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Nothing pairs better with football than fried chicken and tequila. That’s why Popeyes is teaming up with Tequila Don Julio to curate a special Championship Lineup menu for the Super Bowl.
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The Popeyes x Tequila Don Julio Reposado Flavored Concha Chicken Sandwich includes a chicken breast fillet marinated in reposado tequila then fried in Popeyes crunchy buttermilk breading, topped with a tequila lime slaw, spicy spread, a barrel cured pickle and sandwiched between a concha roll. Additional items featured on the specialty menu include Popeyes x Tequila Don Julio Reposado Flavored Louisiana Garlic 3-Piece Wings with a specialty sauce and a Spicy Strawberry Hibiscus Flavored Lemonade Mocktail.
For one day only, on January 31, select Popeyes restaurants in New York City, Miami and New Orleans, as well as the hometowns of the teams headed to the Super Bowl — Philadelphia and Kansas City — will feature the collaboration for customers over 21 years of age. In New Orleans, where the Big Game will take place this year, the items will be available at the flagship restaurant on Canal Street for an extended period from January 31 through February 9, while supplies last.
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To celebrate the collaboration, Tinashe will head down to New Orleans to perform at the Popeyes x Tequila Don Julio bash on Feb. 7. “It’s two things I’m a fan of coming together,” she tells Billboard of the collaboration. “It’s fried chicken and tequila. What more could you ask for?”
While drinking tequila, the “Nasty” keeps it simple. “I’m usually taking shots,” she says with a laugh.
It’s also the second Super Bowl she’s attending. “The Super Bowl was always a huge day in my family. We have a ton of big sports fans in the house,” she shares. “The halftime performance is something I always look forward to every year. I’m just so excited to be back and part of the Super Bowl energy. It’s always so much fun.”
Her performance at the Popeyes x Tequila Don Julio bash will be equally as fun. “I always have a lot of high energy in my performances,” she says. “It’s going to be dancing, going to be on your feet. It’s going to be a real fun, high energy vibe and a celebration.”
If you’re unable to get your hands on the Championship Lineup menu, you can still redeem a buy one get one free chicken sandwich when purchasing Popeyes on UberEats, as well as a $5 code to redeem on Tequila Don Julio until Feb. 9.
Flavor Flav has Selena Gomez’s back. The Public Enemy rapper came to Gomez’s defense on X earlier this week in the wake of the backlash she faced following her emotional reaction opposing the mass deportations taking place around the U.S. with Donald Trump in office.
“Team Selena Gomez. Again. That woman is always so brave to share her truth,,, and so many are quick to bully her,” he wrote.
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There was a mixed reaction in Flav’s replies representing both sides. “She is so real and honest! Love her,” one person wrote.
Team Selena Gomez. Again. That woman is always so brave to share her truth,,, and so many are quick to bully her.— FLAVOR FLAV (@FlavorFlav) January 28, 2025
Another fired back: “Nobody loves defending illegals like she does!”
Over the weekend, a shaken-up Gomez posted an Instagram Story crying over the ICE arrests and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants in the United States. “I’m sorry,” she captioned the since-deleted clip with a Mexican flag (Gomez is half-Mexican from her father’s side).
“All my people are getting attacked, the children,” she said while sobbing. “I don’t understand. I’m so sorry, I wish I could do something, but I can’t. I don’t know what to do. I’ll try everything, I promise.”
After deleting the clip, she posted a follow-up addressing the backlash. “Apparently it’s not ok to show empathy for people,” Gomez added in a follow-up IG Story.
Republican politician Sam Parker even called for the Texas-bred star to be deported in a post on social media. However, Gomez was unfazed by the threat. “Oh, Mr. Parker, Mr. Parker,” she responded, per People. “Thanks for the laugh and the threat.”
Selena Gomez previously served as a producer on Netflix’s Living Undocumented documentary in 2019, which showcased the state of undocumented immigrant families in the United States.
The Emilia Pérez star also penned a Time essay in 2019 addressing immigration issues. “Undocumented immigration is an issue I think about every day, and I never forget how blessed I am to have been born in this country thanks to my family and the grace of circumstance,” she wrote.
It’s far from the first time Flavor Flav has shown love to Gomez. Back in November, he praised her for opening up about her mental health.
“I don’t know her personally,,, but Selena Gomez is one of the STRONGEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL people inside and out,” he gushed. “I applaud her for being so open about her health and mental health. And I applaud her even more for clapping back at haterz,,, but she shouldn’t have to.”
With a handful of exceptions, the era of rap’s six-figure super producer – when Scott Storch, Just Blaze, and Timbaland instrumentals effectively guaranteed radio hits – is over. The internet has made beat making more accessible than ever, and that diffusion means a Dutch teenager could craft one of the biggest records in music history for an unknown internet-savvy rapper dabbling in country tropes, or that a Romanian musician could become one of the go-to producers for Atlanta ragers Playboi Carti and Ken Carson.
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But even these seismic developments pale in comparison to what we’re seeing now: the beginning of generative AI in production and songwriting.
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Given its technical nature, production has always been a component of music-making ripe for new developments, from the introduction of DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) in the late 1970s by Soundstream to the advent of the MIDI digital composition format all the way to the rise of downloadable sample packs and eventually, the integration of AI. A July 2024 survey conducted by Tracklib found that 25 percent of producers were using AI in some capacity. The majority of those AI adopters were using it for either splitting stems or mastering, but more than 20 percent of them were also incorporating it into their records.
That 25 percent isn’t just beginners – it includes some of the genre’s most successful producers. In October, Timbaland was announced as a strategic advisor for Suno AI, a generative musical tool with some controversy around its use of copyrighted material to train its model. He even told Rolling Stone he spent 10 hours a day experimenting with the platform and writing text prompts to recreate some of his own legendary records.
But the star producer who has most emphatically embraced AI is probably Illmind, a Grammy winner with credits for J. Cole, Beyoncé, and Jay-Z. Illmind has always been particularly ambitious when it comes to emerging technologies. He launched Blap Kits, his own sound sample platform, back in 2010, and started the AI-based LoopMagic earlier in 2024. With LoopMagic, musicians enter prompts into the interface for what sounds they want, and those are downloadable. (Subscriptions range from $25 a month up to $250.) They then own those sounds fully, per Illmind, though those in the lower-membership tier cannot package generated sounds as part of their own purchasable sample packs.
Illmind says that he was first introduced to AI as a musical tool back in 2016, when he experimented with a VST (virtual studio technology) plug-in that created MIDI chords and melodies. “I realized how powerful that was, because it was generating ideas from scratch that I musically wouldn’t normally think of,” he says.
While AI’s depiction in the media could lead some to believe it is entirely autonomous, these programs need to be trained on something, and that’s one of the biggest ethical concerns in its widespread musical implementation. In September, a bill in California passed necessitating transparency with generative AI, and the Federal Trade Commission has targeted “unfair or deceptive practices” in the medium through its Operation AI Comply. Suno and another company called Udio have been sued by the three major labels, alleging “mass infringement of copyrighted sound recordings,” igniting a debate around whether AI model training should fall under the category of “fair use.”
Illmind’s LoopMagic was “only trained with permissioned data,” per its website, which includes Illmind’s sprawling catalog. The company Musical AI lists its manifesto as “Ethical Attribution in Generative AI Music Models,” and founders Sean Power and Matt Adell say that they’re taking their extensive history in music and tech and applying it towards creating a fairer world of generative AI. (Adell, the company’s COO, was an executive at Napster, so he’s certainly familiar with disruptive technology in the musical world.)
“Very quickly things balloon into needing a tremendous amount of data and we care for that a lot – because that data to be able to train on that vastness of information requires inputs, requires objects that you can’t possibly do without including copyrighted content,” Power says.
Musical AI is trying to bridge the gap between existing musical creators and rights holders and AI companies, creating an ecosystem where artists are aware of any time their music is used to train AI and be financially compensated in those instances. Having worked through the period of illegal online downloads moving to paid downloads and eventually streaming, Adell says he thinks that the powers that be are comparatively responding much more quickly to the rise of AI, recognizing its urgency and transformational power for the music world.
“I actually think that industry agreements and government regulation are moving quite quickly compared to as they have in the past,” says Musical AI’s Adell. “When Sean and I started, we thought it could be five[-plus] years before all these mechanics get worked out – it [seems to] us now they’re going to get worked out in the next 18 months.”
Opinions on using generative AI to assist in music-making are decidedly split. Many defenders of the technology stress their belief that there will always be some human involvement in production and songwriting. Some artists, like Bay Area producer-vocalist Warren Long (a.k.a. Larrenwong) have embraced it, using programs like ChatGPT to help with lyrical ideas as well as the occasional musical program to aid in production, though he says the latter is often underwhelming and hasn’t frequently made it into his finished work. Still, he talks about AI in music creation with an emphatic pragmatism.
“I’m the first person to tell somebody to use AI for anything,” Long says. “I’m a proponent of it. We always read back and hear the case studies of people, they don’t take advantage of [emerging technology] and then they get left behind.”
Long says he has minimal “ethical qualms” around the use of AI in his own music. “At this point? If it sounds good, f–k it,” Long explains – though he says he’d be unlikely to use an AI program that took a percentage of his rights and royalties. So much of tech innovation has been driven by financial shrewdness, and in this brutal creative economy, the allure of a cheap tool for production or songwriting is similar to the appeal many industries are navigating with AI-led automation.
All of this connects to a kind of existential question in production and songwriting: how much conventional musical work should a music-maker be doing? Rap producers have always faced criticism on this front, from those who derided sampling, to critiques of using premade loops, to now this discussion around AI. A rap producer who advocates for AI could easily make the argument that critical resistance to generative AI is the modern equivalent of traditionalist listeners balking at Grandmaster Flash or the Beastie Boys building now-iconic records through sampling.
The difference here is that human artists were flipping those samples into new songs themselves, whereas these AI platforms are algorithmically combing through musical data with the only real input typically being a written prompt. Cam O’bi, best known as a producer for Chance the Rapper and Noname, addresses the question of whether software that’s trained on existing music without the ephemeral secret ingredient of human creativity can ever create anything truly new or innovative. His skepticism comes in part from a belief that the generative AI software can’t truly innovate, and will instead come up with simplistic regurgitations of the music that it intakes, not unlike how a green musician often struggles to create novel sounds and styles from what they’ve learned.
“When a person is learning how to make music or play guitar and they just keep f–king sounding like Jimi Hendrix, that just means that they still have learning to do,” says O’bi, who also has a budding solo career. “They have to get better, so that they can figure out how to incorporate Jimi Hendrix into their playing without just becoming a cheap imitation of him.”
O’bi explains that he has tried out different AI tools in his work, specifically for stem separation and to craft character voices that would appear on skits throughout one of his albums. (Attempting to combine his own voice with a pirate voice from the video game League of Legends, he found the results “unusable” due to poor audio quality, and the inability to direct the line reading. O’bi says he’s experimented with using ChatGPT like a rhyming dictionary to help move ideas forward, but has been consistently underwhelmed.
“ChatGPT is not a great writer,” O’bi says simply.
Illmind has used his LoopMagic AI program in sessions with other producers, including a widely circulated clip of himself and producer Dunk Rock (Gunna’s “fukumean” and “Cooler Than a Bitch”) generating a “Mysterious sample in F minor.” Even in that video, he does clarify that the software “was ethically trained by me,” and seems a little sheepish about the whole process, though perhaps just for comedic effect. Where it counts though, he’s all-in on the generative AI musical revolution, saying his goal is for LoopMagic to be the “ultimate co-producer.”
“There’s this quote that I read recently and it said, ‘AI won’t replace your job. The human beings that use AI will,’” Illmind says.
It’s not hard to picture a world where stem splitting and other rote, tedious tasks a producer must do for themselves are outsourced almost entirely to AI. Stem splitting, the act of separating the individual audio tracks of a song, typically to isolate vocals or a single instrument part, doesn’t fall under generative AI, but the more conventional use of the technology. It’s an important part of hip-hop production, but it has a different level of sacredness than the process of taking your blank screen and turning it into a track. Being able to use a generative AI tool is absolutely a skill, but it doesn’t seem like one that will make its way into every producer’s toolbox.
Obi says that he’d rather hire another co-producer to help with the workload – like a Dr. Dre or Kanye West has in the past – than to outsource key elements of his production work to AI technology: “Creating the music is really the most rewarding part. And the most fun part.”
Kendrick Lamar went Super Saiyan on his GNX album as Mustard revealed that K. Dot channeled his inner-Goku while recording “Hey Now.”
Mustard caught up with the Recording Academy earlier this week ahead of the Grammy Awards, where he opened up about some of his conversations with Lamar surrounding GNX, who took things to Dragon Ball Z.
“I had heard ‘Hey Now’ during the ‘Not Like Us’ video shoot; he played me a snippet. I asked him, ‘Man, what made you do that,” Mustard recalled asking Lamar. “And he said, ‘When I heard the beat, I just felt like Goku or something.’ I was like, ‘What?’ And he explained, ‘Yeah, when I hear certain s— on your beats, it brings out something else in me, so I just did whatever I felt.’ I was like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy.’”
“Hey Now” features fellow L.A. rapper Dody6 and serves as one of the album’s highlights with a snarling Kendrick at the helm having fun on the mic while powering up like Goku. The Mustard-produced track ended up reaching No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.
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In a separate interview with People, Mustard revealed that plenty of stars previously passed on the “Hey Now” beat, including close friends Ty Dolla $ign, YG and Quavo. The producer explained he was trying to make a “West Coast version of [Clipse’s] ‘Grindin.’”
“That’s why it’s so empty like that. That’s why it’s just weird sounds,” he explained. “[YG] didn’t end up doing it … I played it for Quavo, and I’m like, ‘Quavo man, if you get this if you can connect to this song, I’m telling you,’ he’s like, ‘What the hell you want me to do to it? You want me to whisper on the beat?’ And I’m like, ‘Alright.’ So I didn’t force it on him.”
Mustard is up for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical at the 2025 Grammy Awards, while K.Dot boasts seven nominations in total ahead of Sunday’s show (Feb. 2).
Coming off the release of his acclaimed debut album, Central Cee is hitting the road for the Can’t Rush Greatness World Tour.
Kicking off in Norway on April 1, Cench revealed the complete 39-date global trek on Tuesday (Jan. 28). A first leg will run through Europe/U.K. which will be followed by the U.S. and then Australia.
General tickets will go on sale starting on Friday (Jan. 31) at 10 a.m. local show time while artist pre-sale begins on Wednesday (Jan. 29) on his website.
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“CAN’T RUSH GREATNESS WORLD TOUR,” he wrote in a post on X. “TICKETS ON SALE THIS FRIDAY 10AM WHEREVER YOU ARE.”
European stops for the tour include Norway, Denmark, Milan, Paris, London, Ireland and more. The North American leg starts in Portland on May 2 and will hit Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Montreal.
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Cench delivered his Can’t Rush Greatness debut album on Friday (Jan. 24) which features 21 Savage, Young Miko, Lil Durk, Lil Baby, Skepta and more. The 21 Savage-assisted “GBP” debuted at No. 92 on this week’s Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Cee sniped at Aitch on “5 Star,” calling out how the British rapper won an award over him at the 2023 BRITs. Aitch didn’t waste much time firing back at Cench earlier this week with his “A Guy Called?” diss track.
Cench is up for a trio of 2025 BRIT Awards for Best U.K. Artist, Best Song (“Band4Band”) and Best Hip-Hop & Grime.”
Find all of the 2025 Can’t Rush Greatness World Tour dates below.
Laila! is going on tour, Billboard can exclusively announce. The hip-hop and R&B prodigy is set to embark on the Gap Year Tour!, where she’ll be hitting 10 cities across North America beginning on Mar. 27 in San Francisco and finishing up on Apr. 27 in Toronto. Ticketing will begin with an exclusive artist presale […]
After teasing a “new era” on Instagram last week (Jan. 25), Kelela kept the wait short and sweet, unveiling her latest project on Tuesday (Jan. 28). Out Feb. 11, In The Blue Light is a live album capturing Kelela’s intimate, unplugged performances at New York City’s Blue Note jazz club. Last year (May 28-29, 2024), […]
A big part of the job at Saturday Night Live in the week leading up to showtime is convincing that week’s host or musical guest to appear in sketches that sometimes sound bizarre at best, or potentially disastrous at worst. That was the dilemma frequent SNL guest Justin Timberlake found himself in November 2008 when cast member Andy Samberg hit him up to see if he was in town to hop in on a bit that castmate Bobby Moynihan had cooked up.
“He said Bobby Moynihan has this great idea for a sketch about you, me, and him being Beyoncé’s background dancers that never made the cut,” Timberlake explained in the three-hour doc Ladies & Gentleman… 50 Years of SNL Music, which aired on NBC on Monday night (Jan. 27). “I was like ‘full leotard’? And he’s like, ‘yeah.’ I was like, ‘This is too funny. We have to do this.’”
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Here’s the thing: the three guys were totally down, but convincing Queen Bey to get super silly with them was going to be another matter entirely. In the exhaustive look at the show’s musical history co-directed by Oscar-winning Roots drummer Questlove, current SNL star Bowen Yang explained that “when you pitch a sketch that the musical guest is involved in potentially it can always go wrong.”
And, according to JT, at first Beyoncé was not into it. At all.
“She was very polite about it, but she was very hesitant. And when I say hesitant, I mean like, she was not having it,” Timberlake said. “I’m like: Does she know how funny this is gonna be? How beloved this whole moment will be?” Determined to commit to the bit, Timberlake decided that he had to show his fellow pop superstar how far he was willing to go to convince her.
“I put the leotard and the heels and the hose on and everything, and put a robe on,” he said. “I walked and knocked on her door, I threw the robe down and put my hands on my hips and she was like, ‘No you didn’t!’” Long story short, Bey said yea and the rest is SNL history.
In the final sketch (which is not officially available on YouTube), host Paul Rudd plays the “Single Ladies” video director introducing the singer to her new backup dancers, who she is nervous about.
“Oh look, don’t worry about the other dancers, B-Town,” Rudd tells her. “I hand-picked them myself, these guys are pros.” The three men then enter in all their black leotard, white tights and black heels regalia, assuring Bey that they are definitely warmed up, “like biscuits,” Moynihan says, with Timberlake adding the unhelpful second helping, “yeah, dance biscuits!”
Smash cut to the trio gyrating impertinently on, around and at Beyoncé and the singer repeatedly stopping filming until Rudd finally admits that they are his stepsons, who his wife said he had to spend more time with. “Aww, I didn’t know these were your sons,” Beyoncé says. “That’s very noble of you.”
“So you’ll let them be in your music video?” Rudd asks. “Hell no,” Bey replies.
Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music is available to stream now on Peacock.
For the past five years, producer D’Mile has been on a hot streak. In 2021, he won a song of the year Grammy for his work on H.E.R.’s “I Can’t Breathe.” Shortly after, her “Fight for You” (from the film Judas and the Black Messiah) won D’Mile and H.E.R. the Academy Award for best original song. Then, in 2022, he became the first songwriter to score back-to-back song of the year Grammy wins when Silk Sonic’s “Leave the Door Open” took home the prize. And now, he could potentially claim that same landmark award again: He’s nominated for it at this year’s Grammys for his collaboration with Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga on the retro power ballad “Die With a Smile” — one of three nods he received, in addition to producer of the year, non-classical and best engineered album, non-classical (for Lucky Daye’s Algorithm).
But for the artist born Dernst Emile II — who, at 40, has now accumulated 20 career Grammy nominations — what may seem like overnight success actually took nearly two decades.
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His entry into the music industry was in many ways charmed. His late mother, Yanick Étienne, was a singer who toured with Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, while his namesake father still works as a music producer and teacher. D’Mile himself joined the business at 19 and notched his first production credits in 2005 on projects by Rihanna and Mary J. Blige, before pop-R&B heavyweight Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins (Destiny’s Child, SZA) took him under his wing as a mentor. In the years that followed, D’Mile logged songwriting and production credits for Janet Jackson, Justin Bieber and Usher, among others.
But for D’Mile, “chasing what was hot to get on projects” during those early days wasn’t satisfying. “I was slaving away making five to 10 tracks a day,” he recalls today, sitting in the cozy reception room in his Burbank, Calif., studio. “But things weren’t moving at the pace I would have liked.”
In 2008, he decided to take a mental break and recalibrate. He amicably ended his publishing agreement with Jerkins and made a pledge to himself: to do “what I love, and if it goes anywhere or doesn’t, it’s something I’m proud of.” Lo and behold, things started falling into place that had seemed elusive — like getting more opportunities to work directly with artists instead of “guessing and throwing spaghetti against the wall” when pitching songs. In turn, D’Mile was able to foster long-term relationships with future Grammy winners like Victoria Monét and Daye.
Despite that positive momentum, D’Mile still considered quitting around eight years ago, after “reaching a point of frustration” with industry politics. “It seemed like it was more of a popularity contest or knowing the right people to get in certain rooms or positions that I’d worked so long for,” he says. “I just felt like things weren’t progressing.” He posted his feelings on Instagram Stories, which elicited supportive comments from friends and colleagues telling him that he couldn’t give up.
That’s where Daye came in. Then only a songwriter, he told D’Mile that he wanted to become an artist in his own right — and to bring D’Mile on for a project. “Doing what we wanted to do was a life-saving kind of project for me,” D’Mile recalls of producing and co-writing what became Daye’s 2019 debut album, Painted, which then went on to receive a Grammy nod for best R&B album. “That was the battery in the back that I needed,” he says. In 2022, Daye’s Table for Two, which D’Mile executive-produced, won the Grammy for best progressive R&B album; now, the singer’s third studio set with D’Mile, Algorithm, is vying for best R&B album (which could give D’Mile another Grammy if Daye wins) and best engineered album, non-classical.
Joel Barhamand
What role have your Grammy wins played in your career thus far?
It’s funny. Every time Grammy season comes around, I’m always nervous. I’m so grateful to have the wins, but then I’m like, “One day, that’s going to stop.” With these new nominations, I’m happy that people still like what I do. The attention you receive is something I had to get used to, especially the first time, because I’m kind of a quiet guy. My phone was blowing up and I had to do interviews. It was crazy. But I also feel it has made things easier because a lot of people are coming to me more than I’m trying to get to them, which is great. Yet navigating that can also be overwhelming.
What do you feel is the secret behind your success as a songwriter and producer?
I always just try to bring out who the artist is by getting to know them. It could be a conversation that sparks something before we start or while we’re working together. Or I’ll hear a conversation between the artist and another songwriter, and I’m feeling the vibe, feeling them both out. I like to say that I don’t talk; I listen. And when I create, it’s like my interpretation of who the artist is.
You’re in strong company in the producer of the year, non-classical category this year. Is there more camaraderie among producers now compared with when you were coming up?
Growing up in this business, and being with Rodney, I feel like it was way more competitive back then. And maybe some people might feel that’s better, but it can be negative to be so competitive. I’ve heard horror stories about what people can do just to get something over somebody else. For me, even though I’m up against you, we could probably work together tomorrow — so let’s do something great together. I don’t think that was happening as much back in the day.
I’ve worked before with Mustard. And Dan Nigro and I always talk. I’m such a big fan of his and what he’s done with Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo. I met Alissia a few years ago; it’s great that a female has been nominated. I know a lot of people might not know her, but she’s super-talented. I haven’t met Ian Fitchuk yet but I have heard his work. I learned that he’s a fan of me as well, and that’s cool.
What kind of change would you like to see the industry as a whole embrace?
Streaming is the biggest way that people are listening to music, but it’s not translating that way for songwriters and producers. We’ve just got to make it make sense. That’s the main thing as far as income is concerned. I’ve donated to small companies that are fighting for that, like the organization a friend of mine, Tiffany Red, founded called The 100 Percenters. It advocates for the rights of songwriters and producers. I want to get more involved in that fight for sure.
Given the hot catalog-sales climate, have you been approached about selling yours?
People have talked to me, but it’s never gone as far as “I want to do a deal with you.” I guess it’s situational. Yet in the grand scheme of things, why would you do that? But I don’t know… I’m still learning about all of it at this point.
As one of today’s principal architects of R&B, what’s your take on the state of the genre in 2025?
The most important thing is really caring about the song that you’re writing as an R&B artist. There’s a lot of great stuff happening, but sometimes I feel like some R&B songs topicwise only cater to a certain demographic of people. It’s about finding the balance in keeping the integrity of R&B/soul while making it so that all walks of life can relate. Toxic R&B, that’s a Black thing, and I don’t know how much many other people in the world relate to that. So I think it’s important to make a great song but leave it open a little more for interpretation. We just need to make songs that connect with more people. Then if the songs are more open, it will cause a domino effect. I would like to think that there isn’t really a wall for us not to get bigger than we can be. We’ve just got to be more intentional and not comfortable with where we are. That will change the game, because the industry just follows what’s making the most money. And I feel there’s a world where R&B will be that.
This story appears in the Jan. 25, 2025, issue of Billboard.
Wyclef Jean will be honored at an upcoming benefit on behalf of Music Will. The non-profit music education program for public schools will hold its annual event on April 9 in New York at Gotham Hall. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news In a release announcing the […]