politics
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Stevie Nicks has been using her platform to encourage political activism in her fans, but she explained that she wasn’t always an active voter.
In a new interview with MSNBC, the 76-year-old “Edge of Seventeen” icon opened up about not voting util six years ago. “I never voted until I was 70, but I regret that. I’ve told everybody that onstage for the last two years,” she said. “I regret that and I don’t have very many regrets. There’s so many reasons. You can say, ‘Oh, I didn’t have time. I was this and that.’ In the long run, you didn’t have an hour? You didn’t have an hour of your time that you could have gone and voted.”
She also discussed the inspiration behind her recently released track, “The Lighthouse,” a song inspired by the fight for abortion access following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. “We have to find a way to bring back Roe vs. Wade,” she explained, noting that musicians should speak out more about causes in their music. “In the end of the 50s and 60s and into the 70s, everyone was writing protest songs. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Stephen Stills — it was lots and lots and lots. I would say to all my musical poets that write songs to write some songs about what’s happening like I did.”
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Nicks added, “Whoever wins, the lighthouse needs to keep shining its light and keep those ships from crashing into the rocks. That’s my idea of the lighthouse being a protector, protecting all those boats and ships that are coming in.”
Watch the full interview here.
In September, the Fleetwood Mac singer followed in Taylor Swift’s footsteps to endorse Kamala Harris for the presidential election. “As my friend @taylorswift so eloquently stated, now is the time to research and choose the candidate that speaks to you and your beliefs,” Nicks wrote on Instagram, sharing a photo of herself with her tiny canine.
“Only 54 days left until the election,” she continued. “Make sure you are registered to vote! Your vote in this election may be one of the most important things you ever do.”
Nicky Jam is no longer supporting Donald Trump for president, the reggaetón hitmaker announced on Wednesday (Oct. 30) in a video he uploaded to his Instagram page. The message comes a month after the Massachusetts-born singer-songwriter had endorsed the Republican candidate and even spoke at one of his rallies in Las Vegas back in September. […]
When Billboard started publishing in 1894, Grover Cleveland was president of the United States of America — all 44 of them. Parsing politics has never been this publication’s primary purpose, but over the decades since, every POTUS has popped up in our pages. So, ahead of Election Day (Nov. 5), Billboard tips its reporter’s hat to the commanders in chief whose policies and cultural cachet helped shape the music business.
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No. 1 With a ‘Bullet’
The Sept. 21, 1901, issue of Billboard covered “an almost prophetic incident” that occurred at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., the day an assassin shot President William McKinley at the Temple of Music (Sept. 6). (He died from the injury a week later.) “Only a moment or two before the shot rang out,” a friend of McKinley’s told Billboard, the “orchestra had played a German piece of music entitled ‘The Cursed Bullet.’ ”
Not ‘Ike’ Us
“Election year brought tangible results in revenue to Madison Square Garden,” reported the Feb. 16, 1952, Billboard, “as an Eisenhower-for-President rally, backed by entertainment names, drew 15,000.” Luminaries included songwriting great Irving Berlin, whose 1950 Broadway tune “They Like Ike” became the campaign slogan “I Like Ike.” The same issue included a story about an “overzealous Eisenhower supporter” in Dallas who interrupted a concert by “RCA Victor songbird” Mindy Carson and “insisted on pinning an ‘I Like Ike’ button on her shoulder.
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Family Values
The Nov. 24, 1962, Billboard buzzed about John F. Kennedy impersonator Vaughn Meader’s album The First Family, calling it a “comedy smash” that “electrified the industry.” The title’s success helped warm the market chill that followed the Cuban missile crisis, one of the defining moments of Kennedy’s presidency. The Dec. 8, 1962, issue said the album boosted “a gradually improving sales situation following the partial solution of the Cuban scare.” “I had someone come in for a copy of The First Family the other day and they left the store with $32 worth of records,” a Miami retailer explained. “That’s what one of these smashes can do.”
Get Carter
Soon after the 1976 election, the Nov. 13 issue described Jimmy Carter as “a friend in the White House who’s sympathetic… to the music industry.” The Allman Brothers Band had played a fundraising role in his primary campaign, and the music business “got a lot of early support for him both through contributions and performances when cash was critical,” Capricorn Records president Phil Walden said. It wasn’t just Southern rock that carried Carter: The Sept. 18, 1976, issue reported on “a mobile disco operation in Atlanta” that was “discoing around the country” to raise support for Carter.
Bills, Bills, Bills
The Nov. 14, 1992, Billboard covered a CMJ Music Marathon panel in New York titled “Are We Really Voting Tipper Gore Into the White House?” — a then-controversial idea, considering she had taken a stand against music with explicit lyrics marketed to children. Panelists had “an ‘anti-Tipper-but-voting-for-Clinton-anyway’ theme.’ ” More than two decades later, Bill Clinton posed with Jon Bon Jovi for the cover of the Nov. 5, 2016, issue, to spotlight their philanthropy. “This is Bon Jovi’s Be Kind to a Senior Night,” the former president joked during the photo shoot.
This article appears in the Oct. 26, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Election Day is less than a week away, and viral comedian Randy Rainbow is making one last pitch against former president Donald Trump in his latest parody video.
On Tuesday (Oct. 29), Rainbow sat down for one more fake interview with the twice-impeached former president, checking in on him as the businessman-turned-politican heads into the final stretch of his campaign (“You look like s–t, how are you feeling?” Rainbow asked with a smile), before wondering aloud why the polls were so close. “I can’t sleep nights,” Rainbow declared. “I keep imagining the dark, hate-filled, Orwellian, deep-fried, comb-over, fever dream hellscape this country will become if your crazy a– wins!”
With the premise set, Rainbow launched into his latest parody track, “Magadu.” Lifting the melody of Olivia Newton-John and the Electric Light Orchestra’s 1980 hit “Xanadu” from the film of the same name, Rainbow immediately takes the song’s premise of a mythical, heavenly place in the track’s title and flips it on its head.
“A place where nobody wants to go/ A country so lame and low/ They call it Magadu,” he sings. “But if you vote for this bag of d–ks/ As soon as Nov. 6/ We’ll be in Magadu!”
As Rainbow speculated about the “dark dystopia of absurd extremes” that would occur under a second Trump presidency, the singer made sure to point to Project 2025, the much-discussed 900-page document outlining a plan for Trump to consolidate power in his second presidency and help impose ultra-conservative policies around the country.
“In the year of Project 2025/ Those creeps gonna kick their creepy plans into overdrive/ No more protections or kindness or joy/ And guess who’s gonna be their poster boy?” Rainbow sings on the bridge. “When Planet Earth dries up and demagogues thrive/ No education and nobody’s free/ They’re gonna set us back a century.”
Closing out his song, Rainbow made his choice in the 2024 election clear as a clip of Vice President Kamala Harris saying “we will not go back” played alongside his final plea: “Let’s no go there, there’s no clean air/ Don’t wanna go, girl, just say no to Magadu!”
Watch the full video above.
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Source: The Washington Post / Getty
The Washington Post has become the latest so-called progressive publication to feel the wrath of the fall-out following its decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in this uncomfortably tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and the orangey-white nationalist who has normalized slinging lies and bigotry from the political stage.
According to anonymous courses cited in an NPR report, more than 200,000 people canceled their subscriptions to the Post after the publication announced it is “returning to its roots” by staying neutral in the race to the White House and declining to endorse Harris or Donald Trump.
if you’re in line to cancel your washington post subscription, stay in line pic.twitter.com/y2DEOSrVl0
— Florida Chris (@chrislongview) October 28, 2024
It’s not terribly surprising that the Post is basically hemorrhaging subscribers, considering folks on social media put out the call to send a message to the Post and its owner, Jeff Bezos, that its readers won’t stick around if it won’t make an endorsement in an election this crucial.
BREAKING: Jeff Bezos is forcing the Washington Post NOT to endorse Kamala Harris for President — just in case trump wins the election.
🚨EVERYBODY CANCEL YOUR WASHINGTON POST SUBSCRIPTIONS NOW. 🚨
FUCK YOU, JEFF BEZOS. pic.twitter.com/joQOvl5H8z
— BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ (@mmpadellan) October 25, 2024
From Variety:
On Friday, Washington Post CEO and publisher William Lewis wrote in an article on the paper’s website, “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.” The Post has endorsed a candidate in every presidential election since 1976, with the exception of 1988. Lewis, who joined the post in November 2023, was formerly CEO of Dow Jones & Co. and publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
As first reported by NPR, Bezos — who bought the Washington Post in 2013 — had recently decided that the newspaper would not endorse either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump in the 2024 election. The paper’s editorial board had already drafted an endorsement of Harris. Some observers (and, evidently, thousands of subscribers) interpreted the move as an attempt by Bezos to avoid getting targeted for attacks by Trump.
The fallout for the Post comes just a few days after the Los Angeles Times lost its editorial chief, who resigned over the publication’s relatively new owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, ordered the Times’ editorial board not to endorse Harris after endorsing a Democratic president in every election since 2008. Journalist Mariel Garza said in her resignation letter that it mattered that the largest newspaper in California declined to endorse “in a race this important,” and that “it matters that we won’t even be straight with people about it.”
“It makes us look craven and hypocritical, maybe even a bit sexist and racist,” Garza wrote. “How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country, and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger — who we previously endorsed for the U.S. Senate?”
Yeah — this is the wrong time for major news outlets to choose silence in the name of pseudo-neutrality and objectivity. The choice between a non-fascist woman who will have worked in all three branches of government if elected and the guy from The Apprentice who spouts non-stop hate speech and propaganda is clear. The Post and the Times needed to do the right thing.
Give Joni Mitchell an assist on Hillary Clinton’s new book.
Appearing at the Detroit Opera House on Monday (Oct. 28) to promote Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty, the former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State told her interviewer, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, that her eighth book (fifth as the sole author) was inspired by watching Mitchell sing “Both Sides Now” — the hit song that gave Clinton’s book its title — at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards in February.
“I saw her and she sang ‘Both Sides Now,’ which is one of my all-time favorite songs,” said Clinton, who suggested the “young people” in the crowd Google it. “It’s about life and love and I listened to her sing it. She’d had a cerebral aneurysm [in 2015] and there she was back on stage singing that incredible anthem about what you think of life, what you think of love at different points of your own journey. I heard that song in my twenties. Obviously I’ve heard it in every decade of my life, and I wanted to take a moment to write some essays about where I see my life now, and particularly about my family, about my friends, about some of these experiences I’ve had, like being First Lady of our country, but also politics, which I care deeply about.”
Clinton added that while some early interviews about the book — whose title was taken from a “Both Sides Now” lyric — were about politics and elections, “I was really thinking more about the people who have been important in my life, the relationships…. It was more a reflection of, ‘OK, I’m this age. At this point in my life, what’s really important?’”
While the nearly 90-minute conversation hit on expected political topics — Clinton’s support of Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her disdain for former President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement — she also spoke about her recent work in the arts, including co-producing the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Suffs (which is about the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S. that led to the 19th Amendment, which provided women with the right to vote), and her HiddenLight Productions company with daughter Chelsea, whose releases include the Emmy Award-winning documentary In Her Hands and the new doc Zurawski V. Texas about abortion bans in that state. She said Suffs, which is slated to close Jan. 5 on Broadway, has been “absolutely thrilling” and will be heading out on a national tour in the near future.
Clinton also has a Grammy Award in the best spoken word album category, which led Benson to point out that she’s only an Oscar away from being an EGOT. “I don’t know when or if there’s an Academy Award in the future,” Clinton responded, “but I just am so committed to storytelling…. We want to tell stories, we want to be part of the truth-telling part of America… and tell stories about what’s going on in America, in our lives, and particularly women’s lives.”
Clinton did say we should not hold our collective breath for a future Grammy in a musical category.
“I love to sing, but nobody loves to listen,” she confessed, noting that she would sing to Chelsea when she was a baby, with “Moon River” a particular favorite. “This went on for 14, 15, 16 months, something like that. I’d sing to her. Then when she learned to talk…Y’know, people think the trauma of my life is the 2016 election [Clinton won the popular vote but lost to Trump in the Electoral College]. There is that. But (Chelsea) took her little finger and put it on my mouth and said, ‘No sing, mommy.’”
She has, however, continued to sing to her three grandchildren – “When my daughter’s not around.”
Donald Trump apparently wanted 50 Cent in da club. The Grammy-winning rapper appeared on The Breakfast Club on Tuesday (Oct. 29), and shared that he was offered $3 million to appear at Trump’s recent New York City rally held at Madison Square Garden.
During their chat, DJ Envy asked 50, “Is it true Donald Trump tried to give you money to endorse him one time?”
The rapper told his hosts that he got a call from the twice-impeached former president about “Sunday” (Oct. 27), with Jess Hilarious clarifying by asking whether he was talking about MSG, which 50 confirmed.
“They wanted you to perform ‘Many Men’ at the RNC too, right?” Charlamagne Tha God then asked. (The Get Rich or Die Tryin’ track soundtracked Trump’s entrance to Adin Ross’ stream in August.)
“Yeah. They offered me $3 million!” the “In Da Club” rapper shared. A surprised Charlamagne then asked if it was for the event at Madison Square Garden or the RNC, with 50 replying that it was indeed for the MSG rally. He also replied in the affirmative when Charlamagne asked whether he was offered payment as well for the Republican National Convention.
50 — who did not appear at the RNC in July nor at Trump’s NYC rally — went on to explain why he rejected the offers. “I didn’t even go far,” he told the three hosts of the offers. “I’m afraid of politics, you understand? I do not like it. … It’s because when you do get involved in it, no matter how you feel, somebody passionately disagrees with you. Look, if you say ‘I stay away from religion,’ I stay away from politics. Religion, that’s the formula for the confusion that it sent Kanye to Japan. He said something about both of those things and now he can only go to Japan. So you know I’m like I don’t want to get in that, man.”
Billboard has reached out to Trump’s campaign for comment.
In recent years, Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) has supported Trump, before declaring on July 4, 2020, that he was running for president as well. (He did not get far in his efforts, missing South Carolina’s July 20 deadline that year to get on the ballot.) Then beginning in October 2022, the rapper repeatedly made antisemitic hate speech, which resulted in him facing consequences that included losing brand deals, declines of airplay of his music catalog and more.
In 2020, 50 Cent supported Trump — who in May was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records — before retracting his endorsement after former girlfriend Chelsea Handler called him out. “F–k Donald Trump, I never liked him,” the rapper later said when retweeting a video of the comedian — who preveriously referred the rapper as her favorite ex — on The Tonight Show in which she criticized her ex for his support of the business mogul.
Watch 50’s interview on The Breakfast Club below:
Bob Weir is voting for Kamala Harris and her vice presidential pick, Tim Walz, in the upcoming election. The Grateful Dead rocker took to Instagram on Monday (Oct. 28) to share a photo of himself wearing a Dead-inspired Harris-Walz 2024 shirt, alongside a snap of Walz holding the tee and another with his wife, Natascha […]
Swifties are speaking out against comedian Tony Hinchecliff after he gave a controversial speech at a Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden over the weekend.
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In addition to a series of racist remarks about Puerto Rico, the Latin community, Black people, Jewish people, Palestinians and more, Hinchecliff’s speech also included several derogatory statements about music stars. “I don’t know about you, but I think that Travis Kelce might be the next O.J. Simpson,” he said in reference to the Super Bowl-winning boyfriend of Taylor Swift, whom Trump called out on X last month after the superstar endorsed Kamala Harris for president.
Simpson was a successful professional football player who was charged in June 1994 for murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman, after the two were found stabbed to death in Los Angeles. The now-infamous eight-month murder trial led to his acquittal in October 1995. Three years later, in 1998, he was found liable for the murders in a civil suit from the victims’ families.
Following Hinchecliff’s speech, Swift’s fans flooded social media with criticism of the remark and the distasteful implication that Kelce might murder the “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” singer. “While you’re here, can you please explain in detail why calling Travis Kelce the ‘next OJ’ is funny?” one fan asked Hinchcliffe in response to his defense of his set, noting that people have “no sense of humor.”
“How utterly offensive,” another wrote, while a third expressed, “That racist comedian’s jokes were so disgustingly racist and vile that the #swifties haven’t caught wind about the fact that he made a joke about Travis Kelce being the next OJ Simpson, implying he will k*ll Taylor Swift, and everyone laughed.”
See more reactions below.
Are we going to talk about the Tony guy at Trumps rally saying Travis might be the next OJ Simpson?? Like is he implying Travis should kill Taylor Swift? Is there some context I’m missing here or something???— Black Queen💗 (@Melaninqueen202) October 28, 2024
The PR comments are getting a lot of attention as well they should.But also can we talk about: the guy literally joked about Taylor Swift. Being killed. By her boyfriend.Horrifying … and also I dunno maybe further motivates the swiftie vote because … what a joke (“joke”).— Danielle Kurtzleben (@titonka) October 28, 2024
The OJ reference is in really poor taste. The guy brutally murdered his wife and her friend.
To imply that Travis Kelce could become like that is just sick. Not funny.
— Flyover Zone Patriot 🇺🇸 (@SharkeyTim) October 27, 2024
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Eminem and Kid Rock are both from Detroit and both have been outspoken over the years when it comes to American politics. The two musicians stand on different ends of the political spectrum, but one thing they can agree on is that celebrities speaking their mind could be a good thing (depending on what’s said, […]