Pop
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While the headliners of Coachella 2024 are Lana Del Rey, Tyler, the Creator and Doja Cat, a pack of fellow A-listers also showed up on stages across the Empire Polo Ground over weekend one, with surprise performances from Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Justin Bieber, Shakira, A$AP Rocky, Lauryn Hill, 21 Savage, David Guetta, Childish Gambino […]
Chowon, a member of the K-pop girl group ICHILLIN’, was reportedly hospitalized after being hit by a foul ball at a professional baseball game that she and her band mates were participating in on Tuesday (April 16), according to local reports in Korea.
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At a matchup between the Kiwoom Heroes and KT Wiz and Kiwoom held at the Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul, ICHILLIN’ opened the game with member Yeju throwing the first pitch and ICHILLIN’ leader E.Ji taking the ceremonial first bat ahead of a group performance later. While watching the game and waiting to perform, the group’s youngest member, 18-year-old Chowon, was struck by a foul ball during the third inning.
According to reports, the foul ball struck Chowon in the back of the head with the blow knocking the singer unconscious. She was taken in for medical assistance in the stadium and regained consciousness with the aid of on-the-scene physicians and officials. The star was transferred to a nearby hospital.
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The initial reports indicate Chowon was not seriously injured. However, the performance from ICHILLIN was canceled after the incident.
A YouTube account has uploaded video footage from ICHILLIN’s time at the baseball game where viewers can hear the crack of a baseball and see ICHILLIN and those in the audience near them spot a high-flying foul ball coming towards them. According to social media comments, the uploader chose not to include footage of the moment the ball made impact. The moment happens during the last five seconds of the video:
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Billboard has contacted KM Entertainment, the label and representation for ICHILLIN’, but did not immediately receive a response.
Consisting of members Chowon, E.Ji, Yeju, Jackie, Chaerin, Joonie and Jiyoon, ICHILLIN’ made their debut in September 2021 with the single “Got’Ya” to compete alongside the latest crop of K-pop groups vying for international attention. With three EPs under their belt, the group’s latest record, Feelin’ Hot, dropped on March 7, led by the single “On My Lips,” with its music video garnering almost a million views to date.
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Forget “The Power of Love,” the world is going to get an up-close behind-the-scenes look at the power of Céline Dion in her new documentary, which finally received an official release date. On Tuesday (April 16), via a joint Instagram post on the official pages for Dion and Prime Movies, Amazon MGM Studios announced that […]
While enjoying Lana Del Rey‘s headlining set during the opening night of Coachella weekend one, Justin Bieber and his wife, model Hailey Bieber, were making serious heart-eyes at each other — as shared by the pop star in a post via Instagram on Monday. In the video, set to Mitski’s romantic slow jam “My Love […]
She knows she didn’t invent the idea of “gay pop,” but pop singer and Internet personality JoJo Siwa would like to see the subset become an “official genre” of music.
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During an interview on SiriusXM’s Hits 1 Miami With Mack & Jen, Siwa clarified the comments she made in a viral video interview with Billboard, saying she simply wants to see more queer art get recognized. “So, here’s the thing — ‘gay pop’ is a thing that people have done, but it is not an official genre of music,” she explained. “It is a style, but it is how there’s rap, there’s rock, there’s R&B, there’s pop — if you look on the iTunes charts … this should be a literal genre of music.”
The former Dance Moms star continued, saying that she doesn’t feel the current categorizations for LGBTQ+ artists are sufficient. “There’s so many gay pop artists … but I think that those gay pop artists do deserve a bigger home than what they have right now,” she said.
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Siwa originally spoke about the concept of “gay pop” during an interview with Billboard‘s Tetris Kelly about her new song “Karma,” when she claimed that she told her label (Columbia Records) that she “wanted to start a new genre … called ‘gay pop.’” Commenters quickly called out the singer for claiming to have created a “genre” that has existed for years — even LGBTQ+ pioneers Tegan and Sara shared a video on TikTok where they silently stared into a camera following the 20-year-old’s comments.
In a later interview with TMZ, Siwa clarified that she didn’t intend to say that she “invented” the concept of “gay pop” music. “I am not the inventor of gay pop, for sure not. But I do want to be a piece of making it bigger than it already is,” she said. “I’m not the president [of gay pop], but I might be the CEO, or the CMO. I can be the CMO, the chief marketing officer, and use my marketing tactics whether people like it or not.”
Elsewhere in her interview on SiriusXM, Siwa bemoaned the ongoing backlash to her comments. “I could say I want world peace, and everyone would be like, ‘How dare you want peace for the world!’” she said. “People ask me all the time, they’re like, ‘Do you feel like you have to be very careful about what you say?’ And I’m like, ‘No, because no matter what I say, it’s going down anyways.’”
Watch a clip from Siwa’s interview below:
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Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes, and sneaky EDM remixes catch Taylor Swift by surprise.
In a video from the Neon Carnival party during the first weekend of Coachella, the pop star can be seen having a hilarious reaction to hearing her Billboard Hot 100-topping single “Cruel Summer” come on over the speakers between sets, quickly realizing that it’s slightly different from the one she’s used to.
In the blurry clip, Swift sits down in what appears to be a VIP area, singing and dancing along to her own lyrics as the Lover hit blares over the noisy crowd. Halfway through the chorus, though, the 14-time Grammy winner’s original mix shifts into a club-ready dance track, with the second syllable of the word “cool” repeating over and over in the lead-up to a bass drop — “It’s a cruel summer, it’s cool -ool -ool -ool -ool…” For a second, Swift continues singing the words as usual, but when she realizes that she’s the only one, she freezes in place before looking around with a confused expression on her face.
The man behind the remix is Vanderpump Rules star James Kennedy, who was DJing at Neon Carnival on Saturday night in Thermal, Calif., about a 15-minute drive from Coachella. When reached by Billboard for his reaction to the viral video, Kennedy was still processing the fact that he had DJ’d for the likes of Swift and her Kansas City Chiefs star boyfriend Travis Kelce.
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“Not only a dream come true DJing Neon Carnival, but the fact that Taylor and Travis were there feeling the vibes and enjoying themselves was unreal!” Kennedy said in an exclusive statement, mentioning that his Swiftie girlfriend Ally Lewber, who also stars on Vanderpump Rules, couldn’t believe it either. “Ally and I were just at the Eras Tour in L.A! (Ally still can’t get over it haha!)“
Given that Swift sings “Cruel Summer” every night on her global Eras Tour, it makes sense that her brain might have been on autopilot for a second or two of the remix. The track first dropped in 2019 as part of the singer’s seventh studio album Lover but wasn’t made a radio single until 2023, after which it steadily ascended to No. 1 on the Hot 100 in October, a full four years after its release.
Swift also spent day 2 of the festival’s first weekend watching Bleachers and Ice Spice’s Coachella sets alongside Kelce, with the pair adorably dancing together in the crowd. In just a few days, she’ll release her highly anticipated 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, complete with collaborations from Post Malone and Florence + the Machine.
See Swift’s startled reaction to hearing Kennedy’s remix below.
Ariana Grande loves her Nonna! The pop superstar took to Instagram on Tuesday (April 16) to celebrate her grandmother Marjorie Grande’s history-making chart achievement. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news “Celebrating the one and only, most beautiful Nonna who has now made history for being the senior […]
Another piece of Taylor Swift‘s The Tortured Poets Department has fallen into place. With just three days left until the new album arrives, the 34-year-old pop star unveiled another lyric from the 16-track set in partnership with Spotify on Tuesday (April 16) — and it’s a loaded one.
The streaming service premiered the snippet of an unknown track at its Swiftie library installation in Los Angeles Tuesday, the first of three days the pop-up is set to take place. A display case resting on pressed flowers and a lacy white veil at the event finds an open book of “Tortured Poets Department” stationary reading the new lyric in all-caps: “Even statues crumble if they’re made to wait.”
Around the same time, a video appeared on the Spotify page for Tortured Poets showing Swift herself sitting at a typewriter, hammering out the same phrase.
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The revelation isn’t the first time the metaphor-loving Grammy winner has given fans a taste of the new album, which follows her 2022 Billboard 200-topping LP Midnights. On April 8, the day of the 2024 total solar eclipse, she shared the topical lyric on social media: “Crowd goes wild at her fingertips. Half moonshine, full eclipse.”
Then, on Sunday (April 14), Swift celebrated the news that Target would be carrying special vinyl variants of Tortured Poets by posting another fragment: “I wish I could un-recall how we almost had it all.”
It’s also possible that the taglines assigned to each deluxe edition of the record double as lyrics. For instance, the backside of “The Manuscript” version of the project features the phrase “I love you, it’s ruining my life,” while “The Bolter” carries the message, “You don’t get to tell me about sad.”
The very first piece of the album Swift gifted to fans, however, came on the day she announced Tortured Poets at the 2024 Grammys. Shortly after breaking the news during her best pop vocal acceptance speech, the superstar posted on Instagram: “And so I enter into evidence my tarnished coat of arms/ My muses, acquired like bruises, my talismans and charms/ The tick, tick, tick of love bombs/ My veins of pitch black ink/ All’s fair in love and poetry …”
See how Spotify unveiled the new Tortured Poets Department lyric below.
Michael J. Fox has been added to the list of celebrity Swifties. The Back to the Future star sat down with People recently, where he named Taylor Swift as someone who will have an even greater impact in the next 50 years. “I think she’s going to be a really important person. I think she […]
JoJo Siwa‘s edgy new era might be all about charting a new path forward, but her “Karma” is bringing along some key players from her past. In a conversation with Billboard News, renowned choreographer Richy Jackson details how his approach to choreography has evolved since he first worked with the pop star more than a decade ago.
“I met JoJo on a show I was judging called Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition,” he recounts. “I think she was nine years old. Later on in her career, she was with Nickelodeon, she began doing Dance Moms with Abby Lee [Miller] and she started doing music on YouTube. I hadn’t seen her since that competition show, and I happened to run into her and her mom at Studio City, and her mom was like, ‘Would you ever wanna choreograph for JoJo?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes!’”
Siwa placed fifth on season two of Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition, and appeared on seasons five and six of Dance Moms from 2015 to 2016. In 2017, the multi-hyphenate signed with Nickelodeon, under whom she acted in various programs, released several children’s songs and starred in her own feature film, The J Team, which earned her a pair of Children’s and Family Emmy nods. On the Kid Albums chart, Siwa has logged three entries, reaching as high as No. 12 with 2019’s Celebrate.
“She was 13 then. Chroeographing for her then … she was very young, the songs were for kids, it was with Nickelodeon,” explains Jackson. “There [were] certain dance moves I could do and not do, certain hip moves couldn’t make it into the choreography because it was for kids. But now, that she’s in her ‘adult pop star’ era that we’re about to get into — now, it’s like the game is open. We’ve been laughing, ’cause I’m like, ‘Ah, now we can do this move and do that move!” It’s more risque, so I’m excited. She’s just one of those artist that I feel is the next generation’s big pop star, and she just goes for it, and I love that about her.”
Jackson, of course, is no stranger to helping pop stars express their risque side through dance. His credits include the bulk of Lady Gaga‘s acclaimed videography — including 2009’s VMAs-sweeping “Bad Romance” and 2017’s headlining sets at Coachella and the Super Bowl Halftime Show — as well as Katy Perry‘s “California Gurls” and, now, Siwa’s “Karma.”
Siwa launched “Karma” with a flashy, choreogrpahy-packed music video on April 5, with the intent to achieve a rebrand similar to that of Miley Cyrus during her controversial Bangerz era back in 2013. “The last song JoJo played for me was ‘D.R.E.A.M.,’” says Jackson. “It was very young, very kiddie. Once I heard [“Karma”] I was like, ‘Yes!’ It was so unexpected … to hear this vibe on her, I loved it.”
In his chat with Billboard News, Jackson also reflects on his experience bringing Gaga’s iconic dance moves to the gaming landscape via an A.I.-utilizing Fortnite collaboration, recalls learning that he would be choreographing the Super Bowl Halftime Show and discusses the impact of TikTok on the contemporary dance scene.
Watch Richy Jackson’s full Billboard News interview above.