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On The Tonight Show Tuesday (March 11), Sting and Shaggy explained the current tumultuous state of the United States economy the best way they know how: through song. In a hilarious segment on the episode, the duo answered host Jimmy Fallon’s questions about the Donald Trump administration’s financial policies with lyrics from their own songs. […]
Venezuelan singer-songwriter Joaquina has signed a global publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music, the company tells Billboard. This marks her first worldwide administration agreement since her best new artist win at the Latin Grammys in 2023, which made her the youngest act to win that category at age 19. “I believe a huge part of […]
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Yung Miami and Sean “Diddy” Combs were involved in a brief but intense romantic situation that observers openly coveted and applauded for the unattached way the pair carried their union and their openness about sex. After Yung Miami famously stated on her show that she was a fan of “golden showers,” the rapper and podcast host has since walked back that stance in a new interview.
Yung Miami was a guest on Stepping into the Shade Room with host Thembi Mawema, and the pair discussed a number of topics related to her career, her recent birthday celebration, and, of course, all things involving her former group, the City Girls.
Mawema, flipping the script, asked the “Rap Freaks” star some scandalous questions in a version of Miami’s Resha Roulette game and was questioned about the infamous moment in 2023 on Caresha Please with Trina where she expressed a love for “watersports.” However, it looks like Caresha was just poddin’ and talking mess.
‘I always go back to that interview and say, ‘Why the fuck did I say that?’” Miami says. She added, “I’m the type of person that’s like that. Like, I say some sh*t and then I’m just like, ‘What?’ I have a bubbly personality. I can tell y’all a thousand times, English, Spanish, and French [that] no man has ever peed on me.”
Last year, Miami clarified that she didn’t let Diddy perform a golden shower on her. However, the chatter persisted all the same.
Check out the full Yung Miami interview with Stepping into the Shade Room below. Hop to the 52-minute mark to see the comments mentioned above.
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Photo: Getty
Drake has always been one to keep his eye on the pulse of music, and now, he’s showing love to an emerging pop star. The 6 God shouted out Gracie Abrams on his Instagram Story on Tuesday (March 11), which had social media buzzing.
Drizzy spotlighted Abrams’ “I Knew It, I Know You” from the singer’s sophomore album, The Secret of Us, and more specifically, the beat switch that he was feeling.
“[GOAT]’d beat switch on this,” he wrote. “Second half is [sad emoji, brain exploding emoji, blue heart emoji].”
Fans had plenty to say about the idea of Drake and Gracie aligning after seeing him praise the guitar-driven 2024 tune produced by Aaron Dessner.
“Well, at least he has good taste in music,” one person wrote to X. Another chimed in, “We live in the timeline where DRAKE posts about GRACIE ABRAMS!”
The OVO faithful have also found their way to the “I Knew It, I Know You” music video and flooded the comments section.
Drake has been showing love to the pop stars in recent weeks, as he shouted out fellow Canadian Tate McRae as well as Charli XCX on $ome $exy $ongs 4 U track “Small Town Fame.”
“B—h, I feel like Tate McRae/ Puttin’ Charli up her nose, X on her tongue, she been geekin’ hard/ She done had a Brat summer,” he raps.
Abrams released her The Secret of Us album last June. The 25-year-old’s sophomore LP peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and was Billboard‘s No. 16 album on our 50 Best Albums of 2024 list.
See Drake’s Instagram Story below.
https://twitter.com/chriscznn/status/1899614961288016211
Little Monsters everywhere are loving Lady Gaga‘s latest album Mayhem, but in a new interview, Mother Monster revealed that one of the most talked-about songs on the record almost didn’t make it into the final product.
Appearing on Las Culturistas With Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, Gaga revealed to the pair that she almost removed late-album standout “How Bad Do U Want Me” from the Mayhem tracklist. “Oh my god, I almost didn’t put that on the album,” she told the hosts. “I was not sure that I should put that on the record, and Michael [Polansky, her fiancé] was like, ‘You have to — your fans are going to love that song.’”
When both Rogers and Yang expressed their dismay at the thought of “How Bad” being cut, Gaga revealed that it’s not the only beloved pop song of hers to nearly get the axe. “Sometimes, when things are really super pop, I just get a weird reaction [to them],” she said. “I felt this way about [The Fame‘s] ‘Just Dance,’ so thank God I didn’t listen to myself then.”
In explaining “How Bad,” Gaga broke down how she’s always felt pigeonholed as “the bad girl” throughout her life, and how she wanted to break that cycle in her current relationship. “I’ve always been at war with this feeling that, if I am interested in someone, they’re actually longing for a ‘good girl,’ but they’re stuck with me,” she said. “There is no actual other good girl, the good girl is in their head, and they’re kind of comparing me the whole time.”
Elsewhere in the wide-ranging interview, Gaga, Rogers and Yang talked about the importance of Saturday Night Live as an institution for both up-and-coming artists and pop stars. In fact, Gaga revealed that before her hilarious performance of “D–k in a Box” with Andy Samberg at the SNL50 concert, she felt a lot of pressure to get it right.
“It’s so funny, at the SNL50 concert the other night, I was nervous to do ‘D–k in a Box,’” she said. “I feel like, if you’re a comedian, being asked to do ‘Who’s on First?’ is probably really [nerve-wracking], and to me, ‘D–k in a Box’ is a classic. So I was like, ‘Oh my god, why did I do this?’ But as I was walking through [Radio City Music Hall], I remembered the last time I had been there was with Tony [Bennett]. And Tony would have said, ‘If you are nervous, it’s because you care.’”
Check out Gaga’s full episode of Las Culturistas below:
A federal judge has dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by R. Kelly’s former assistant against Netflix and Lifetime over how she was portrayed in the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly,” ruling that the networks are protected by the First Amendment.
The lawsuit from Diana Copeland, who says she worked for Kelly for more than a decade, claimed that the doc series “depicts her in a sinister and defamatory light” – including falsely suggesting that she had helped the now-convicted singer prey on young women.
But in a ruling Tuesday, Judge Stephanos Bibas said Copeland had failed to clear the “high bar” for filing libel cases over newsworthy subjects: “The First Amendment demands ‘adequate breathing space’ for the free flow of ideas, especially about public figures on matters of public controversy.”
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The judge dismissed the lawsuit, but gave Copeland a chance to refile an updated version of her lawsuit. In a statement to Billboard, her attorney said she would successfully do so: “In this new streaming world, platforms like Netflix and documentarians need to be held accountable for any damages caused to people by slander in their content.”
An attorney for Lifetime and Netflix did not immediately return a request for comment.
Released in early 2019 as a six-part documentary series, “Surviving R. Kelly” helped push the longstanding abuse allegations against Kelly back into the public eye. Later that same year, the singer was indicted by federal prosecutors on a slew of criminal charges, eventually resulting in convictions on racketeering, sex trafficking and child pornography and decades-long prison sentences.
Copeland sued last year, with her attorneys claiming that episodes of the Lifetime documentary, which was later added to Netflix’s catalog, “paint Ms. Copeland as Mr. Kelly’s co-conspirator and accomplice in victimizing children and young women.”
But in Tuesday’s decision dismissing those claims, Judge Bibas ruled that Copeland was a so-called public figure — a status that makes it very hard to win a defamation lawsuit.
Under landmark U.S. Supreme Court rulings, someone like Copeland must show that Lifetime acted with “actual malice,” meaning the network either knew its claims were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. That difficult-to-meet standard is designed to prevent government officials, business execs and other powerful people from abusing libel suits to stifle free speech.
Copeland had argued that she was no celebrity and simply wanted to “lead a private life” despite her work for Kelly. But Judge Bibas pointed out that she had appeared on Good Morning America to discuss the allegations and defend her conduct: “By going on national TV to discuss Kelly, Copeland voluntarily injected herself into the public discourse [and] invited public attention, comment, and criticism.”
As a public figure, the judge said Copeland’s case would only succeed if she could show “actual malice” – and he said had not done so in her court filings.
“The actual-malice standard shields publishers from liability for mistakes, while still preserving defamation remedies where the publisher knew that he was publishing falsehoods or deliberately ignored the truth,” the judge wrote. “Copeland fails to clear that high bar. The complaint offers only conclusions and speculation of ill will, not allegations of actual malice.”
For similar reasons, the judge also tossed out other allegations of the case, including that the documentary inflicted emotional distress and misappropriated her name and likeness. But the entire ruling came “without prejudice,” meaning Copeland can refile her case with changes in an effort to fix the problems Judge Bibas identified: “Perhaps Copeland can cure these defects.”
At this point, even Billy Corgan isn’t sure what is real life and what is fantasy. Since the Smashing Pumpkins singer appeared on Howie Mandel’s Does Stuff podcast in November and revealed that his stepmother once told him that comedian Bill Burr might be one of his half-brothers after Mandel accidentally put a photo of the stand-up instead of the rocker, things have gotten progressively weirder.
After the two men were then surprised by Mandel when he had them unexpectedly meet for the first time in person on his pod earlier this year, Corgan, 57, told People magazine that the meet-weird was not a bit, but actually the real thing.
“It was one of those rare moments where I think all three of us really didn’t know where it was going. And you see that, and that’s what makes it sort of interesting,” Corgan said of the episode Mandel dubbed “Family Reunion with Bill Burr & Billy Corgan.”
“There’s enough energy there that that’s why it’s not a bit, because it’s really about confronting something in a way that none of us really knew what that confrontation would lead to, and you see it play out,” he continued. “You see jokes, but you also see kind of like, oh, there’s something there.”
It was so real, in fact, that Corgan said some close friends still ask him about the interaction, and ask for receipts. “A really good friend of mine said to me, looking around, ‘Okay, now tell me the truth.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think we’re related,’” Corgan said. “And then my friend said, ‘Well, I think you are.’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess it’s possible because he really does look like my father in a way that’s almost shocking to me.’ So then my friend goes, ‘Well then get a DNA test.’”
While Corgan has heard stories about his late musician father — William Corgan, who died in 2021 — allegedly having a number of children out of wedlock, the rocker said one of the intriguing things about the potential mid-life reveal of a half-brother in 56-year-old fellow chrome dome Burr is that there is no definitive answer for now.
“It’s taken on a life of its own. It’s sort of strange,” Corgan said. “It really started from honest things, which are, my father may have fathered 12 other children, and the facts of Bill’s life actually do match the story that I was told. There’s no invention there.”
Burr was audibly and visibly upset by the unannounced family reunion, lambasting his longtime friend Mandel, and almost walking out of the interview in protest. “He’s bringing it here, not because he’s trying to heal the bulls–t that we went through growing up. He’s getting here just for the f–king ratings,” Burr said of Mandel during the awkward appearance.
Mandel did eventually leave the room and the two men traded stories about the man they both described as their dad, though Burr initially was not able to let go of his anger about the surprise. Asking what Mandel thought was going to happen, Burr wondered, “Are we going to play catch? We’re both in our 50s!”
Mandel later apologized for the unexpected bit, saying on a subsequent pod, “I feel horrible and I’m sorry, Bill. I’m sorry, Billy. I only tried to do something good,” noting that at that point in early February he had not heard a “peep” from his longtime friend Burr.
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