Possible is “the friendship of Charlie and I, which is quite remarkable because usually in long-working relationships in music people hate each other after 20 years. But Charlie and I still go on. There’s a great friendship there.”
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Despite that, Kerr tells Billboard that it’s not always a lovefest between frontman and guitarist, either, as Simple Minds is in the midst of its first full-scale North American tour in seven years. “We’re still able to have our rows and our fights. We’re not always on the same page,” Kerr acknowledges, adding with a laugh that, “We had a screaming match last week and everyone around us…. First of all they said, ‘I’ve never heard such a f–kin’ intense screaming match,’ so afterwards Charlie and I felt embarrassed. Y’know, usually it’s not even (about) a thing. You’re not on the same page, and it’s frustrating. Someone will just say the wrong word, and it triggers.
“But here’s the good news; at the end of the day there’s no scars, no wounds. We get up the next day and everything is fine. How amazing that we’re still so passionate about it. How amazing that we still care. How amazing we’re in the rehearsal room, trying to make it as great as it can be for our audience, and how amazing the next day we go to breakfast with each other.”
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During its current trek, whose U.S. leg wraps up Saturday (June 22 in Noblesville, Ind.), Kerr, Churchill and the latest incarnation of Simple Minds have been supporting their new concert album — Live in the City of Diamonds, which came out in April — and the 40th anniversary of an eventful 1985 that included: the Billboard Hot 100-topping single “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” from the hit film The Breakfast Club; a performance at Live Aid that summer; and the band’s best-selling studio album, Once Upon a Time, which came out that fall.
“It was beautiful,” Kerr recalls. “It was so unexpected in a sense. You had the movie, you had the song, Live Aid, MTV, ‘Alive & Kicking’ [a No. 3 Hot 100 hit], the Once Upon a Time album itself…and lo and behold, 40 years later we’re still here talking about it. That’s what 1985 felt like to us.”
Simple Minds was famously ambivalent about recording “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” which was written by producer Keith Forsey and Steve Schiff for the John Hughes-directed film. The group had already planned to make an aggressive assault on the U.S. market in the wake of its 1984 album Sparkle in the Rain and was confident “we had songs up our sleeve” for what would become Once Upon a Time.
“Then out of nowhere these phone calls start to come in about this movie, and the record company thinks it would be a good thing to bridge to the next album,” Kerr recalls. “We were like, ‘Yeah, we want to do it,’ then ‘Oh, hang on a minute. They want us to record someone else’s song? That’s not what we do; we’re credible artists. We write our own songs, and we’ve got some good ones in the pipeline, so we’re not sure about that.’ But after meeting the people involved we decided to do it.”
The key, Kerr adds, was that his band found a way to make the song its own. “I’m not taking anything away from the song and Keith and the guys who came up with the music. You can find the demo of the song online; it’s a good little song. But Simple Minds, what we brought to it was 10 years of playing live, and we put our heart and soul into it and we put our lifeblood into the record. It would’ve been a different song if OMD did it, or the Psychedelic Furs — it would’ve been a different record, rather. So it’s not our song, but it is our record.”
Simple Minds will follow the North American tour with a jaunt through Europe, starting June 27 at home in Glasgow, where the band plans to play Once Upon a Time in its entirety. That trek wraps up July 27 in Italy, after which Simple Minds plans to return to working on a new studio album — the follow-up to 2022’s Direction of the Heart — which Kerr, Burchill and company began working on before hitting the road.
“We’ve got a whole bunch of songs up our sleeves,” Kerr says. “They’re not finished yet, but the backing tracks are down, the rough mixes. So we’re excited. People might say, ‘What’s the impetus?’ because obviously records don’t sell like they used to and there’s a limited appeal for new stuff no matter whether you’re Bruce Springsteen or whoever you are. But this is who we are. This is what we do. It just goes on. It’s all about creativity and you have it in you and you’ve got to get it out. That’s the same now as it’s ever been, and for us every time you do something new you’re still using those muscles. It’s like a chapter to a book; it seems to refresh the rest of the story and stops you from calcifying.”
Erykah Badu and The Alchemist are really making an album together, and their first single is finally here. Badu and the West Coast producer dropped their new song “Next to You” at midnight after she performed Badu Presents: Echos 19 in her hometown of Dallas as part of Forever in Rotation, Amazon Music’s Juneteenth celebration. […]
