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The 2025 MusiCares Person of the Year event honoring the Grateful Dead is still set for Jan. 31 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, MusiCares announced on Tuesday (Jan. 14). The announcement, first reported in Variety, came one day after the Recording Academy announced that the 67th Grammy Awards were still on for Feb. 2.
Many had expected the Academy to reverse course and postpone the date of the Grammy telecast after all, but the announcement that the top Grammy Week event outside of the telecast is still on gives the impression that the academy is indeed planning to move forward with the show.
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“Your attendance at Persons of the Year and your ongoing generosity will support these continued vital efforts, helping those in urgent need and signaling to the world that this vibrant city is on its feet,” MusiCares said in a statement that it is emailing to Recording Academy members.
“At our upcoming Persons of the Year, we will make a special appeal for donations to support our wildfire relief efforts. We invite you to join us in spreading the word to your friends and family by sharing this link: www.musicares.org/FireRelief.”
In a joint statement on Monday (Jan. 13), Harvey Mason jr., CEO of both the Recording Academy and MusiCares, and Tammy Hurt, the chair of the academy’s board of trustees, suggested that the Feb. 2 show would combine the fund-raising goal and emotional appeals of a telethon with award presentations. “This year’s show, however, will carry a renewed sense of purpose: raising additional funds to support wildfire relief efforts and honoring the bravery and dedication of first responders who risk their lives to protect ours,” they said.
Even before the Grammys announced plans to go on with the show, Lucas Keller, president/founder of Milk & Honey Management, announced that he was canceling Milk & Honey’s popular Grammy party. “It would be tone deaf to celebrate and I hope all other companies will follow suit,” he wrote on his Instagram Story.
Many followed Keller’s lead. Just hours after the Recording Academy announced that it planned to go ahead with the telecast, Universal Music Group (UMG) announced it was canceling all of the company’s Grammy-related events, including its artist showcase and after-Grammy party, and will instead “redirect the resources that would have been used for those events to assist those affected by the wildfires.” Within 24 hours, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment had also canceled their Grammy Week events. And on Tuesday (Jan. 14), BMG announced that it too was canceling its annual pre-Grammy party.
Additionally, many executives not based in Los Angeles expressed concern about taking up hotel rooms that may be needed by evacuees and planned not to attend.
The Recording Academy has yet to announce the host of this year’s Grammys. The announcement was expected last week but has been delayed to avoid stepping on the main news about whether the show was going to proceed or not. The announcement is expected soon.
MusiCares conveyed the news in an email to members on Tuesday (Jan. 14). It appears in full below.
“We hope you and your loved ones are safe. We’re reaching out to assure you that the MusiCares Persons of the Year will take place as planned on Friday, January 31, 2025, at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
“As the devastation unfolds from the wildfires in greater Los Angeles, MusiCares is committed to supporting the impacted music community. When the crisis began, we launched our Fire Relief Effort with a $1 million contribution from the Recording Academy and MusiCares.
“Your attendance at Persons of the Year and your ongoing generosity will support these continued vital efforts, helping those in urgent need and signaling to the world that this vibrant city is on its feet.
“Now more than ever, our mission is critical. For more than three decades, MusiCares has been a steadfast partner to the music industry during times of need, offering aid in response to a variety of disasters. From the Las Vegas Route 91 shooting and the COVID-19 pandemic to Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Helene, the California and Maui wildfires. MusiCares is here to help—no matter the size or scope of the crisis.
“At our upcoming Persons of the Year, we will make a special appeal for donations to support our wildfire relief efforts. We invite you to join us in spreading the word to your friends and family by sharing this link: www.musicares.org/FireRelief
“Thank you for your support during this crucial time. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions. We look forward to coming together for this important cause.
Best regards,
MusiCares
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The report by Special Counsel Jack Smith on Donald Trump’s alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election was released, with many on social media outraged at the findings.
Early Tuesday morning (January 14), the report by Special Counsel Jack Smith on the alleged attempts by Donald Trump to interfere with the results of the 2020 presidential election was released, sending shockwaves as the report rebuked the president-elect for his efforts. “Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” Smith stated in the report.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report painfully reminds us of just how far the conservative justices were willing to go: pic.twitter.com/M6GwQw5Tlf
— Shanlon Wu (@shanlonwu) January 14, 2025
The damning 137-page report explicitly connected Trump to the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, that left five dead and 140 police officers injured, having encouraged “violence against his perceived opponents” after losing the presidential election in 2020 to Joe Biden. Smith also highlighted how Trump and his accomplices, including Rudy Giuliani, attempted to overturn the results in Arizona and Michigan. The report also detailed racist threats made to District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, and how Trump encouraged the isolation of his then-Vice President Mike Pence to compel him not to certify the 2020 results.
Smith wrote that he made the move to quickly indict Trump to not impact the 2024 presidential election. “Because of the Office’s deep familiarity and experience with these policies, it focused on completing both of its investigations promptly and making timely charging decisions, long before the election,” he wrote. Smith resigned as Special Counsel last week, and while the report has been sent to Congress, it’s assured there will be no further action since Republicans control both the House and the Senate. There is a second volume of the report related to the classified documents case against Trump. Still, Attorney General Merrick Garland has opted to wait until the legal proceedings against Trump’s co-defendants have ended.
The report has left many online upset at the evidence against the president-elect, seeing it as justice being denied. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Denise Wheeler, a novelist, laid the blame squarely at Garland’s feet with her post: “Merrick Garland waited until late 2022 to appoint a special counsel to investigate the biggest & most treasonous criminal in our country’s history. Yet it wasn’t until after Trump announced his candidacy that Garland acted. This wasn’t weakness. It was flat-out intentional.”
The 2025 Calibash concert has been rescheduled amid the ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles. Originally scheduled to take place Saturday (Jan. 18) at Crypto.com Arena, the event — presented by SBS Los Angeles, Mega 96.3FM and 97.9FM La Raza — will now take place Friday, March 7. Confirmed artists include Maluma, Wisin, Xavi, Manuel Turizo, Emilia, […]
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Last September, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it would conduct its first federal review of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. On Friday, the DOJ released the findings from its review — only about a century and three and a half years late.
As the Guardian noted, a June 1921 report on the race massacre by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, which preceded the FBI, blamed the attack that killed hundreds and leveled an entire affluent Black neighborhood on Black men and, alleging that the white perpetrators of one of the most notorious white supremacist attacks in American history did not violate any federal laws. (And people say objective journalism is dead. When was there ever objective journalism? Certainly not when white men were the only demographic allowed in the field.) The DOJ’s report, however, acknowledged who the true villains were during the massacre, and that the vicious attack on Black residents by the white mob “was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.”
“The Tulsa race massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings, and locked the survivors in internment camps.”
“Until this day, the justice department has not spoken publicly about this race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa,” the 126-page report was conducted by a team of lawyers and investigators from the Emmett Till Cold Case Unit of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division went on to say. “This report breaks that silence by rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report lays bare new information and shows that the massacre was the result not of uncontrolled mob violence, but of a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood.”
Investigators for the review “spoke with survivors and with descendants of survivors, examined firsthand accounts of the massacre given by individuals who are now deceased, studied primary source materials, spoke to scholars of the massacre and reviewed legal pleadings, books, and scholarly articles relating to the massacre,” the report says. And yet, the living survivors of Tulsa and their descendants have repeatedly been denied reparations for all that they suffered and lost by the state of Oklahoma. They wanted long-overdue restitution, and all they got was a lousy review of what we already knew about the event.
Clarke noted in the review that “there is no living perpetrator for the justice department to prosecute.” So, basically, no reparations, no justice, only a century-late document confirming that what happened actually happened.
But that’s America for ya.
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I might swerve and bend that corner whoaaaa. LiAngelo Ball has had the streets on fire with his 2005 Nelly, Country Grammar resurrection song, ‘Tweaker’. Once Gelo hopped on the streamer, Neon’s show, and previewed the song he instantly had the internet in a frenzy. Through all the memes, there was an audience that actually enjoyed the song. The nostalgia of it, and the triple layering of his vocals gave a Chamillionaire – esk feel to it.
Hot 107.9’s DJ Holiday, Devin Steel, & The Morning Hustle’s Kyle Santillian broke down why people on the internet went from trolling the song to actually enjoying it:
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Now that the record has its own legs, the record labels started calling. Def Jam Records has become the winner of the G3 bidding war. Landing the Ball Brother for $13 Million. Yup, you heard it right, 13 M’s. Not only is LiAngelo now a Def Jam artist, but Rolling Loud has given him a prime spot on the next festival. So make sure to bring your oversized white tee, bandage, & some timbs.
G3’s song “Tweaker” is nowhere near done blowing up. Even though he’s known for basketball, Gelo’s showing off his musical skills too. It’s clear that Gelo’s not just about hoops—he’s out here making moves in the rap game too. The track’s been getting love, and it’s no surprise he’s starting to make waves in the music world. The Cleveland Cavaliers’ locker room was blasting Gelo’s track “G3” while Donovan Mitchell was being interviewed. Players were all singing along, spitting the lyrics like they’d known the song for months. Mitchell couldn’t believe it, and jokingly said, “Yo, y’all already know the words? The song just dropped yesterday!”
Get your money Gelo, we ain’t mad atcha’.
Check out Hip-Hop Wired’s reaction to LiAngelo Ball’s ‘Tweakin’ song:
Chrissy Teigen and John Legend are among the lucky few who have been able to return home amid the fires that continue to devastate Los Angeles. The Cravings author, who has been sharing resources for fire victims via social media, took to her Instagram Stories on Monday (Jan. 13) to reveal that she and her […]
When new artist Max McNown flies into his falsetto voice in the middle of his first radio release, “Better Me for You (Brown Eyes),” he conveys a sense of strength through vulnerability, as if he’s been doing it for years.
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But sounds, like looks, can be deceiving. McNown had never written a song that mined that part of his register before, and it forced him to woodshed when it connected quickly with his fan base.
“’Better Me for You’ is probably the greatest problem child of any of my songs I’ve ever written,” McNown says. “I mean, it was written so early in my career. I had never taken vocal lessons before – I still have only taken a couple – but when it was written, I couldn’t even sing that song all the way through without messing up.”
Not that that mattered in the song’s creation. McNown rode with it as the melody gravitated naturally in that falsetto direction when he wrote “Better Me For You” with Ava Suppelsa, Trent Dabbs and producer-writer Jamie Kenney last May. McNown’s willingness to take on the discomfort moved the song forward.
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“That was the moment that got me really excited,” Dabbs remembers.
“Better Me for You” was personal for McNown when they crafted it. He was living in Oregon at the time and had started a long-distance relationship that was still fairly new. His co-writers asked him about his life to get the creative juices flowing at the start of the appointment, and as he spoke of his girlfriend in glowing, almost reverent tones, they launched into a bright midtempo groove on acoustic guitars. McNown pulled out a short phrase with a descending melody – “I didn’t know you’d have brown eyes” – that he’d already written about her. It became the opening line of the chorus; it also ends up being the only physical description of the woman that appears in the entire song. The rest of the text frames her as strong, spiritually-grounded and “deeper than a coal mine.”
“He’s not a superficial guy,” Kenney notes. “He’s a deep soul, and he’s a kind, caring and thoughtful person. So I think we always end up writing those kind of songs. And I think it’s not an accident that we don’t end up leaning on trite euphemisms.”
McNown noted that his girlfriend had inspired him to become a better person, an idea that morphed into the payoff line at the end of the chorus: “I gotta find a better me for you.” Knowing where they were headed, the writers turned their attention to the opening verse, the first-person singer remembering a period dominated by alcohol and romantic conquests.
“If you need to be a better person for someone, what does that look like previously, before them?” Suppelsa asks rhetorically. “Those verses [are] painting the darker side of before this girl. You need to have that chorus there to make that change.”
The second verse would begin with an abstract thought about “dipping toes in the water,” a reflection, McNown says, of a period when he worked at a coffee shop, dodging any sort of commitments. “[It’s] basically not being willing to give things my full heart,” he notes. “That’s symbolic in the relationship department, that’s symbolic in the career department, that’s symbolic in life in so many aspects. For a while, especially when you feel like you may have been wounded, you’re afraid to jump back in again.”
To round out the piece, they built a bridge that, like the chorus, starts with a descending melody. The differences are subtle enough that the first few listens, it doesn’t sound like a departure from the rest of the song. “It’s a sneaky bridge, for sure,” Suppelsa says.
McNown inserted a reference to the long-distance relationship – his cowriters feared it was new information that didn’t quite fit the text, but he insisted it fit him, and they deferred to his judgment. Within five lines, the bridge incorporates a hymnal, pledges undying devotion and solidifies a spiritual quality to the relationship that had been seeded earlier.
“It feels like one of those songs where, if he was playing at the Ryman [Auditorium] and he walked to the front of the stage and played the song, I would be sold,” Dabbs says. “I think that’s what you always look for in an artist. It’s kind of like, ‘All right, I get you. I get I get what you’re about.’”
When the song was finished, McNown remained at Kenney’s studio in Nashville’s Berry Hill neighborhood, and they worked through a rough demo of the song, stacking acoustic guitars and makeshift percussion to create a “blurry picture,” McNown says, “of what we wanted the song to sound like.” He added a scratch vocal with fragile falsetto, then returned to Oregon while the production evolved in Kenney’s hands back in Music City.
Kenney played some additional parts, then enlisted Todd Lombardo to overdub banjo and rubber-bridge acoustic guitar; Aaron Sterling for the core drums; and guitarist Jedd Hughes to add electric guitars. Kenney tucked both Dobro and a slide-guitar sample into the background, then worked to find a balance between the acoustics and electrics. It doesn’t sound as tough as he expected.
“I would go back and forth,” Kenney says. “I feel like the sweet spot was so minute. You think ‘power’ when you get to the chorus. You want to go, ‘Let’s punch them in the face with electrics.’ But I felt like it got less cool when I pushed those electrics.”
As Kenney worked on it, McNown moved to Nashville and resided in a room at the studio for six months, making it convenient to redo vocals. He ended up recutting them three times before he was entirely happy with the results. “The third time we recorded it,” McNown says, “I had already toured for 40, 50 shows, and I had built my vocal capabilities and my confidence, and I also knew the song like the back of my hand, and so I came back in and we got it right.”
“Ironically enough,” Kenney counters, “we ended up using pretty much the original, because it had a bit of a freshness to it.”
Kenney enhanced the falsetto parts in the chorus with different instruments – a mandolin in the first chorus, electric guitar in the second – trailing the vocal and creating a dreamy mood. “Anytime you have a melody like that that’s really hooky and singable, the more you can pile on and just accentuate it, the better,” Kenney says.
McNown introduced the song on TikTok, beginning with short performances that keyed on the opening line in the chorus. As the song grew, he inserted “Brown Eyes” into the title in parentheses.
“When you look at it on TikTok, I think people are looking for ‘Brown Eyes,’” Suppelsa says. “If that hadn’t been put in there in parentheses, it definitely would have been a harder search for people.”
Fugitive Recordings – in tandem with Magnolia Music Group’s promotion department, coming off its work on Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” – released “Better Me For You (Brown Eyes)” to country radio via PlayMPE on Dec. 16.
“It’s gonna be heard by so many different people that have never heard of me,” McNown acknowledges. “So we need a song that is wide-reaching enough and catchy enough to kind of hook people in and make them fans within two minutes. You have to have a gripping hook and a gripping song, and ‘Better Me for You’ just felt like it fit the criteria.”
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Amidst the L.A. wildfires, The Weeknd has delayed his Hurry Up Tomorrow album drop and canceled its accompanying show, while Beyoncé paused her announcement that had been scheduled for Jan. 14. Keep watching to see the events that have been delayed or canceled due to the ongoing wildfires. Tetris Kelly:Beyoncé pauses her big announcement as […]
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A mere four months after the arrest of Sean “Diddy” Combs, the first of many announced documentaries surrounding his federal racketeering and sex trafficking allegations has landed. Following a shocking trailer released two weeks ago, Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy documentary is here and now available to stream online exclusively on Peacock.
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The 90-minute documentary tracks the hip-hop mogul, from his early life struggles to his rise to fame within the music industry. There are several appearances throughout the doc from members in Diddy’s inner circle including former employees, childhood friends, bodyguards, and even a Making The Band contestant, all recounting their tales of dealing with Combs throughout his career. However, the most notable appearance is from singer Al B. Sure!, who details accusations regarding domestic abuse and death of Kim Porter, his and Combs late former partner.
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This is the first documentary to be released regarding Diddy’s sexual abuse allegations, but it won’t be the last. 50 Cent has already publicly announced that his G-Unit film division is producing their own doc surrounding Puff. Until then, check out how you can watch the Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy below.
How to Stream ‘The Making of a Bad Boy’ Diddy Documentary
Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy documentary premiered on Jan. 14, exclusively streaming on Peacock. Peacock subscribers can stream the new Diddy documentary online for free. Not subscribed? For just $7.99/month, the streaming service offers access to live sports, original TV programming, movies and specials, including the Diddy doc. Sign up here or below.
Peacock lets you watch the Diddy documentary online through your phone, computer, tablet or smart TV (via the Peacock app). This special is not airing on TV so the only place to stream the Diddy Bad Boy documentary online is through Peacock.
Watch the trailer for Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy below.