TV/Film
Jack Black’s “Steve’s Lava Chicken” — the shortest song ever to make the Billboard Hot 100 — adds another chart feat as the A Minecraft Movie song debuts at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Movie Songs chart, powered by Tunefind (a Songtradr company), for April.
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Rankings for the Top Movie Songs chart are based on song and film data provided by Tunefind and ranked using a formula blending that data with sales and streaming information tracked by Luminate during the corresponding period of April. The ranking includes newly released films from the preceding three months.
“Steve’s Lava Chicken” reaches No. 1 following its first month of tracking for Top Movie Songs; A Minecraft Movie debuted in theaters on April 4.
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The song earned 20.1 million official on-demand U.S. streams and sold 3,000 downloads in April, according to Luminate. That led “Steve’s Lava Chicken” to debut at No. 78 on the Hot 100 dated May 3, making it the ranking’s shortest song ever at 34 seconds (a longer, albeit less popular version is one minute and 15 seconds).
“Steve’s Lava Chicken” reigns over a trio of holdovers from the chart’s previous iteration, paced by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” from The Electric State (No. 2; 14.6 million streams, 1,000 downloads) and followed by Chappell Roan’s “Casual” from Novocaine (No. 3; 13.8 million streams) and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Spitting Off the Edge of the World” from The Gorge (No. 4; 2.4 million streams, 1,000 downloads).
The next highest debut is courtesy of Rod Wave’s “Sinners,” from the movie of the same name, released April 18. Wave’s track bows at No. 5 via 14.3 million streams and 1,000 downloads.
More Sinners activity is possible upon the May chart, the movie’s first full month of tracking for the survey. The soundtrack debuted at No. 133 on the Billboard 200 dated May 10.
Eric Prydz‘s 2004 hit “Call On Me” also starts at No. 7 via a synch in Warfare, garnering 2.6 million streams and 1,000 downloads in April. Prydz’s track concurrently returned to Billboard charts via the Dance/Electronic Digital Song Sales list in late April, bowing at No. 5. It peaked at the same position on Dance/Mix Show Airplay in 2004.
See the full top 10, which also features music from Snow White and Holland, below.
Rank, Song, Artist, Movie
“Steve’s Lava Chicken,” Jack Black, A Minecraft Movie
“Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Electric State
“Casual,” Chappell Roan, Novocaine
“Spitting Off the Edge of the World,” Yeah Yeah Yeahs feat. Perfume Genius, The Gorge
“Sinners,” Rod Wave, Sinners
“Good Things Grow,” Snow White Cast, Snow White
“Call On Me,” Eric Prydz, Warfare
“Mother,” Danzig, The Electric State
“Party Up,” DMX, Holland
“(All Along the) Watchtower,” Devlin, The Gorge
Ludwig Göransson is still getting used to Donald Glover retiring his Childish Gambino moniker. The movie score composer and music producer stopped by Apple Music to have a chat with Zane Lowe recently and talked about his work with Childish Gambino. “It’s been a huge part of my life — Donald and Childish Gambino — […]
Dove Cameron is remembering Cameron Boyce on what would’ve been his 26th birthday, posting an emotional tribute to her late Descendants co-star Wednesday (May 28).
Six years since the Jessie actor died suddenly after suffering an epileptic seizure in his sleep, the “Boyfriend” singer shared a carousel of photos with her friend and wrote on Instagram, “i still feel you all the time.”
“catch you in the next life,” she continued. “happy birthday. i love you.”
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In one of the photos, a smiling Boyce wraps his arms around the Liv & Maddie alum while smiling wide; in another, they sit on the floor and pose with two other Descendants stars, Sofia Carson and Booboo Stewart. Cameron also shared a snap of the gun and rose tattoo on her wrist that she got in the late actor’s honor.
Carson also paid tribute to Boyce on Wednesday, sharing a black-and-white photo and writing on Instagram, “Keep dancing in heaven, my Cam. Earth could never be the same without you.”
Boyce was just 20 years old when he died in 2019, leaving the Disney community — and countless fans who watched him on projects such as Jessie and Bunk’d — in shock. At the time, a spokesperson confirmed that his seizure had been the “result of an ongoing medical condition for which he was being treated.”
Cameron and Boyce starred together in three Descendants movies between 2015 and 2019. The soundtrack for the first film debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
The Schmigadoon! actress has since pursued a solo music career, dropping her debut single “Bloodshot” in 2019. Her viral hit “Boyfriend” peaked at No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2023, and she is now fresh off the release of new singles “Too Much” and “French Girls,” the latter of which dropped earlier in May.
“There’s a huge intersection between pain, heartbreak, joy and camp and levity. And that’s where we found ourselves in ‘French Girls,’” Cameron recently told Billboard of the newer song. “The melodrama of being a muse for a sculptor or a painter. There’s something so painfully romantic and also constricting about that. In ‘French Girls,’ the thing that I was really obsessed with was this self-sacrificing mania about being a muse that is not healthy.”
Lindsay Lohan is reprising one of her most iconic roles, but according to her, stepping back into one facet of the character was a little, well, freaky.
In a conversation with Freakier Friday costar Chloe Fineman for an Elle cover story published Tuesday (May 27), the actress opened up about what it was like to sing again while playing Anna Coleman for the second time in Freaky Friday‘s upcoming sequel. Also starring Jamie Lee Curtis, the original 2003 flick found Lohan’s character — a teenage rebel who fronts a rock band called Pink Slip — magically switching bodies with her mother.
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“It was good,” Lohan began. “Well, it was kind of nerve-racking at first, because I’m not singing as me. When I was doing [Freaky Friday], I was also recording an album, so it was part of my life at the time. In this movie, I was singing it as Anna, whereas before felt more like Lindsay singing.”
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The Parent Trap star also confirmed that everyone in the original Pink Slip lineup returned for the sequel. “The whole band came back,” she told the Saturday Night Live comedian. “And it’s so funny, because Christina Vidal [who plays Maddie] had just had a baby, and we were like, ‘How weird is this? Are we still cool?’”
The interview comes just a couple of months ahead of the premiere of Freakier Friday, which hits theaters on Aug. 8. It’ll mark the latest project in Lohan’s onscreen renaissance that has taken place over the past few years following a long hiatus, during which the actress started a family. In 2022, she married finance executive Bader Shammas, and the pair welcomed a son, Luai, the following year.
According to Lohan, her little boy doesn’t fully understand her job as an actress yet — although he did recognize her on screen when she watched the original Freaky Friday to study her own guitar playing. “In my trailer, one day I was watching the original guitar scene and practicing movements,” she recalled to Fineman. “And he was there and he was like, ‘Mama,’ pointing at the screen.”
See Lohan on the cover of Elle below.
Ahead of the premiere of the new Apple TV+ animated special Lulu Is a Rhinoceros on Friday, Billboard Family has your exclusive first listen of the uplifting self-love anthem “The Perfect Me.”
The adorable ditty features Auli’i Cravahlo‘s Lulu, Dulé Hill’s Flom Flom and Utkarsh Ambudkar’s Hip-Hop celebrating their best and most authentic selves as they sing, “The perfect me is me/ The perfect you is you/ And when we listen to each other/ The whole world is more in tune, yeah!/ Who I am’s up to me/ Nothing I have to prove/ I’m easy to love, I’m good enough/ The perfect you is you!”
Coinciding with the premiere, Cravalho and creators Jason and Allison Flom shared exclusive statements with Billboard about the inspirational message that both kids and adults can take from “The Perfect Me.”
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“I adore Lulu for her enthusiastic spirit, and her innate wisdom of knowing exactly who she is,” the Moana star tells Billboard. “The song ‘The Perfect Me’ was a lot of fun to record; and while the message is simple, it felt meaningful to belt out! Others might say how you should look or act, but you are whole and complete without alI that outside noise. It’s honestly really catchy, and I definitely left the studio in a better mood that day.”
Meanwhile, the Floms — who penned the original children’s book together and serve as executive producers on the animated special — shared their own thoughts on the self-love anthem. “To write these lyrics, I started from, ‘The rhino of my dreams is me’ and ‘I am easy to love,’” Allison says. “In the song, Lulu, Flom-Flom and Hip-Hop each have a verse where they affirm: ‘Who I am is up to me/ Nothing I have to prove/ I’m easy to love/ I’m good enough…The perfect you is you!”
Jason adds: “Each of them reminds us that there’s much more to them than everyone else thinks and assumes. … We think everyone, not just kids, will connect to ‘The Perfect Me,’ and maybe they’ll get a boost of confidence every time they hear it.”
Once Lulu Is a Rhinoceros arrives on Apple TV+ on Friday, the special’s soundtrack will be available on Apple Music and other streaming platforms as well.
Pop songwriter LELAND serves as the special’s musical producer, and he tells Billboard: “Finding the right melodies and chords to pair with the brilliant lyrics written by Allison Flom was a challenge I welcomed. I aimed to compose melodies that felt conclusive, exciting, and easy enough for a child to sing after just a few listens. I remembered the songs I loved as a kid in my favorite musical specials or movies and how they’ve stuck with me to this day. The message of ‘The Perfect Me’ is simple and important and something we should all be reminded of whether we’re kids or adults.”
Watch the exclusive premiere of “The Perfect Me” from Lulu Is a Rhinoceros below.
On Tuesday’s (May 27) season 20 premiere of America’s Got Talent, judge Simon Cowell was blown away by a Brazilian crew that combined LED technology and dance for a simply mesmerizing show. The troupe is called Light Wire, and their show has to be seen to be believed. The movements of four dancers onstage cascade […]
50 Cent isn’t letting up on his self-appointed coverage of the Diddy trial, and he continues to have fun with AI to help with his trolling. This time around, the Queens rapper and filmmaker reacted on social media to his name being mentioned during Diddy’s ex-assistant Capricorn Clark’s testimony on Tuesday morning (May 27), during […]
Kenan Thompson is teasing the possibility of casting changes for the next season of Saturday Night Live. Following the conclusion of the iconic sketch comedy show’s 50th season on May 17 — hosted by Scarlett Johansson with musical guest Bad Bunny — the 47-year-old comedian and longtime SNL cast member called the season’s end “bittersweet” […]
Sacha Jenkins, a pioneering hip-hop journalist, author, filmmaker and cultural historian, has died at the age of 54.
Jenkins passed away on Friday (May 23) at his home due to complications from multiple system atrophy, his wife, journalist and filmmaker Raquel Cepeda, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.
Throughout his multifaceted career as an author, producer, magazine founder and filmmaker, Jenkins was widely regarded as a key authority on hip-hop culture. Born in Philadelphia and raised in New York City, he moved to Queens in the late 1970s — a formative time when hip-hop, punk, graffiti and skateboarding were all rising cultural forces.
Jenkins was the son of Horace Byrd Jenkins III, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker who worked on 60 Minutes and Sesame Street. He began his own career by founding Graphic Scenes & X-plicit Language, an early magazine dedicated to graffiti art. Jenkins later co-founded the hip-hop newspaper Beat Down with childhood friend and fellow music journalist Elliott Wilson.
In 1994, Jenkins and Wilson launched the influential hip-hop and skateboarding publication Ego Trip. The magazine ran for 13 issues and spawned two acclaimed books: 1999’s Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists and 2002’s Ego Trip’s Big Book of Racism! Alongside team members Jefferson “Chairman” Mao, Gabriel Alvarez and Brent Rollins, Ego Trip also branched into television, producing several shows for VH1, including 2007’s The (White) Rapper Show.
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Jenkins contributed his writing to publications like Spin, Rolling Stone and served as both music editor and writer-at-large at Vibe. He recently held the position of creative director at Mass Appeal, according to Rolling Stone.
As a filmmaker, Jenkins directed and produced a range of projects. His work includes Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues (2022), Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James (2021), Fresh Dressed (2015), All Up in the Biz (2023) and Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos (2024). His 2019 docuseries Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men earned him an Emmy nomination.
Jenkins is survived by his wife, Raquel Cepeda, and their two children.
Hot Ones host Sean Evans is blowing the lid off of one of the country’s most exclusive, top-secret concert venues: Aaron Paul’s living room. On the latest episode of his culinary web series posted Thursday (May 22), the interviewer got the Breaking Bad star to open up about his little-known house shows, for which Paul […]