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02 May 2023

Megan Thee Stallion Is Gearing Up for Hot Girl Summer With Swimsuit Selfies & Natural Curls

It feels like Hot Girl Summer is just around the corner, and Megan Thee Stallion is kicking the season off with some sizzling selfies.

The “Savage” rapper took to Instagram on Tuesday (May 2) to share a slew of photos in which she’s seen posing in a sleek crochet two-piece set, a colorful maxi dress, a bedazzled cut-out gown, a tropical swimsuit and so much more, all while rocking a gorgeous naturally curly hairdo. The OG Hot Girl captioned the post with a simple camera emoji and, at the time of publication, the post already has more than one million likes.

Back in March, Meg teased a new album at the Vanity Fair Oscar party — much to fans’ excitement. When asked by Entertainment Tonight about the possibility of new music on the way, the rapper replied, “Oh I am, new album, f–k y’all hoes, bye!” before walking away with a laugh.

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A new full-length project would serve as a follow-up to her 2022 sophomore effort Traumazine, which debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and contained hit singles “Sweetest Pie” with Dua Lipa, “Plan B,” “Pressurelicious” featuring Future, “Her” and the Key Glock-assisted “Ungrateful.”

One person who’d be down to collaborate with Meg on upcoming music is Shania Twain, who revealed at the 2023 CMT Music Awards that the two got acquainted when the rapper presented her with the Equal Play Honor at the show. “I love her… what a sweetheart!” Twain said of the “Thot S—” rapper. “I think that [a collaboration] would really work… I love her whole mind.”

02 May 2023

Amazon Music Unlimited: Get 3 Months Free With This Limited Deal

Amazon is currently offering an amazing streaming deal that won’t last long, so if you’ve been thinking of joining Amazon Music Unlimited, this limited promo might be too good to pass up.

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On Tuesday (May 2), Amazon launched a promo that lets new subscribers enjoy three months of free Amazon Unlimited Music by watching a featurette for The Little Mermaid on Prime Video.

The featurette is available on the Amazon Fire TV homepage, but also might be accessible through Amazon Fire Stick and Prime Video. After you watch the featurette, a three-month free trial subscription link will be emailed to your account. This limited offer runs from now until May 16.

The Amazon Music Unlimited subscription includes HD streaming and spatial audio at no extra cost, plus unlimited access to 100 million on-demand and commercial-free songs, thousands of stations and top playlists, along with millions of podcast episodes.

Traveling soon? Amazon Music Unlimited lets you stay connected even when you’re flying the friendly skies. Listen offline with unlimited skips or hands-free with an Alexa or Bluetooth device.

After the three-month free trial ends, Amazon Music Unlimited will be billed at $10.99/month ($9.99 a month for Prime members. Click here to launch your free trial). Your subscription will automatically renew after the first three months unless you cancel.

How else can you get a free trial to Amazon Music? If you join Amazon Music Unlimited without The Little Mermaid promo you can still snag a free trial for the first month.

Amazon Music Unlimited

$10.99/month after 30-day free trial

Amazon Music offers individual plans to stream anywhere, anytime but you can also get a family plan ($15.99 a month) which lets you stream on up to six devices simultaneously and block songs with explicit lyrics. There’s also a single device plan ($4.99 a month) to stream from a single Echo device or Fire TV. Lastly, the student plan cuts your Amazon Music monthly membership from $9.99 to $1 per month. However, Amazon’s three-month promo only applies to the Amazon Music Unlimited individual plan.

If you’re already an Amazon Prime member, Amazon Music is included in your membership, but you can only access two million songs (versus 100 million) along with thousands of playlists in addition to discounted pricing, free two-day shipping, the entire Prime Video streaming library and lots of other perks.

02 May 2023

Halsey Transports to ’80s-Era Hollywood in ‘MaXXXine’ First Look

A24 revealed the first look at its upcoming slasher threequel MaXXXine on Monday, starring Mia Goth and Halsey.

“The life she deserves #MaXXXine,” the studio tweeted alongside a still of Goth’s Maxine walking beneath the bright harsh and garish lights of Hollywood in the 1980s alongside Halsey’s character, whose name has yet to be revealed. (The pop star does, however, sport a black pixie cut and floor-length fur coat as she side-eyes Maxine in the photo.)

Contrary to her Little House on the Prairie-esque look from Ti West’s two previous films in the X trilogy — 2022’s X and Pearl — Goth’s murderous Hollywood hopeful has traded her brunette braids and prairie dresses for a tousled blonde mane and iridescent green windbreaker.

Set for release sometime later this year, MaXXXine will conclude the trilogy imagined by West. X tells the story of Maxine, an aspiring adult film star who became embroiled in a violent murder on the 1979 set of her friends’ pornographic movie, which they’re filming on a desolate Texas ranch owned by an elderly couple named Pearl and Howard. The movie’s prequel, Pearl, featured Goth playing the younger version of the eponymous character from the first film in her 1918 origin story. (The series contains heavy homages to the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.)

Along with Halsey, MaXXXine will also star Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Lily Collins, Giancarlo Esposito and Kevin Bacon.

See the first look below:

02 May 2023

‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton Exits Role at Google to Warn of Technology’s Dangers

Sounding alarms about artificial intelligence has become a popular pastime in the ChatGPT era, taken up by high-profile figures as varied as industrialist Elon Musk, leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky and the 99-year-old retired statesman Henry Kissinger.

But it’s the concerns of insiders in the AI research community that are attracting particular attention. A pioneering researcher and the so-called “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton quit his role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

Over his decades-long career, Hinton’s pioneering work on deep learning and neural networks helped lay the foundation for much of the AI technology we see today.

There has been a spasm of AI introductions in recent months. San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, rolled out its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-4, in March. Other tech giants have invested in competing tools — including Google’s “Bard.”

Some of the dangers of AI chatbots are “quite scary,” Hinton told the BBC. “Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”

In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Hinton also pointed to “bad actors” that may use AI in ways that could have detrimental impacts on society — such as manipulating elections or instigating violence.

Hinton, 75, says he retired from Google so that he could speak openly about the potential risks as someone who no longer works for the tech giant.

“I want to talk about AI safety issues without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he told MIT Technology Review. “As long as I’m paid by Google, I can’t do that.”

Since announcing his departure, Hinton has maintained that Google has “acted very responsibly” regarding AI. He told MIT Technology Review that there’s also “a lot of good things about Google” that he would want to talk about — but those comments would be “much more credible if I’m not at Google anymore.”

Google confirmed that Hinton had retired from his role after 10 years overseeing the Google Research team in Toronto.

Hinton declined further comment Tuesday but said he would talk more about it at a conference Wednesday.

At the heart of the debate on the state of AI is whether the primary dangers are in the future or present. On one side are hypothetical scenarios of existential risk caused by computers that supersede human intelligence. On the other are concerns about automated technology that’s already getting widely deployed by businesses and governments and can cause real-world harms.

“For good or for not, what the chatbot moment has done is made AI a national conversation and an international conversation that doesn’t only include AI experts and developers,” said Alondra Nelson, who until February led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and its push to craft guidelines around the responsible use of AI tools.

“AI is no longer abstract, and we have this kind of opening, I think, to have a new conversation about what we want a democratic future and a non-exploitative future with technology to look like,” Nelson said in an interview last month.

A number of AI researchers have long expressed concerns about racial, gender and other forms of bias in AI systems, including text-based large language models that are trained on huge troves of human writing and can amplify discrimination that exists in society.

“We need to take a step back and really think about whose needs are being put front and center in the discussion about risks,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute. “The harms that are being enacted by AI systems today are really not evenly distributed. It’s very much exacerbating existing patterns of inequality.”

Hinton was one of three AI pioneers who in 2019 won the Turing Award, an honor that has become known as tech industry’s version of the Nobel Prize. The other two winners, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, have also expressed concerns about the future of AI.

Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, signed a petition in late March calling for tech companies to agree to a 6-month pause on developing powerful AI systems, while LeCun, a top AI scientist at Facebook parent Meta, has taken a more optimistic approach.

02 May 2023

Taylor Swift Lands a Record 10 Albums in the Top 100 of Billboard 200 Chart

Taylor Swift puts an impressive stamp on the Billboard 200 albums chart (dated May 6), as the superstar has 10 albums on the list at the same time. And all of them are in the top 100 of the 200-position tally, which ranks the most popular albums of the week in the United States.

Among those 10 albums, nine are in the top 50, eight sit in the top 40, and three are in the top 10.

Since the Billboard 200 was combined from its previously separate mono and stereo LP charts into one all-encompassing list in August 1963, Swift is:

  • the first living female artist with at least three albums simultaneously in the top 10
  • the only act to have at least eight albums simultaneously in the top 40
  • the only act with at least nine albums simultaneously in the top 50
  • the only living artist with at least 10 albums simultaneously in the top 100

On the Billboard 200 dated May 6, Swift charts the following titles:
No. 3 – Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions
No. 4 – Midnights
No. 10 – Lover
No. 12 – Folklore
No. 21 – 1989
No. 22 – reputation
No. 27 – Red (Taylor’s Version)
No. 29 – Evermore
No. 41 – Fearless (Taylor’s Version)
No. 66 – Speak Now

Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions debuts at No. 3 with 75,000 equivalent album units earned (all from vinyl LP sales) in the week ending April 27, according to Luminate, following its buzzy release on vinyl for the first time, for Record Store Day 2023 (April 22).

The May 6-dated Billboard 200 chart reflects the tracking week of April 21-27 – a little over a month after Swift launched her career-spanning The Eras Tour on March 17. The stadium-filling trek has aided exposure of her catalog of music, as she performs dozens of hits songs from most of her albums each night of the tour. Below Long Pond in the top 10, Midnights, her most recent studio album, ranks at No. 4, followed by Lover at No. 10. The latter was released in 2019 and, due to the pandemic, is now being spotlighted by Swift on tour for the first time. (She had planned to tour in support of Lover in 2020, but COVID-19 forced her to cancel the shows.)

While the Billboard 200 has ranked the country’s most popular albums each week for decades, dating back to its March 1956 inception, the chart’s rules have changed dramatically over the years – making it easier for some albums to linger on the tally in recent years than in decades past.

For example, older albums (known as catalog albums, generally regarded as those at least 18 months old) were mostly barred from charting on the Billboard 200 from mid-1991 through the end of 2009. Then, at the end of 2014, the chart transitioned from a pure-album sales formula to a multimetric methodology – and adding streaming activity. Because of the changes in the chart’s methodology (primarily the inclusion of streaming data) and the ability for catalog albums to chart, many albums now continue to rank on the list (including Swift’s bevy of titles) for a much longer time than albums in previous… eras (pun intended), when the chart was effectively a sales-only chart for current and/or new releases.

Three in the top 10: The last act with at least three albums in the top 10 at the same time before Swift this week was Prince, following his death, when he had five albums in the top 10 on the May 14, 2016, chart (he also placed three in the top 10 on the May 7, 2016 chart). Before Prince, Led Zeppelin had three in the top 10 on the June 21, 2014, chart with a trio of deluxe reissues of the band’s first three albums. And before that, Whitney Houston did it, after her death, on the March 17 and March 10, 2012-dated charts (three in the top 10 on each chart). And prior to Houston, one must scroll all the way back to Herb Alpert on the Dec. 24, 1966-dated list, when he had three in the top 10 (a feat he achieved more than a dozen times that year, led by four for a week that April; he and Prince are the only acts with more than three top 10s in a single week since August 1963).

10 in the Top 100: In terms of 10 albums in the top 100, that’s been done only twice since August 1963 – Swift on the latest chart, and Prince with 15 albums on the May 14, 2016, chart.

10 Albums on the Billboard 200 at the Same Time: Swift has now placed at least 10 albums on the Billboard 200 chart at the same time – twice. She did it earlier this year on the March 4-dated chart. The last act before Swift to notch 10 albums on the list at the same time was Prince, following his death in 2016, including a one-week record 19 (May 14, 2016).

Here are the acts who have placed at least 10 albums on the Billboard 200 chart at the same time (since August 1963):

Taylor Swift – May 6, 2023 (10 albums)
Taylor Swift – March 4, 2023 (10)
Prince – May 28, 2016 (13)
Prince – May 21, 2016 (10)
Prince – May 14, 2016 (19)
David Bowie – Jan. 30, 2016 (10)
The Beatles – March 1, 2014 (13)
Whitney Houston – March 10, 2012 (10)
The Beatles – Dec. 4, 2010 (14)
The Beatles – Jan. 9, 2010 (11)

Prince, Bowie and Houston’s achievements came shortly after they died, following a surge of interest in their respective catalogs from music fans.

The Beatles placed 13 titles on the March 1, 2014, chart thanks in large part to gains reaped from the CBS-TV concert special The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to The Beatles, which aired that Feb. 9 (and repeated Feb. 12). The special celebrated 50 years of The Beatles’ success in the U.S., specifically commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Fab Four’s first live American TV performance on The Ed Sullivan Show (Feb. 9, 1964).

The Beatles also logged 14 and 11 titles, respectively, on the Dec. 4 and Jan. 9, 2010-dated charts. On the Dec. 4, 2010, list, The Beatles logged 12 re-entries and two debuts, following the band’s belated bow in the iTunes Store. (The group had been a holdout to selling digital downloads of its albums and songs on the service until Nov. 16, 2010.)

As for The Beatles’ feat on the Jan. 9, 2010, chart, that week came shortly after the Billboard 200 began allowing older (catalog) albums to appear, beginning with the Dec. 5, 2009-dated chart. It was also not long after the band’s catalog was digitally remastered for CD reissues in September 2009.

The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units, compiled by Luminate. Units comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). Each unit equals one album sale, or 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams generated by songs from an album. For all chart news, follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both Twitter and Instagram.

02 May 2023

Famous Musicians Who Root for the Knicks

The New York Knicks have once again made their way back into the NBA Playoffs after missing the postseason in 2022, and the iconic team has a long history of celebrity fans cheering them on.

As a whole, the Knicks have been in the playoffs 39 times over their 74 seasons, but they haven’t won the NBA championship since 1973. Regardless, music stars from Diddy, 50 Cent and LL Cool J to Brandy, Fat Joe and Alicia Keys have cheered on the Empire State’s basketball team courtside over the years, no matter the record.

Perhaps one of the most famous Knicks fans is filmmaker Spike Lee, who throughout the years became known for having a sideline rivalry with basketball player Reggie Miller whenever the team would play against the Indiana Pacers throughout the 1990s. “I would come to his funeral dressed in all orange and blue sky as he would like,” Miller once said on The Dan Patrick Show, calling Lee the “face” of the Knicks. “I would be in Knicks’ colors at his wake. Just like he’d better be in blue and gold at mine.”

To this day, the lifelong superfan can be seen courtside at games dressed in head-to-toe Knicks attire. Most recently, he’s been enjoying the Knicks’ round 2 games this year against the Miami Heat.

To celebrate the Knicks in the playoffs, we’ve compiled a gallery of famous musicians who are also fans of the NY basketball team. See the photos below.

02 May 2023

Cardi B Talks Met Gala Pressure in Behind-the-Scenes Video: ‘Imagine Competing With Myself’

Cardi B dazzled at the 2023 Met Gala on Monday night, descending on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in three separate looks — including in a black-and-white ensemble perfectly fitting with the night’s theme, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.”

The “Up” rapper shared the behind-the-scenes of getting ready for the classy look in a video with Vogue, in which she shared details on the origins of her looks and how it tied into the theme of the fashionable evening.

“My inspirations for this look, it’s just Chanel and Karl. It’s a little mix, because if you see the top, it’s giving the infamous Karl suits with the tie, the white collar. Almost like his suit, but not really,” she explained. “At the bottom, if you see the skirt it has the camellias, which is the flower. So yeah, it’s just a little bit of everything. It’s representing the house of Chanel and Karl. Karl is so infamous for his gray hair.”

Though Cardi has had a showstopping look every time she’s attended the ceremony, she admitted that nerves still get the best of her. “Every single time that I got to the Met, it’s fun of course. … After my first time going to the Met, I always get anxiety. And the anxieties just grow and grow and grow,” she said, adding, “Maybe because my looks are so spectacular that people just expect every year to be more amazing than the last, and it’s so hard because imagine competing with myself. That is sickening.”

The 30-year-old was then asked what she would tell Lagerfeld if she had the chance to speak with him in person. “I would’ve told him I need a discount at the Chanel store. And tell him that he’s amazing and iconic. Like you’re so iconic that they’re making a Met Gala representing you, honoring you. I know he’s smiling.”

See Cardi’s behind-the-scenes video with Vogue in the video above.

Cardi B

Cardi B attends The 2023 Met Gala Celebrating “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line Of Beauty” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 01, 2023 in New York City.

Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

02 May 2023

Miranda Lambert Reveals She’d Love to Collaborate With Beyoncé

Miranda Lambert stopped by Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen on Monday night and dished on her dream collaboration with Beyoncé.

Host Andy Cohen pressed the country star on both who her favorite past collaborator has been as well as who’s still on her bucket list during a game of “Clubhouse Quickie.” For the former, she chose fellow guest Meghan Trainor — the pair performed “All About That Bass” at the CMA Awards back in 2014 — but at first she had a difficult time naming another artist she’d want to work with.

“Everybody!” she insisted. “Everybody brings something different to the table. It’s always fun and, you know, cool to meet somebody new and get some of their creativity and mix it all up.”

It was at that point that Trainor jumped in to shout, “I want Lewis Capaldi!,” which helped Lambert make a decision: “I want Beyoncé.”

Other things fans learned about the “I’ll Be Loving You” singer during the rapid-fire round of questioning included her first concert (Garth Brooks at Texas Stadium when she was just 10), go-to karaoke song (anything by The Chicks), the reality shows she secretly binges (home renovations on HGTV) and more.

While Lambert’s most recent album, Palomino, came out in April 2022, she just released her very first cookbook titled Y’all Eat Yet? In an exclusive interview with Billboard, the singer said the book of recipes came about “so organically” adding, “I’ve never shared some of my personal happy times, and memories and some hard stuff other than in my music. I’ve been in this industry for 20 years, so I feel like this is maybe a side of me that my fans haven’t gotten to see and dig a little bit deeper.”

Watch Lambert talk about Queen Bey being on her wish list of collaborators below.

02 May 2023

Kim Petras Calls Anti-Trans Rhetoric ‘The Same Sh–‘ She Dealt With as a ‘Very Suicidal’ Teen

History has a way of repeating itself, which is exactly what Kim Petras is watching happen with the current anti-trans rhetoric spreading around the globe.

In an exclusive clip from her upcoming Out magazine cover story shared with People, Petras talks about coming out as trans at an early age and why her parents’ support was vital. “I literally was very suicidal as a kid, and I just wouldn’t still be here had my parents not believed me,” the singer said. Recalling her historic win at the 2023 Grammy Awards, she added that she knew she needed to thank “the person who’s responsible for me being alive,” her mother.

Watching the continued wave of transphobic sentiment sweeping across the globe — especially in the U.S., where more anti-LGBTQ legislation has been proposed in 2023 than any other year on record — has been “sad” to watch, Petras said. “I hate that another generation is going through this, and I hate that young kids are going through the same sh– I was going through, and that apparently just isn’t changing.”

Putting a finer point on the issue, Petras said it shouldn’t be anyone else’s business how a person identifies. “I just never understood why people were so obsessed with what people do to be happy,” she said. “Just focus on what you can do to be happy.”

The teaser of Petras’ new profile comes on the heels of “Alone,” the singer’s latest collaboration with rap superstar Nicki Minaj. Following the pair of performers earning a No. 55 debut on the Billboard Hot 100 this week, Kim and Nicki dropped their official music video for “Alone” on Tuesday (May 2).

Check out the preview of Petras’ Out cover story here, and watch her new music video for “Alone” below:

02 May 2023

Rihanna’s 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show Is Now the Most-Watched of All Time

Rihanna‘s Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show is officially the most-watched halftime show performance of all time, according to an adjusted Nielsen report Tuesday (May 2).

The live performance — her first in more than five years — attracted 121.017 million viewers during the Feb. 12-dated broadcast. Nielsen’s revised report regarding Super Bowl LVII between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles also makes this year’s big game the most-watched Super Bowl in history.

According to the Associated Press, Nielsen revised this year’s original figure of 113.1 million by 2 million “after a review that revealed encoding irregularities as well as issues with out-of-home measurement.” The new 115.1 million figure breaks the record that was previously set by the 2015 Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks, which had 114.442 million viewers (not including streaming). This year’s figure also surpassed that of the 2017 Super Bowl between the Atlanta Falcons and the New England Patriots (113.668 million), which previously held the most-watched record out of Fox Sports’ 10 Super Bowl broadcasts.

During RiRi’s now history-making performance at Glendale, Ariz.’s State Farm Stadium, she not only revealed she was pregnant with her and partner A$AP Rocky‘s second child, but she also performed her Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hits like “Only Girl (in the World),” “We Found Love,” “S&M,” “Rude Boy,” “Work” and more. Ahead of her big night, Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty lingerie and clothing brand sold “Rihanna concert interrupted by a football game, weird but whatever” T-shirts as part of its game day collection. And considering millions more people tuned into her “concert” than the game, there’s truth to that slogan.