nsfs
Page: 61
Jason Isbell will be taking the stage on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention on Monday night (Aug. 19), Billboard can confirm. The star will be performing his 2015 hit, “Something More Than Free,” the title track off his Grammy-winning fifth studio album. “I don’t think on why I’m here or where it […]
President Nicolás Maduro lashed out at Venezuelan singer and influencer Lele Pons in a video posted on his Instagram and TikTok accounts, amid the tension generated by the recent Venezuelan presidential elections in which he declared himself the winner. The video was released after the massive opposition march on Saturday (Aug. 17), which brought together thousands of people in Caracas and other cities worldwide, including Tokyo, Mexico City and Miami.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
“Eleonora ‘Lele’ Pons wants to impose a government in #Venezuela through a concert in Miami, but who said she is a politician? Lele Pons is not the #CNE! Do not underestimate Venezuela, you do not know the spiritual power of this #People!” reads the description of Maduro’s TikTok video.
“Who said that Lele Pons and the artists that she is calling, just like the concert in Cúcuta, should determine the life of an entire country?” the Chavismo leader said. “So they think that because some artists were going to sing, the next day they would invade Venezuela. Be careful with manipulations, be careful. And you can conspire from Miami, but in Venezuela, the Venezuelans rule. As we did with the artists at the concert in Cúcuta, so will the people of Venezuela, today even more strongly.”
Trending on Billboard
Shortly after, Pons reacted in a video on her TikTok account captioned, “You will not silence me! VENEZUELA WON 🇻🇪❤️.” The artist also shared some images on Instagram of her participation in the march, during which she carried the flag of her native country, accompanied by Venezuelan artists Danny Ocean, Elena Rose, Marko and Joaquina, among others.
Pons is the Venezuelan influencer and singer with the most followers on social media, with more than 53.4 million followers on Instagram alone and 32.5 million on TikTok. She has been vocal about the irregularities in Venezuela’s elections, where the opposition claims to have evidence that its candidate, Edmundo González, obtained the majority of the votes.
On Aug. 9, she did an Instagram Live with Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, during which the politician answered questions from her followers and announced Saturday’s massive event aimed at the international community.
See Lele Pons’ TikTok below:
At one of her recent Eras Tour shows in London, Taylor Swift met with the families of victims harmed by the deadly mass stabbing at a children’s dance class in Southport in July. In photos posted to TikTok by one mom who met the pop star with her daughters at Wembley Stadium over the weekend, […]
Before this wildly unpredictable presidential campaign season even kicked off, technology experts issued dire warnings that doctored artificial intelligence images and videos could be used to manipulate voters. That appears to be the case with some seemingly manufactured images shared by three-time White House candidate Donald Trump on Sunday (Aug. 18) on his Truth Social account.
The twice impeached former one-term Republican president re-posted a series of images whose authenticity could not be verified and which appeared to show Taylor Swift fans, as well as the singer herself, throwing in with his campaign. One featured six squares filled with smiling Swifties wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shits with the message “Swifties Turning to Trump After ISIS Foiled Taylor Swift Concert,” a seeming reference to the recently foiled plot to attack Swift’s since-cancelled trio of concerts in Vienna after the discovery of a 19-year-old ISIS-radicalized man’s plan to cause a mass casualty event outside the singer’s Austrian shows.
In another image meant to mirror the iconic “I Want You For U.S. Army” recruiting poster, a user doctored up an image of Swift in a patriotic red, white and blue suit and star-spangled top hat with the message, “Taylor Wants You to Vote For Donald Trump.” The other two pictures featured more images of what are allegedly Swift fans in Trump-boosting gear.
At press time spokespeople for Swift and Trump had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment on the post, which also featured Trump’s enthusiastic response to the alleged endorsement, “I accept!” According to The Daily Beast, the Swiftie images were first posted to X on Friday and Saturday by a couple of popular right-wing accounts, including one that reportedly mixed the doctored AI images with a real one of a blonde woman wearing a “Swifties For Trump” shirt at a rally. The Sunday Times noted that one of the 25 Truth Social posts featuring the faked images that read “The Swifties for Trump movement is real!” was labelled “satire,” calling into question whether Trump, 78, realized that he was re-posting computer-generated pictures.
Swift has yet to endorse anyone in the 2024 presidential race between convicted felon Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, whose nomination will be celebrated this week in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. Harris was swapped in for President Joe Biden last month and since her sudden elevation to the top spot on the ticket polls have shown the once dead-even race that Trump — now the oldest candidate to ever run for the White House — was winning in several key battleground states shifting slightly in Harris’ favor.
The singer eschewed political endorsements for most of her career, but following Trump’s election in 2016 she endorsed two Democratic candidates in midterm elections in her home state of Tennessee as well as endorsing Biden in 2020. She also took aim at the former Apprentice host during the George Floyd protests in 2020, lambasting Trump’s response to the unrest after earlier saying she was “completely blindsided” by his 2016 victory over former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton.
“After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence? ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts’???” Swift wrote in reference to a comment from Trump that many took as a veiled threat to protesters who flooded the streets around the nation following the killing of unarmed 46-year-old Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on his neck for nearly 10 minutes. “We will vote you out in November.”
Trump, who the Washington Post reported in 2021 had made nearly 31,000 false or misleading statements during his presidency — a rate of 21 claims per day — recently claimed that photos of a massive Harris/Walz rally in Detroit were AI-generated, a falsehood that was quickly disproven by photos and videos taken by reporters and attendees on the ground.
Check out the AI Taylor Swift images below.
Lol, Trump posted a collage of AI generated Taylor Swift fans wearing ‘Swifities for Trump’ T-shits, and wrote “I accept!” as if this were real.I mean…..this is uniquely pathetic, even for Trump. pic.twitter.com/GUVXQLqzYo— Peter Henlein (@SwissWatchGuy) August 18, 2024
At least 23 people were injured when two gondolas of a Ferris wheel caught fire at a music festival near Leipzig in eastern Germany, the German news agency dpa reported Sunday (Aug. 18). The accident took place at the Highfield Festival at Lake Strömthal near Leipzig. The fire started in one gondola and then spread […]
Jelly Roll is speaking candidly about his experience attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, a topic he says he’s never talked about in public before.
In a new interview with The New York Times, the artist — who’s topped both the Mainstream Rock Airplay and Country Airplay charts — was asked about an unreleased song, “Winning Streak,” which will be heard on upcoming album Beautifully Broken, scheduled for release in fall 2024. “Winning Streak” “basically describes going to an AA meeting,” NYT‘s David Marchese noted in the conversation. “Is alcohol addiction something you struggle with or have struggled with?”
Jelly Roll explained the song was written “from the perspective of a story I’d seen happen for real” at an AA meeting, which he’ll attend “for my demons.”
“I still will have a cocktail every now and then and I’m a known weed smoker, but I got away from the drugs that I knew were gonna kill me,” Jelly Roll said of his relationship with drugs and alcohol in the podcast interview published on Saturday (Aug. 17).
He continued, “It was really hard for me to get away from those drugs,” which he’s previously said included substances including cocaine, pain pills and codeine. “Something I do [for] maintaining my relationship with those drugs is I will still attend the meetings, even though I’m not a textbook sober guy — but I never share, I just quietly sit and appreciate the message and the meaning.”
Added Jelly Roll, “This is the first time I’ve talked about this publicly at all. I don’t tell people I go to meetings. It’s not a part of my story that I share because I have so much respect for the men and women in that program that get actually completely sober, that I never want my stuff to get in the way of them.”
Jelly Roll, who says in the chat that he’s “actively doing better every single day,” described the moment at an AA meeting that influenced his writing on “Winning Streak.” It tells someone else’s story, but in the first-person perspective.
He said that felt right for this particular track, and named first-person songs like James Taylor’s “Carolina in My Mind” that have inspired him and made him emotional, solely as the listener.
“This kid, he’s going through it,” he said of the meeting that resulted in writing “Winning Streak.” “One of the old men sitting there was like, ‘Look man, it’s all good. Nobody came in here on a winning streak.’ It was such a beautiful thing. If you’ve ever been to an AA meeting, a big one, like this room had 20, 30 people in it, it felt like …. You watch the room kind of split when he said that ‘cause half of the room are old, sober dudes who remember being the young dude, so they chuckle, and the other half are other dudes who just immediately feel it in their bones and cry. But it’s all the same emotion and feeling, and right then, there it was. That was the beginning of ‘Winning Streak.’”
“Get By,” another new song from his upcoming album, will serve as the soundtrack for ESPN’s season-long college football coverage across ESPN networks and ABC. Jelly Roll, who’s latest new music release is the collab “Losers” on Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion album, will hit the road for a series of headlining tour dates later this month.
Listen to his full interview, clocking in at over a half-hour, with The New York Times below.
[embedded content]
Maxie Solters, a third-generation entertainment publicist, died unexpectedly Thursday (Aug. 15) in Los Angeles. She was 37. She was also a writer, actor and producer. No cause of death was shared.
Solters followed her father, Larry Solters, and her grandfather, Lee Solters, in the family business. Her grandfather was a legendary press agent, who handled such acts as Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson, Carol Channing and Frank Sinatra. Larry Solters’ Scoop Marketing represents the Eagles, Irving Azoff and Iconic Artists Group, among other clients.
Solters, who was known for her helpful and friendly demeanor, joined Scoop in 2012, working with such clients as the Kia Forum, the Hollywood Bowl and Music Forward.
Maxie Solters
Solters family
Solters grew up in Sherman Oaks, California, and graduated from Oakwood School and the University of Southern California with a theater degree. Before joining Scoop, she worked in film and television casting and also served as a coordinator for One Billion Rising, the global movement for justice and equality. In addition to acting in a number of theatrical productions, Maxie, who was a member of the Screen Actors Guild, also created, produced and starred in her own comedy web series, including 2016’s Chooch and Adventures in Online Dating and 2017’s Climax! The Series.
Her social justice work also included involvement in V-Day International and work on women’s rights.
Survivors include her father, Larry, and his partner, Carol Greenhut; her mother, Debra Graff; her longtime partner, Dim Dobrin; her aunt, Susan Reynolds; her cousin, Jonah Reynolds; and her dog, Pookie. A celebration of life will be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made in Maxie’s name to One Billion Rising, a cause she deeply believed in.
Courtney Kramer, the Republican challenger to Fani Willis in the race for Fulton County District Attorney in Georgia, is vowing to end the long-running YSL RICO trial involving Young Thug if she’s elected, according to a statement issued by her campaign on Friday (Aug. 16).
“With no apparent justice in sight, I have become highly concerned and disappointed in the lack of prosecutorial oversight in this case,” Kramer said in the statement. “As time goes on, the public has witnessed a trial that is undoubtedly over prosecuted by attorneys who have repeatedly been admonished for lack of trial prepartion: a complete and utter waste of the court’s time.”
Kramer goes on to blast prosecutors in the case, noting that they were recently “condemned” by new judge Paige Reese Whitaker “for not following the ethical and legal duty to disclose exculpatory evidence that could prove fruitful for the defense, one of the most basic requirements in the courtroom.” She further contends that the case “was brought to bring fame” to Willis, “not to bring justice to the community,” and that it’s resulted in “endless amounts of taxpayer dollars” being spent “on a prosecution that is based almost entirely on witnesses with little to no credibility.”
“If I am elected as the next District Attorney of Fulton County, I promise to end this prosecution immediately,” said Kramer. “I challenge my opponent to do the same thing, the right thing, and end this prosection and release the accused in this case who are being held without bond.”
Representatives for Willis and Young Thug did not immediately respond to Billboard‘s requests for comment.
The YSL case was set into motion in May 2022 when Thug (real name Jeffery Williams) was indicted along with dozen of others over allegations that their YSL was not a record label called Young Stoner Life but a violent Atlanta street game called Young Slime Life. The group of defendants was charged under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, with prosecutors claiming they operated a criminal enterprise that committed murders, carjackings, armed robberies, drug dealing and other crimes over the course of a decade.
Since his arrest, Thug remained in jail despite multiple calls for his release. On Aug. 8, Judge Whitaker denied requests by Thug’s attorneys to declare a mistrial over the explosive revelation of a secret “ex parte” meeting between the since-removed judge in the case, Ural Glanville, prosecutors and a key witness. Prior to that, she denied their renewed motion to release Thug on bond.
Notably, the trial, which began in January 2023 and resumed on Monday (Aug. 12), is now the longest in Georgia state history; with dozens of witnesses still set to testify, it’s estimated to run well into next year.
You can read Kramer’s full statement here.
With the presidential elections approaching, the Democratic ticket is helping voters get to know them on a personal level.
Kamala Harris and her selected Vice President, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, sat down for a wide-ranging chat uploaded to YouTube on Thursday (Aug. 15), where the duo discuss topics including their childhoods, taco recipes and their hope for the future of America.
They also share a love for music, and the conversation led to each politician sharing the music that shaped them throughout their lives. For Walz, it started with Bruce Springsteen’s 1980 album The River, which he called a “transformational piece of music” for him. He also shared his love for Bob Seger. “My first car, it was the summer of 1980 and I’d been saving up. I buy a 1973 orange Chevy Camaro,” he recalled. “Got an eight-track player in it. The previous owner left Bob Seger’s Night Moves in there. I listened to it, and it’s kind of the soundtrack of my life. […] What’s really great about it is I’ve got a ’79 international that’s my car and it’s got an eight-track player in it. I have the very eight-track to this day.”
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
For Harris, Aretha Franklin was a major part of her childhood. “My mother had every Aretha album and our Christmas gift to my mother, her birthday gift was always like, what’s the latest Aretha Franklin record?” she explained.
Harris added that while Stevie Wonde, Miles Davis and John Coltrane were also fixtures within her family home, one of her “personal favorite musicians” was Minnesota’s own Prince. “My husband Doug and I — I’m more of a hip-hop girl, and he’s more Depeche Mode,” she shared. “However, in the Venn diagram of things, Prince he and I love the same. Talk about how Prince was with that guitar, man. I almost know by heart every one of those songs.”
“I feel like a trip to Paisley Park is going to happen here,” Walz said of the late icon’s beloved Minnesota estate, to which Harris happily replied, “It’s on my bucket list.”
Watch Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s full conversation below.
[embedded content]
As we approach the presidential election, Lil Pump will be voicing his support for Donald Trump in song. The “Gucci Gang” rapper took to X on Tuesday (Aug. 13) to reveal that he will no longer be performing a diss track aimed at both President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris during Trump’s next rally, […]