R&B/Hip-Hop
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Snoop Dogg returned last week with his Missionary album, which found him reuniting with Dr. Dre for his first full-length project alongside the West Coast legend in more than three decades since 1993’s Doggystyle. But the project wasn’t always going to have that title, as Snoop joked with Complex earlier this week as part of […]
Future scores a triple play as his single “Too Fast” reaches No. 1 on three Billboard radio song charts: Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, Rhythmic Airplay and Rap Airplay. The track advances to the summit on the lists dated Dec. 21 after it became the most played song on U.S. monitored mainstream R&B/hip-hop and rhythmic radio stations and the most heard song, by audience impression count, on U.S. monitored hip-hop stations in the tracking week ending Dec. 12, according to Luminate.
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“Too Fast,” released on Freebandz/Epic Records, jumps from No. 3 on Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay after a 3% increase in plays for the week. It becomes Future’s seventh No. 1 on the chart and second of 2024, after “Like That,” his collaboration with Metro Boomin and Kendrick Lamar, which reigned for three weeks in June. The rapper’s leading collection includes the longest running No. 1 in the chart’s history, the 16-week champ “Wait for U,” featuring Drake and Tems, from 2022.
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Looking at Rhythmic Airplay, “Too Fast” wraps an identical 3-1 leap after a strong 12% surge in weekly plays and likewise is Future’s seventh No. 1 on the radio ranking. On Rap Airplay, the single pushes from the runner-up spot thanks to a 9% rally in audience impressions, giving the rapper his sixth leader.
With its triple coronation, “Too Fast” is the fifth song to rule the Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, Rhythmic Airplay and Rap Airplay charts in 2024. It joins Future’s collaboration with Metro Boomin and Kendrick Lamar, “Like That,” Jack Harlow’s “Lovin on Me,” Lamar’s “Not Like Us” and Nicki Minaj’s “Everybody,” featuring Lil Uzi Vert.
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Elsewhere, “Too Fast” climbs 4-3 on the audience-based R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart, which ranks songs by combined audience totals from adult R&B and mainstream R&B/hip-hop stations. There, it improved to 13.4 million audience impressions, up 7%. Such gains, in turn, push the track 24-23 on the all-genre Radio Songs chart, with a 9% improvement to 24 million audience impressions across all formats.
“Too Fast” appears on Future’s Mixtape Pluto project, which dropped in September. It became the rapper’s 16th No. 1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, a record by a solo artist and put Future within one leader of tying The Temptations for the most among all acts.
50 Cent, Davido and Mary J. Blige have announced a special gig scheduled to take place July 3 at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
The date will see the three global superstars perform together as co-headliners for the first time. Tickets will go on sale at 10 a.m. GMT this Friday (Dec. 20) via Ticketmaster.
For Blige, the show will follow her spring North American headlining tour in support of new LP Gratitude. On Nov. 29, the R&B legend also celebrated the 30th anniversary of her sophomore album, My Life, which spawned the singles “Be Happy,” “I’m Goin Down” and “Mary Jane.”
Speaking to Billboard earlier this year, Blige described the record as being “pivotal” to her success, adding that its creation allowed her to find herself as an artist. “My fans have given me so much, and when I say, ‘We did it,’ I mean my fans and I,” she said.
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50 Cent, meanwhile, has another huge U.K. show scheduled for July. The following week will see him headline Glasgow’s TRNSMT Festival (July 11), alongside Irish pop act The Script. The rapper recently landed his second video in the YouTube Billion Views Club with 2005 hit “Candy Shop,” joining “In Da Club.” His last studio album arrived in the form of 2014’s Animal Ambition.
In March 2023, Davido released his Timeless LP, which peaked at No. 37 on the Billboard 200 and was nominated for best global music album at the 2024 Grammy Awards. Its Musa Keys-assisted track “Unavailable” went on to hit No. 3 on the U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart.
The Nigerian-American artist is slated to drop his next album, 5ive, early next year. He unveiled lead single “Funds” with Odumodublvck and Chike earlier on Dec. 5; it featured a sample of the 1997 track “Vuli Ndlela” by South African singer-songwriter Brenda Fassie.“This one is straight from the heart – my story, my truth, my growth,” Davido wrote on Instagram uponn the song’s release. “This one’s for the dreamers, the go getters and everyone chasing what’s theirs! Thank you for riding with me.”
André 3000 stopped by The Tonight Show on Monday night (Dec. 16) to chat with host Jimmy Fallon about his right-turn into the world of jazz and perform a rendition of one of the songs from his Grammy-nominated solo album New Blue Sun.
Three Stacks stressed to Jimmy that despite his name being on the cover and the LP being tagged as a “solo” project, it was truly a “collective effort.” Asked to describe the vibe of the all-instrumental, no rapping album that came out in November 2023, André said it’s definitely a “very open, trusting free-form exploration.”
Though some fans were bummed that the man widely consider to be one of the greatest MCs of all time put down the mic and picked up woodwinds, André revealed that the title of the first song on the album — “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time” — wasn’t a joke.
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He said that though for years he’s been “producing, making beats and still trying to do a vocal, rap kind of situation. Because I’m still a fan of rap. But that wasn’t on tap right now and that just happened to be what I was doing at the time. So I was like, ‘I enjoy this. Let me share it.’”
During a 17-year hiatus from releasing music as a lead artist, André dabbled in acting and became a kind of traveling minstrel meme among fans who delighted in posting videos of the MC strolling around coffee shops and airports playing one of his many flutes. “You know how when you have your phone you’re usually just scrolling and looking, I’ll play my flute,” he said. In fact, while in Philadelphia shooting a movie years ago, he would be spotted around town playing and people would come up to him and say, “‘you know it’s a game now. People are trying to find you and we’ll tweet and we’ll say, ‘Well, he’s at this park.’”
He also said that before each performance with his band they huddle and pump each other up with the phrase “fly free… that’s what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to really fly free with it. The reward is different, because you have to listen to every second to know what’s happening. It’s just a different muscle, a different exercise than going and performing verses and choruses that you’ve written. Both are rewarding in their own ways.”
Dré then came back later in the show to perform an edited version of the originally 13-minute song “BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter Wears a 3000® Shirt Embroidered.”
Watch André 3000 on The Tonight Show below.
Where do we start with 2024? The elephant in the room, the Kendrick Lamar and Drake feud, was a seismic event that reverberated throughout the year’s pop culture, leaving rap purists scrambling to dissect every haymaker thrown in this illustrious battle. And who could forget when Future soared like MJ, securing a three-peat on the […]
Earlier this week, Billboard revealed its year-end Boxscore charts, ranking the top tours, venues and promoters of 2024. We’re breaking it down further, looking at the biggest live acts, genre by genre. Here, we kick things off with rap. Hip-hop had its biggest year ever on stage. Rap artists accounted for 5.7% of the top […]
Lil Wayne has been very candid about the hurt feelings he felt when he was passed over to perform at next year’s Super Bowl halftime show in his hometown of New Orleans in favor of “Squabble Up” MC Kendrick Lamar. Now, Weezy has revealed that he’s spoken K-Dot and not only is it all good, but he’s rooting for Kendrick to “kill” the gig.
“I’ve spoken to him, and I wish him all the best and I told him he better kill it,” Wayne told Skip Bayless on his show on Monday (Dec. 16), during which the host revealed that he remains “baffled and angry” that his guest was not tapped to perform on the biggest stage there is in his own backyard.
“For whatever reason I believe it’s over my head,” Wayne said as part of what he described as the “general” reason why he thinks he was passed over for the gig during what is traditionally the most-viewed TV program of the year. “I don’t know why, period. Obviously I believe that it’s perfect… I do not know why.”
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Personally, however, Wayne, 42, had some other thoughts. “The person I am? I straight look at it like, ‘you ain’t there, you gotta get there,’” said the MC with more than three decades in the game, as Bayless shook his head and called him the undisputed “G.O.A.T.,” then doubled-down on the fact that the game is being played at the Caesars Superdome in the Big Easy. “It just makes no sense to me. I don’t get it… their politics played… I don’t know,” Bayless said.
“That’s another part of it, there’s things I can’t control,” Wayne said. Asked if he was better with it now than he was when the news first dropped, Wayne smiled and said unequivocally “no.”
Wayne added, however, that he’s talked to the people he trusts and his management team about his feelings and told them, “I want to get to the point where I’m undeniable. I want them to walk in there and have 10 other choices and whoever’s in charge says, ‘no, you have to go with him!’”
Bayless then read the lyrics to the new Lamar GNX song “wacced out murals” — which Wayne said he was not familiar with — in which K-dot raps, “Used to bump Tha Carter III, I held my Rollie chain proud/ Irony, I think my hard work let Lil Wayne down.” Looking confused and doubling-down on saying it was his first time hearing those lines, Wayne parsed it by suggesting, “I think he’s [Lamar] a fan like I’m a fan of his music (he’s a fan of my music)… he saw what everybody else [saw] and he saw how much it meant to me. I think that’s all he mean… obviously he can’t control that. He didn’t let me down. It ain’t like he can control it.”
Wayne then described talking to Lamar and telling him that “he better kill it. You gotta kill it.” He also noted that Lamar did not need to explain the “wacced out murals” lyrics to him. “I think he means he made it there, his hard work is the reason he made it there and obviously let me down is me being upset and disappointed about not getting that spot.” If anything, Wayne said the lyrics showed that Lamar “has a heart” and that he cares about the situation.
Back when the news broke in September, Weezy was very candid about being passed over. “First of all, I want to say forgive me for the delay. I had to get strength enough to do this without breaking,” said a somber Wayne in an Instagram post. “I’mma say thank you to every voice, every opinion, all the care, all love and support out there. Your words turned into arms and held me up when I tried to fall back.”
At the time, he said the news “Hurt. It hurt a lot. You know what I’m talking about. It hurt a whole lot. I blame myself for not being mentally prepared for a letdown. And for automatically mentally putting myself in that position like somebody told me that was my position. So I blame myself for that. But I thought that was nothing better than that spot and that stage and that platform in my city, so it hurt. It hurt a whole lot.”
The let-down cam after Wayne openly admitted last February that he coveted the halftime slot. “I will not lie to you, I have not got a call,” he said on YG’s 4Hunnid podcast. “But we all praying, we keeping our fingers crossed. I’m working hard. I’m going to make sure this next album and everything I do is killer, so I’m going make it very hard for them to … I want to just make it hard for them not to highlight the boy.”
When Bayless asked if there was any chance Wayne might make a last-second cameo during the set to show that it’s all good between the two undisputed rap legends, Weezy said no way, noting that he will be out of the country on February 9.
Watch Wayne wish Kendrick well below.
After months of delays and speculation, SZA has finally announced the release date for Lana, the long-awaited deluxe edition of her chart-topping album SOS. The project is set to arrive on Friday, Dec. 20, as confirmed via a teaser video shared on social media.
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In the clip shared Monday (Dec. 16), Stiller channels his inner superfan, dramatically lip-syncing to what’s presumed to be SZA’s new track “Drive” while driving through a rainy night.
If the scene feels familiar, it’s because Stiller also once made an iconic lip-syncing cameo in Jack Johnson’s “Taylor” video back in 2003 — except this time, he’s swapping a guitar for a steering wheel.
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Lana has been in the works for over two years, with SZA first teasing it as “a whole other album” packed with outtakes and new tracks. In a recent interview with British Vogue, she reflected on her evolving creative process. “I think I am making music from a more beautiful place. From a more possible place versus a more angsty place,” she explained.
“I’m not identifying with my brokenness. It’s not my identity. It’s shit that happened to me. Yeah, I experienced cruelty. I have to put it down at some point. Piece by piece, my music is shifting because of that, the lighter I get.”
The deluxe release marks another chapter in the SOS era, which has been nothing short of massive.
Following its release, SOS debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart with 318,000 equivalent album units – the third-highest debut week of 2022 – and shattered the record for the biggest streaming week for an R&B album by a woman, with 404.6 million official on-demand streams for the album’s songs, according to Luminate. It spent 10 total weeks atop the chart, and became the first R&B album by a woman to hit the double-digit mark since Mariah Carey’s self-titled debut posted 11 weeks at No. 1 in 1991.
With Lana now confirmed, the release perfectly aligns with SZA’s upcoming stadium tour alongside Kendrick Lamar, kicking off in 2025. As part of their highly anticipated Grand National tour, presented by Live Nation, pgLang and Top Dawg Entertainment, the duo are setting off on a North American stadium tour beginning in April 2025.
The Grand National tour will kick off in Minnesota on April 19 and make its way through major cities across the country including Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, the New York area, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Detroit, Chicago and even Toronto before wrapping up in Washington, D.C., on June 18.
As the chapter of who was responsible for 2Pac‘s death finally closes with the arrest of Keffe D, more stories from that fateful night are being told.
Young Noble of the Outlawz, who frequently collaborated with the late rapper and actor — sat down with The Art of Dialogue to talk about Pac’s final days in the hospital after he was shot in Las Vegas after a Mike Tyson fight in 1996.
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He began talking about the day the Notorious B.I.G. got shot in Los Angeles by revealing that the group had recently signed to Death Row and that he remembered them getting kicked out of a hotel after the staff accused them of pimping due to “too much female activity.” Noble then recalled watching the news about Biggie and feeling like “hip-hop was dying.”
Adding, “This ain’t how it’s supposed to be. We didn’t wish that on Biggie or nothin’ like that. It felt devastating,” before acknowledging that some members of the Outlawz were featured on 2Pac’s “Hit ‘Em Up” where he dissed Big.
Towards the end of the interview, Noble started speaking on being there with Pac in the hospital. “I was right there, front and center,” he said before referring to the longstanding rumors that the late rapper allegedly faked his death and moved to Cuba.
“Let them tell it, he’s still alive underground like Bin Laden somewhere hiding or in Cuba… Nah, he really died. I really was in the hospital. I really saw him with tubes in his body. I really saw his body full of fluid real big. He wasn’t skinny with the six-pack; his body was full. He really f—king died on us.”
The New Jersey rapper then claimed Pac’s mother made the decision to “let her son go,” saying, “He probably could have lived. His momma said, ‘Nah, f—k all that. I think he lost his finger, he was gonna lose a lung, they were gonna do all these surgeries. You know how strong your momma gotta to be to say, ‘Damn, he’s probably could make it. I don’t want my son to endure no more pain in this world. Y’all tear him down.’ That sh—t is devastating.”
He then added, “She let her son go. ‘Pac ain’t die; Afeni said, ‘Let my son fly,’” before getting emotional and walking off set as he continued to talk about how his friend’s life has been “dissected” since his untimely passing.
You can watch the full clip below.
André 3000 and Beyoncé have teamed up for collaborations in the past and he even named a song after Queen Bey on his New Blue Sun album.
The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Three Stacks on Monday (Dec. 16) for a rare sit-down interview, where he reflected on working with the pop icon.
“Really just being excited about working together because we performed together during the ‘Hey Ya!’ times in England [in 2003],” the Outkast legend recalled. “That was some of the first times I’ve met her, so being able to record, I think we’ve always had respect for each other and been fans.
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He continued: “To be reached out by Beyoncé, ‘Hey, can you get on this song?’ I’m like, ‘Hell, yeah, you know I’m with it.’ Yeah, it was a cool musical family thing. I think people from a certain era, we have a kinship.”
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Three Stacks and Bey joined forces for “Back to Black” from The Great Gatsby soundtrack in 2013 and “Party” a couple of years prior. He detailed the vision of naming his “Ninety Three ‘Til Infinity And Beyoncé” after the Houston-bred music deity.
“The title was really a play on words, just referencing things that I was into,” he began. “Souls of Mischief, one of their most famous songs was called ’93 ‘Til Infinity,’ and that’s when I was coming out of high school. That was one of my favorite rap tracks. Then I thought it was funny to put that together with a Toy Story proclamation, ‘Until infinity and beyond.’”
Dre even received Jay-Z and Bey’s blessing: “That was a thing that the character would say in the movie, and I would say, “Why not Beyoncé?” It was funny; it was a play on pop culture stuff. I reached out to Jay-Z and Beyoncé and asked if it was cool. She’s like, ‘Yeah.’ So I was happy.”
Elsewhere in the interview, André 3000 voiced his frustration with the media continuously referring to New Blue Sun, which is nominated for album of the year, best alternative jazz album and best instrumental composition at the 2025 Grammy Awards, as a “flute album.”
“The media has touted it as this flute album and I think it’s a misrepresentation of the album,” he said. “It’s way more than a flute album. They belittle it by calling it a flute album because there are actual flutists that have made flute albums, like Jethro Tull and Paul Horn. I think it could be a turnoff to some people if they think, ‘Yo, he’s just in a room playing this flute.’”