Pop
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On today’s (Oct. 30) episode of the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century podcast, we reach No. 6 of our list with a pop star who became one of the great icons of the early 21st century — first as the artist behind a string of smash hits and unforgettable pop culture moments, then […]
Elvis Costello is fully in support of Olivia Rodrigo. In a new interview with Vanity Fair, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer shared his thoughts on Rodrigo’s Sour album opener, “Brutal,” which seemingly took inspiration from his angsty 1978 anthem “Pump It Up.” He told the publication that artists “allude to [the song] in […]
Ethan Slater has largely kept his romance with Ariana Grande private, but he took a moment to carefully gush over the “Yes, And?” superstar in his recent cover story with GQ. At one point in the interview, Slater responded to rumors that Grande’s Eternal Sunshine track, “Imperfect for You” is about him. “Messy, completely distressed/ […]
Michael Jackson is in rarified air when it comes to billion-view music videos on YouTube. This week, the late King of Pop notched his fifth visual to cross that mark when the gangster-themed clip for his 1988 single “Smooth Criminal” crossed the 10-digit mark.
The track from Jackson’s seventh album, 1987’s Bad, was brought to vivid life by director Colin Chilvers, who tapped into a 1930 gangster nightclub vibe for one of MJ’s most beloved videos. Jackson also paid homage to one of his musical and dancing heroes in it via a white suit and matching fedora that tipped its hat to dancer/actor/singer Fred Astaire.
The nearly 10-minute mini movie opens with Jackson running to the door of an underground club — where he’s blasted by a gust of white wind — before entering to silence as the clubgoers stare him down warily. In classic MJ fashion, he flips a coin through the tense air, landing it perfectly into the slot of a juke box, which, of course, cues up the rhythmic Quincy Jones co-produced track.
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What comes next is a clinic in classic Jackson, with the singer popping, locking and skittering across the club’s floor while executing some of his signature spins and fancy footwork while breaking hearts and deftly dispatching would-be assassins with his signature elan. The action culminates in the video’s centerpiece movie, the “anti-gravity lean,” during which the track drops out and time slows down, before the beat picks back up and the singer slides into his moonwalk and then appears to defy the rules of the physical universe by keeping his feet planted and back straight while his body dips into a nearly 45 degree angle before righting itself.
According to a 2018 article in The Telegraph, the stunt was achieved via unseen cables, because, as neurosurgeon Dr. Nishant Yagnick told the paper, “It’s not really possible physically to do it. He was cheating gravity.” Jackson later patented a specially designed shoe with a hook in it so that he could recreate the stunt live, as most humans are able to pull off, at best, a 30-degree lean without injuring themselves.
A group dance number brings things to a close as Jackson opens fire with a machine gun, sending the revelers running for the exits.
“Smooth Criminal” joins a handful of other all-time-classic Jackson videos with more than one billion YouTube views, including such beloved hits as “Beat It,” “Billie Jean,” “They Don’t Care About Us” and MJ’s Halloween-appropriate 14-minute scarefest, “Thriller.”
Watch the “Smooth Criminal” video below.
If you were looking for a breezy break from the unrelenting torrent of news about the Nov. 5 presidential election, SEVENTEEN had just what you needed on Wednesday morning (Oct. 30). The 13-member K-pop boy band marked their debut performance on ABC’s Good Morning America by providing some musical caffeine via the first U.S. TV run-through of their new single, “LOVE, MONEY, FAME” from their 12th mini album, SPILL THE FEELS.
Though the song’s featured artist, DJ Khaled, was not on hand, S.COUPS, JEONGHAN, JOSHUA, JUN, HOSHI, WONWOO, WOOZI, THE 8, MINGYU, DK, SEUNGKWAN, VERNON and DINO, rocked the GMA stage with their signature mix of smooth vocal harmonies, rapping and intricate choreography as the members took turns in the spotlight for the English-language version of the song.
The performance came after the group racked up their sixth top 10-charting release on the Billboard 200 album chart with SPILL, which debuted at No. 5 with 66,000 equivalent album units earned for the week ending Oct. 24.
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The superstar group kicked off the U.S. leg of their [RIGHT HERE] world tour in Chicago last week, marking their first American dates in more than two years. The three-hour, 22-song show showcased tracks from across their four album, 12 EP catalog, including the debut live performance of “LOVE, MONEY, FAME.”
American CARATs can check them out next on Halloween night (Oct. 31) at the Frost Bank Center in San Antonio (and again the next night), Oakland Arena in Oakland, CA (Nov. 5-6) and BMO Stadium in Los Angeles (Nov. 9-10); the latter will be their first U.S. stadium shows.
Watch SEVENTEEN perform “LOVE, MONEY, FAME” on GMA below.
As exciting and whirlwind as her romance was with Jonas Brothers singer and solo star Joe Jonas was, looking back on it now Sophie Turner can kind of sketch out what went wrong. In a new Harper’s Bazaar 2024 Women of the Year profile, the former Game of Thrones actress said her upcoming 2025 psychological thriller Trust — in which she plays an actress on the run after a high-profile internet scandal — “really mirrored my life from this past year.”
She said filming the movie was a very “cathartic” experience and a chance to “let out some serious anger, which was fun.” Not as fun was the end of her four-year marriage to Jonas, whom she married in 2019 in a Las Vegas wedding overseen by an Elvis impersonator that was livestreamed by Diplo.
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The couple subsequently had two children together, daughters Willa and Delphine, before Jonas filed for divorce in Sept. 2023, saying that their marriage was “irretrievably broken” and requesting shared custody of their children. Asked what went wrong in the high-profile relationship that found the glamorous jet-setting couple lighting up red carpets around the world during their union?
“I’m going through a legal process right now where I can’t really say much, but it was incredibly sad. We had a beautiful relationship, and it was hard,” Turner said of the highs of the marriage, and the lows of its dissolution. One of the reported points of contention in their split was Turner’s desire for their girls to grow up in her native England, and now that she’s back in the U.K. she told the magazine that her life feels like it’s back on the rails.
“I’m so happy to be back. It felt as if my life was on pause until I returned to England,” she said. “I just never really feel like myself when I’m not in London, with my friends and family. I was away for so long – six years – and it was when my friends were getting engaged, and when I got pregnant. I went for dinner with someone the other day, and she said, ‘I never got to touch your belly.’ We didn’t have those key experiences with each other.”
Turner, 28, said she was homesick living in Los Angeles and Miami with Jonas, revealing that the first thing she would do in every city they lived in was “find a British shop and stock up on a month’s worth of chocolate,” comfort food that helped her feel settled, but still didn’t make up for the aspects of American society she found most troubling. “The gun violence, Roe v Wade being overturned… Everything just kind of piled on,” she said. “After the [May 2022] Uvalde [school] shooting, I knew it was time to get the f–k out of there.”
Now she’s got her own place in West London, though Turner said she’s currently staying with a friend while the girls are with Jonas in the U.S. because being home alone without her kids is “absolute agony” for her. Turner — who can be seen now in the ITV crime drama Joan — also revealed that before becoming a mother she was “very depressed and anxious,” and used to isolate herself a lot.
“Now, I think I live my life for them. I want them to see me having a social life and enjoying work and thriving in my career and relationships,” she said. “I want them to see a hard-working mum. I’ll come back and say, ‘This is why Mummy was away – it’s because she’s doing this for you, so Father Christmas can come with a big bundle of presents.’”
In September, a Florida judge declared Jonas and Turner officially divorced and single, approving a confidential, moderated agreement between the two that split their assets and detailed spousal support and custody of their children. In January, Turner dropped her “wrongful retention” suit when the ex’s reached a co-parenting agreement.
Coldplay have notched a lot of firsts on their current Music of the Spheres world tour. But on Wednesday night (Oct. 30) in Melbourne, Australia the group did something they’ve never done in their entire quarter century run together: they played a show without one of their four founding members.
In an Instagram post that went up after the gig at Marvel Stadium, the band announced that bassist Guy Berryman was forced to sit out the gig, noting, “Tonight was the first time in our band’s history that we’ve played a show without all four members onstage. Guy was taken ill unexpectedly just before the show. Thank you for carrying us through it.”
So, instead, singer Chris Martin, guitarist Jonny Buckland and drummer Will Champion carried on, with Martin telling the crowd before the gig properly began, “I have to say, thank you so much for coming to our show today. It’s a shame but we waited for the last minute to tell you that our beautiful bass player Guy is very, very sick. And will not be (playing) for the first time. I’m sorry for you guys down here who are waiting to see Guy. He’s not going to be able to play today. We’ll have a slightly different show and we’ll do our best to make it amazing, and I know that it will be amazing because we’re in Melbourne with all of you beautiful people.”
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He added, however, that if the crowd noticed some “mistakes, and some problems, it’s because we don’t have our bass player. And we only had about an hour to figure it out. And we have figured it out. We have a strange, alien, weird friend character playing bass, or looking like he’s playing bass. So you’ll hear Guy, but you just won’t see him. Because he’s vomiting.”
Instead, Martin revealed that the band’s co-producer and engineer, Bill Rahko, would be subbing in while wearing on the signature space helmets that are part of the eye-popping spectacle that has criss-crossed the globe for nearly three years to date, grossing more than $1 billion.
Coldplay recently celebrated their first Billboard top 200 No. 1 album in 10 years. After wrapping their four-night stand at Marvel Stadium, Coldplay will move on to four nights at Accor Stadium in Sydney and three nights at Eden Park in Auckland, N.Z. before taking time off and re-booting the tour in January with gigs in the United Arab Emirates and India on their way to wrapping up the outing with a 10-night stand at Wembley Stadium in London.
Check out fan footage of Rahko on stage in Melbourne.
Next year’s emo-tastic lineup for the annual When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas has yet another stacked lineup of all your Hot Topic faves. Just weeks after this year’s event swept up all its glitter and guyliner, organizers revealed that the October 18, 2025 edition will feature the return of Panic! At the Disco, who announced their split in early 2023 and played their final shows in early 2024 in Europe.
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Not only that, but the band will celebrate the 20th anniversary of their beloved 2005 debut album A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out in its entirety, regaling the crowd with renditions of classics including “The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide is Press Coverage,” “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” and “But It’s Better If You Do.”
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Other acts lined up to hit the Las Vegas Festival Grounds for the show include: Weezer, Blink-182, Avril Lavigne, The Offspring, All Time Low, The Used, Knocked Loose, Yellowcard, Simple Plan, Taking Back Sunday, Jack’s Mannequin, The Story So Far, Alexisonfire, Bad Religion, The Gaslight Anthem, I Prevail, Ice Nine Kills, Motionless in White, Plain White T’s, Straylight Run and many more.
Sign-up for the presale beings on Friday (Nov. 1) at 10 a.m. PT., with the general onsale kicking off on Friday at 2 p.m. PT.
This year’s WWWY fest took place on Oct. 19-20 and featured My Chemical Romance playing their landmark album The Black Parade, as well as sets from Nada Surf, 3OH!3, Neck Deep, New Found Glory, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Atreyu, Saves the Day, Silverstein, Coheed and Cambria and many more.
See the full lineup and Panic’s announcement below.
Even though he wrapped his Love on Tour outing two years ago and hasn’t released a new album since 2022’s Harry’s House, Harry Styles has definitely still got it. For proof just look at People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive 2024 Readers’ Choice Poll, which saw almost 350,000 votes cast in what the mag said was […]
Olivia Rodrigo is likely still on a sugar high after wrapping up her sold-out 95-show Guts world tour. So, naturally, on Tuesday night (Oct. 29) when she visited the Tonight Show, host Jimmy Fallon asked her to talk about two of the wildest things that happened to her on the road.
After holding up a copy of the Touring Issue of Billboard magazine with Rodrigo on the cover, Fallon dug right in on the singer’s intense road run-in with some border cops. “I got in trouble with the law for the first time in my life,” Rodrigo admitted. “We were going from Canada to, like, Portland or something. We were at border control, I give them my passport, and they’re like, ‘OK, whatever.’ And they knock on the door and they’re like, ‘We need Olivia.’”
Thinking it might be a border agent wanting an autograph for their daughter, Rodrigo came out of her bus at 3 a.m. to see what the problem was. “I’m delirious, and they take me to a room—and it’s an interrogation room, and there’s like, a big cop [with] a gun,” she recalled. “He’s like, ‘Have you ever been arrested?’ I’m, like, ‘No, I haven’t been arrested.’ He’s like, ‘Are you sure?’ I’m like gaslighting [myself]. I’m, like, Oh, my God, maybe I was, like, arrested and I didn’t know it,” she said breathlessly.
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After being warned she could go to jail for lying to a federal officer, Rodrigo said she started to freak out, worrying she would not be let back into the U.S. “Like, I’m so scared. I’m, like, having a panic attack,” she said. After a 30-minute interrogation, the border agent looked at her again and asked her to spell her last name. “[I said] ‘Olivia Rodrigo, like, R, O, D, R, I, G, O,’ And he’s, like, ‘Oh, there’s a girl who looks just like you, that’s your same age, that’s been arrested multiple times, and her name’s Olivia Rodriguez.’”
Fallon also asked Rodrigo, 21, to run down some highlights of the tour, which she said included going to the Philippines for the first time, which was special for her due to her Filipino heritage. “Yeah, it was so special and everyone was so great. [And] such good singers!,” she said, remembering how her fans there sang all her lyrics back to her perfectly on pitch and in key.
Jimmy also just had to bring up one of the most embarrassing moments from the tour, a mishap in Melbourne, Australia where Olivia went crashing through a trap door in the stage. After playing the clip of Rodrigo handling the trip-and-fall like a pro, the singer said it was actually “really scary. Watching the video back is pretty terrifying. I mean, show must go on, that’s showbiz, baby.”
That said, Rodrigo said it was actually kind of a “beautiful” accident in hindsight because she had just been in the Philippines and she’d been thinking about her family and heritage and after getting shaken up by the fall she went to the hospital to make sure she hadn’t sustained a concussion. While there, she was treated by a Filipino nurse who had the same name as the singer’s grandpa, who passed earlier this year.
“And so I was like ‘wow that was him looking out for me,’” she said. “Making sure I didn’t get hurt and so I’m really happy it happened. I think it’s a beautiful story.”
Rodrigo also plugged her new Netflix concert special Olivia Rodrigo: GUTS World Tour and stuck around to play a fun game of “What’s Behind Me.”
Watch Rodrigo on The Tonight Show below.