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Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” has earned an eighth consecutive week at No. 1 on the U.K. Singles Chart (May 9). The last single to earn this feat was Sabrina Carpenter’s “Taste,” which reigned at the top for nine consecutive weeks beginning in August 2024. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and […]
Pink Floyd have scored their first No. 1 LP in over a decade on the U.K.’s Official Albums Chart with live album Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII (May 9).
The collection coincides with a digital 4K remastering of the 1972 concert film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, directed by Adrian Maben, which captures the band’s iconic show at the Roman amphitheatre in the ruins of Pompeii, Italy. The film’s audio was newly mixed by Steven Wilson and released across physical formats and on streaming.
The prog rock icons now have seven chart-toppers on the U.K. charts, Atom Heart Mother (1970), Wish You Were Here (1975), The Final Cut (1983), The Division Bell (1994), Pulse (Live) (1995) and The Endless River (2014). Their magnum opus, Dark Side of the Moon (1973), only hit No. 2. The feat now ties them with Blur, Kasabian, Barbara Streisand, George Michael, Muse, The Prodigy and Paul McCartney (solo) on the all-time list of acts who have landed seven No. 1s.
In its 37th week on the charts, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet rises back up to No. 2, and Ed Sheeran’s +-=÷× (Tour Collection) lifts to No. 3 following the announcement of an upcoming eighth studio album, Play.
On Thursday (May 8), Sheeran shared the music video to nostalgic single “Old Phone,” which saw him revisit formative moments throughout his career as a musician. He also launched a new Instagram page showcasing never-before-seen pictures with musician pals Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and more.
Greatest hits collections by Fleetwood Mac (Don’t Stop, No. 5) and The Weeknd (The Highlights, No. 4) round out the top five. Alex Warren, whose single “Ordinary” is now in its eighth week at No. 1 on the Singles chart, enters the top 10 of the Albums Chart for the first time with debut LP You’ll Be Alright, Kid (Chapter 1).
Ye (formerly Kanye West) continues to be in hot water after attempting to release his highly controversial song “Heil Hitler.” After being yanked down by streaming services and DSPs on Thursday (May 8), CEO of Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jim Berk, shared a statement to Billboard, voicing his dismay and disappointment in the mercurial MC.
“Kanye West’s release of a song entitled ‘Heil Hitler’ on VE Day, the anniversary of the defeat of the Nazi regime, is hate speech, pure and simple—totally in line with the despicable messages we now expect from West,” said Berk.
Berk’s frustration didn’t stop there, as he directed his attention to Elon Musk’s social media platform X, for enabling such vitriol to be spewed by Ye and others.
“But his partner in spreading dangerous vitriol against Jews is X, which is allowing flagrant violation of its own rules reading, ‘You may not directly attack other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.’”
He continued: “We call on X to remove West from its platform and for other platforms and distributors to refuse to host or monetize this song. There must be a clear line when it comes to glorification of genocidal regimes, particularly to millions of young people.”
After experiencing failed attempts on DSPs, West uploaded the song to SoundCloud, where it was later pulled down as well. This prompted Ye to share his thoughts on X.
“Heil Hitler by Ye has been banned by all digital streaming platforms,” Ye wrote. “While Rednecks by Randy Newman remains streamable They’re literally keeping the n—-s down.” Previously teased by Ye, “Heil Hitler” had terse subject matter ranging from the rapper’s nitrous usage to custody issues over his four children with ex-wife Kim Kardashian.
Billboard reached out to Ye’s camp for comment.
Legendary house label Trax Records has dropped its first vinyl release in a decade. The project is a six-track compilation called Rising Again and features the work French duo Jacques x Gregory, American house producer Joe Smooth, KushGad, Spada, ThadX and veteran house producer and Trax affiliate Screamin’ Rachael. Five hundred copies of Rising Again […]
Lola Young’s “Messy” moves up two spots to No. 1 on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart (dated May 17). The song tops a second individual-format radio ranking, after it led Alternative Airplay for a week in April. “Messy,” on Day One/Island Records and promoted to radio by Republic, becomes just the sixth song by a solo […]
When John Cena dropped his 2005 debut album, You Can’t See Me, critics wondered if the wrestling powerhouse had more brawn than bars. What began as a perceived gimmick evolved into a two-decade-long run, marked by unfiltered charisma, sharp wit and unshakeable confidence. Sure, his popularity and in-ring dominance made him box office gold, but when he unleashed his mic skills — especially over Jake One’s soulful beats — Cena cemented himself as the godfather of the rap-wrestling crossover.
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Released on May 10, 2005, You Can’t See Me — a collaboration with his cousin, fellow rapper TradeMarc — debuted at No. 15 on the Billboard 200, also reaching No. 3 on Top Rap Albums — proof Cena had real appeal on the mic. Even while locking up with heavyweights like Triple H, Randy Orton, and The Undertaker each week, Cena carried that same grit and resilience into the booth. On tracks like “Just Another Day” and “If It All Ended Tomorrow,” Cena’s raw candor and introspection made him surprisingly easy to root for. As he raps on the latter: “You the new kid, now you gettin’ some shine/ When every vet sayin’ that it’s not yo’ time/ My hustle is non-stop and it’s not yo’ grind/ Plus I hear very clear, I’m not so blind.”
And though Cena was dubbed WWE’s Superman, his rap heroics on You Can’t See Me became every critic’s kryptonite. His bravado and swagger leglocked the doubters into submission. The album’s title track became his armor — its hook both a taunt and a shield — as he swatted away skepticism with a single phrase: “You can’t see me.” The song became both a gift and a curse: a champion’s anthem and rallying cry, but also a punchline for detractors who turned it into an easy jab, diminishing Cena even as he continued to dominate.
Now on his final lap as a professional wrestler, Cena’s recent partnership with Travis Scott — rap’s latest generational leader — speaks volumes about his influence across both arenas. WWE is in the midst of a renaissance, with pop culture once again reinvigorated by its presence. Hip-hop’s footprint in the ring is larger than ever: WaleMania just celebrated its 10th anniversary at WrestleMania, while wrestlers like Montez Ford and Trick Williams proudly showcase their rap chops with original music, and genre superstars like Drake, Metro Boomin, Lil Yachty, and Quavo now flood wrestling arenas with the same fervor and excitement as the everyday diehards beside them. Much of this stems from Cena’s early efforts to meld both worlds — what began as a desperate bid to save his WWE career ended up bridging a gap between music and wrestling, one that remains tightly connected to this day.
And while we may never get another album from the 48-year-old multi-hyphenate, You Can’t See Me still deserves a spin — for everything it gave to hip-hop, wrestling, and pop culture at large.
She’s got a bit of a potty mouth, so when Ashley Cooke released a track titled “the f word,” her friends weren’t particularly surprised.
“I have the mouth of a sailor,” she says, “so [that title] didn’t really bother me, because it was just so brilliant. And I love that it was something that caught your attention off the bat. In today’s world with music, I feel like you kind of have to push the boundaries a little bit and do something that maybe shocks people and makes people curious.”
The phrase “the f word” is designed to hide a term that makes some folks uncomfortable. Oddly enough, “the f word” didn’t follow its inspiration to the letter, because “f” wasn’t the initial plan.
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“I had written ‘The B Word’ down on my phone,” songwriter Emily Weisband (“If I Die Before You,” “Looking For You”) remembers. “I was talking to my friend one day, and she was like, ‘Could you see him being my boyfriend?’ I was like, ‘Ooh, you said the B word, dirty mouth.’ I just made a joke about it, so I wrote ‘The B Word’ down in my phone. And then as I thought about the idea more, I said, ‘You know, ‘the f word’ might be a little cooler, a little more potent.’”
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Weisband had a Zoom writing appointment on Oct. 30, 2021, with Lori McKenna (“Humble and Kind,” “Girl Crush”) and Gordie Sampson (“Jesus, Take The Wheel,” “God, Your Mama, And Me”), and she suggested writing “the f word.”
Zoom presents some co-writing challenges, so under the circumstances, some F bombs were definitely dropped. “I’m gonna say just a couple – maybe 55, 60,” Sampson jokes.
The title looks like a novelty, so an uptempo song seems obvious. They took an unexpected turn, and wrote “the f word” as a ballad. “I love the juxtaposition sometimes when it’s a sad song that is upbeat, or a happy song that’s slow,” Weisband says. “I think that can be a really beautiful ‘art’ thing sometimes, so I kind of felt, because the title was a little gimmicky, [we should] balance that out.”
The thing was, the payoff line for “the f word” would be a surprise. Listeners would certainly expect the song to use a swear word, based on the title. But the writers had a different F word in mind. The goal was to tease the listener a bit, hinting at the implied four-letter term while introducing clues to the song’s actual F expression.
“I try not to swear” became the opening line, and they kept that first verse short, using just six lines until they got to the end of the pre-chorus: “I should wash my mouth out with soap.”
“If you, the listener, have granted us that you’re going to click on this, we owe it to you to keep you there and get to the point right off the top, instead of dilly-dallying and making them wait,” Sampson says.
“I said the F word in front of your mama” – the opening of the chorus – was dramatic enough, and they unwittingly dropped in a “what the hell” in the third line, before they finally got to the F word: “I’d probably spend forever with you.”
“Forever” may work in fairytales, but it often scares men away. And the singer in “the f word” keeps using it – she says it “in front of your sister” in the second chorus, and at “4 in the morning” in the third. Since the guy is still there, the risky “forever” word paid off.
Matching the surprise lyric, they stocked “the f word” with a couple of surprise chords at key moments. Sampson created a demo after everyone left Zoom, and a few weeks later, Weisband applied an almost-dreamy lead vocal. “We used a very mellow, reverbed-out, clean guitar in the background to stay out of the way of the lyric,” Sampson says. “We had to make a lot of space in the track for the lyrics, so that it would be out front and very present, so you could hopefully get reeled into it.”
A number of artists liked it, but “the f word” hung around unrecorded until Weisband emailed it among several songs to Cooke on Aug. 28, 2024. The title intrigued Cooke, and the “forever in front of your mama” line nailed it; Cooke had once made the mistake of telling her boyfriend’s mother over sushi that he had changed his mind and was ready to get married – before he was ready for his mom to know.
“He looked at me like I was a psycho person,” Cooke recalls. “I heard the song, and it took me immediately back to my sushi restaurant.”
Cooke performed it live for the first time during a Feb. 19 date at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl, with Weisband singing harmony, and she cut it with producer Dann Huff (Keith Urban, Rascal Flatts) before heading to Australia in March. Huff kept the spirit of the demo, though he turned the guitar background into a subtly morphing sound, the tones shifting indiscernibly from Derek Wells’ atmospheric guitar into Alex Wright’s glassy keyboards into Justin Schipper’s tangy steel. Jerry Roe snuck into the arrangement gradually, and Jenee Fleenor applied shimmering fiddle to a couple of spots, emulating a string quartet in the second verse.
“To me, there’s a dance to this song,” Huff says. “Jenee studied classical music when she was young, so she has the repertoire… She can be as bluegrass as she can be classical. That’s kind of where we went with this thing.”
Huff felt the track needed a fourth chorus, allowing them to repeat “I said the F word in front of your mama.” Cooke had her doubts, but they cut both options, and once she saw live audiences attempting to repeat the “mama” line when they sang along, she agreed with Huff. “We let it sit and marinate, and came back to it, and she chose that [extra chorus],” Huff says. “I’m glad she did, because I think it’s the right way to do it.”
Will Weatherly produced her lead vocal, and the final product turns a title that initially looks edgy into a sweet moment that feels, as Cooke says, “like ‘90s rom-coms.”
Big Loud released “the f word” to digital service providers on April 18, but there’s a chance it could go to radio. Programmers have responded well, recognizing that it lets adults in on the joke while keeping it clean for kids.
“It seems controversial, but it’s not,” Cooke says. “I’ve heard from a lot of program directors [who say] when the title comes across their dashboard, [fans] are curious, and so it makes them want to turn it up and listen to what’s happening. And when they hear it, there’s no profanity or negativity in the song. So it’s actually the best thing for them, because it catches attention without having to worry about the viewership and the age groups. It’s a really cool thing. We’ll see what happens.”
Behold, a new offering. In the last five years, an enigmatic rock band named Sleep Token has bent metal to its will. Emerging from the pandemic shadows of 2020, the masked group quickly established itself as an amorphous entity, syncing guttural screams with pop melodies, hip-hop drums and reggaetón grooves to the growing curiosity of […]
It’s hard to imagine Shakira‘s discography without the 2006 smash hit “Hips Don’t Lie,” but according to the star, the song very nearly didn’t come out when it did.
In an interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show Thursday (May 8), Shakira recalled having to plead with her record label to release the now-iconic Wyclef Jean collaboration on a reissue of her album Oral Fixation, Vol. 2, even though the original LP was already out on store shelves. “I remember my album was already distributed, and then this idea came up, and Wyclef and I met,” she began, noting that she’d had a prophetic dream about the Haitian rapper just before he reached out asking to work with her.
“This song came about,” she continued. “I knew I had a hit, so I called Donny Ienner, who was in charge at the time of [Sony Music Label Group U.S.], and I said, ‘Donny, you have to pick up the albums from the stores.’ He was like, ‘No way, this album is already out there.’ I was like, ‘You’ve got to believe me. You’ve got to trust me. You do that, we have a hit.’”
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To great reward, Shakira’s team ended up doing just that. Released in February 2006 on a repackaged version of Oral Fixation, Vol. 2, the track would ascend to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and spend two weeks at No. 1, marking the four-time Grammy winner’s best performance on the chart to date. As Shakira put it to Fallon, “It changed my story.”
Shakira’s sit-down chat with the late night host comes just two days after she and Jean reunited on The Tonight Show to perform “Hips Don’t Lie” in celebration of its 20-year anniversary. She’s currently gearing up to embark on the United States leg of her Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour, which kicks off May 13 in Charlotte, N.C., following a run of Latin America dates earlier this year.
Just last year, however, Shakira gave fans a taste of what’s to come when performed a surprise concert in Times Square in March 2024 for 40,000 fans. The show was truly something to behold, but according to the “She Wolf” singer, she thought it would be a complete failure in the hours leading up to it.
“The funny thing is I was so scared to do that performance, because I thought people were not going to show up,” she told Fallon on Thursday. “We announced it, like, two hours before the appearance, and half an hour before the appearance, I just saw cars. I was peeking through the window, I was so scared, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is the end of my career.’ And then in the last 20 minutes, it was a sea of people.”
Watch Shakira’s full interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon above.
Fat Joe and Jadakiss have a new podcast called Joe & Jada where they talk about all things music, sports, and culture. On their recently released premiere episode, the two rap legends — who’ve seen their fair share of rap beef — talked about the one-year anniversary of the kick-off of the historic rap battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake.
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Jada started things off by clarifying that what went down wasn’t exactly “beef,” and that he couldn’t believe that it’s been a whole year already. “One year since the Kendrick and Drake discrepancy. What they like to call it ‘beef’ in the media world,” Jada quipped. “Thank God nothing really happened to anybody, physically. Personally, I thought it was about four or five months ago. I can’t believe it’s already been a year.”
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Joey Crack couldn’t believe that it’s been a year either, and then sparked a light debate between the two when he said he noticed that Lamar gets more airplay than other West Coast legends did in their prime. ‘Kiss fired back by saying, “Everybody from L.A. gets spins on L.A. radio.”
Joe then asked him when was the last time Jadakiss was out there, with both of them saying they were recently in L.A. and Joe adding, “Yo, bro, I never seen nothing like this. Every single song, they like, ‘Turn the TV off,” causing Jada to agree that Kenny does indeed get a lot of spin in Southern California.
“It’s a fact. Kendrick Lamar gets played nine out of every 10 songs in L.A. right now,” the Bronx rapper proclaimed. “Not even Snoop Dogg, not even Tupac Shakur — nobody from L.A. has dominated the paint like this guy. That last year? What they’re doing in L.A. — if you’re from L.A., you probably think there’s only one guy on Earth, Kendrick Lamar. I’m just keeping it a buck with you. You turn on that radio in L.A. — if you from L.A., you work at Target, Amazon, you’re delivering some s–t, you working at the bakery, panadería, wherever, East L.A., holmes — you thinking it’s one man breathing in hip-hop, it’s called Kendrick Lamar.”
Joe then shifted the conversation to rap beef in today’s landscape, asking the Yonkers MC what he thinks about historic hip-hop battles. “For me, I thought it was always good if you take it all the back to Wild Style and LL and Kool Moe Dee and all the way up to us and 50,” he began. “It’s always good as long as it stays on wax. “When it first started, somebody say something about you, you gotta go to the studio, you gotta immediately work on getting one back at there, knock the stick off your shoulders like a fight after school at three o’clock. Now, as the technology evolved, it turns into movie skits, animations, retrieving fake information… It got a little wacky for me. I like it to be beats and rhymes and keep it like that. Once it got out of my pay grade, it’s a little bit of disinterest to me because it’s turning political now.”
Fat Joe agreed about things getting political and brought up Drake’s controversial UMG lawsuit. “There’s even lawsuits behind rap diss records now. I never saw that,” he said, to which Manteca Jada replied, “That’s over my head, I don’t really understand… I just wanna see rhymes and song and hip-hop s–t.”
You can watch the full episode below.
