In 2014, KISS’ Gene Simmons first told Esquire magazine that rock was dead. But it seems his bandmate Paul Stanley doesn’t share his sentiment.
“It’s a great soundbite, but that’s about all it is,” Stanley tells the United Kingdom publication Louder in a new interview. “My son Evan is playing all around Los Angeles with a rock band that kicks a** and is getting great crowds, with beautiful models coming, and that’s proof to me that rock’s not dead.”
Stanley notes music tastes are always changing: “it ebbs and flows.”
“There’s a lot of rock music being made right now, and some of it may be too derivative to really stake a claim and take it to the next level, but it will happen, it will happen,” he shares. “But the next big rock band won’t be huge because it sounds like a band from the past, it will have its own voice.”
Ava Max is known for interpolatingfamous songs in hermusic, which has seemingly earned her some backlash. Despite that, Ava says she won’t change how she makes music.
“The comments online have been kind of mean,” she told NYLON. “[But] this music is helping so many people, I can never stop. No matter how many haters there are out there, or people who want to bring you down.”
Ava explained interpolating songs isn’t a cheap move, as some critics have said. “I take a lot of time on my songs — especially if I interpolate them,” she said.
“I think it should be done tastefully,” Ava noted. “I spend a lot of time making sure it’s not at all like the [original] song. That’s the beauty about bringing something back. You don’t want to give people the same thing.”
She said online hate will not make her change how she looks, either. Ava explained she finds it funny people compare her to Lady Gagabecause they both wear blond wigs.
“Like what do they want me to do, dye my hair black?! I did that, and then they started comparing me to Dua [Lipa]! You can’t win,” she expressed.
Just like her music, Ava will continue to play with her style. “If I wake up one morning and I want pink hair, I want pink hair! I don’t want to be confined to one look,” she said. “At the end of the day, daring is better than boring.”
Ava also confirmed she’s working on a deluxe version of her new album, which she said is “like Diamonds & Dancefloors on crack.”
She confirmed there’s a new song on that album — a collaboration with Khalid, which makes her “really excited.”
Adam Lambert just released his covers album, High Drama, which he says is something he put out to “entertain people with” while he works on his next big project: an original musical.
“The process of putting a musical together is a longer timeline,” Adam told USA Today. “I said to my team, ‘I wish I had new music to put out on the quick side for all of my beautiful fans.’ And the idea for a covers album felt like, O.K., we could get that done quicker, and have great music to entertain people with!”
High Drama features Adam’s takes on songs by current artists like Billie Eilish, Sia and Pink, as well as hits from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. And speaking of the ’70s, Adam’s musical is the story of a person from that decade.
“I’m thrilled to be able to write music for somebody else’s story than my own,” Adam told ABC Audio last year. “That’s a real nice challenge. I do identify a bit with this person and I can see myself in them at times, but I was not alive in the ’70s. … it’s about a different time and it’s about somebody a bit ahead of their time.”
Adam’s also happy to be part of a musical from the beginning.
“I gotta say, it’s really exciting to be involved in all layers of this process from the ground up — as a creator and as a writer,” he told ABC Audio. “I have done a lot of musical theater, but always as, like, someone doing someone else‘s work. So to be able to create something — I’m really thrilled!”
Adam said he’d reveal more details about the musical “when the time is right.”
(NOTE LANGUAGE) Latto‘s early memories of rapping stem from her childhood, when she was rushing to the studio with her father at just 10 years old. Her experience led to her win on Lifetime’s The Rap Game and later her breakthrough single “B**** From Da Souf,” but 2021’s “Big Energy” catapulted her to an even higher level.
“I heard my A&R and management whispering, debating on whether or not to play this beat for me,” Latto tells Billboard when discussing the song. “It was just so different from everything else that I’ve done. They were hesitant on how I would react.”
Despite not recognizing “Genius of Love,” the 1981 Tom Tom Club song sampled by Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” things “ended up working in my favor,” earning her a Grammy nod for Best Melodic Rap Performance.
“I could feel the potential of the song and how commercial it was,” she said, “but I definitely didn’t think it would be Grammy-nominated.” Collaborating with Mariah for the remix, she added, was “a super out-of-body experience.”
“She was just embracing me and telling me she loves everything I’m doing,” Latto said.
Latto’s received support from Queen Latifah, Trina, City Girls, Cardi B, SZA, Remy Ma and Lizzothroughout her career, and she intends on passing on the love to new female artists.
“My No. 1 thing has been being a girl’s girl,” she said. “I utilize my power in uplifting others on my way up. When you see Latto do a feature with an upcoming female rapper, I don’t charge them … I don’t profit off that.”
Noting how young she was when she started out, Latto says she’s now “taking control back” and exploring new sounds.
“The content I’m about to roll out is a whole fresh new leaf,” she said.
Courtesy of the 29th Annual ScreenActors Guild Awards®
The 29th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards honored outstanding performances in film and television Sunday at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles. The event was streamed live on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other media partners including Netflix.
Here is the complete list of winners:
The Motion Picture winners are: Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role
Brendan Fraser – The Whale
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
Michelle Yeoh – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role
Ke Huy Quan – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role
Jamie Lee Curtis – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Television Program winners are: Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Limited Series
Sam Elliot – 1883
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Limited Series
Jessica Chastain – George & Tammy
Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series
Jason Bateman – Ozark
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series
Jennifer Coolidge – The White Lotus
Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series
Jeremy Allen White – The Bear
Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series
Jean Smart – Hacks
Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series The White Lotus
Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series Abbott Elementary
The Stunt Ensemble winners are: Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture Top Gun: Maverick
Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Television Series Stranger Things
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
Madonna is mourning her older brother Anthony Ciccone, who has passed away at age 66.
The sad news was announced by Madonna’s brother-in-law, musician Joe Henry, who’s married to Madonna’s sister Melanie. On Instagram, he wrote, “My brother-in-law, Anthony Gerard Ciccone, exited this earthly plane last evening. I’ve known him since I was 15, in the spring of our lives in Michigan so many years now gone.”
Describing Anthony as “a complex character,” Henry noted, “I loved him, and understood him better than I was sometimes willing to let on…Farewell, then, brother Anthony. I want to think the God your blessed mother (and mine) believed in has her there, waiting to receive you. At least for today, no one shall dissuade me from this vision.”
A source told Page Six that Anthony struggled with addiction, noting, “Madonna helped to support her brother when he would accept that support. During his final months he was in contact with family and Madonna, but this past week he refused the support the rehab facility offered and it was clear he was ready to move on.”
Anthony was one of Madonna’s seven siblings. He was believed to have been living in Michigan, where they grew up, at the time of his death.
(WASHINGTON) — While no firm conclusion has yet been made among health and government officials as to where COVID-19 came from, the U.S. Energy Department has now reportedly indicated it believes the virus was most likely the result of a lab leak in China — one of two prevailing theories under investigation along with natural human exposure to an infected animal.
The view of the Energy Department, which oversees a network of national labs, some which conduct bioresearch, was reported Sunday by The Wall Street Journal based on a classified intelligence report but has not been confirmed by ABC News.
People who read the report said the assessment was made with “low confidence,” according to the Journal, referring to the lowest of three confidence intervals in the intelligence community.
It’s the latest development in the ongoing work, in the U.S. and internationally, to determine where COVID-19 came from: to both trace back the virus in order to hold any responsible parties to account and to understand its inception in order to prevent the next pandemic.
But with no “smoking gun” and limited access to raw data, discussion of the science has played out in a haze of circumstantial evidence.
At the same time, the virus’ origins have become a contentious wedge issue at home while the Chinese government vehemently denies COVID-19 could have come from one of its labs in Wuhan.
A spokesperson for the Energy Department did not comment Sunday on the Journal’s new article but said in a statement to ABC News that the department “continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”
A spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee said in their own brief statement that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had “provided a response to Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and Select Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup’s February 13th letter requesting information about the origins of COVID-19 and we are reviewing the classified information provided.”
The White House’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said in an appearance on CNN on Sunday that he could not confirm or deny the Journal report but that “right now there is not a definitive answer” from the intelligence community on where COVID-19 started.
“Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure,” Sullivan said. “Here’s what I can tell you. President [Joe] Biden has directed, repeatedly, every element of our intelligence community to put effort and resources behind getting to the bottom of this question.”
“If we gain any further insight or information, we will share it with Congress, and we will share it with the American people,” Sullivan said.
The White House declined on Sunday to say if Biden had been briefed on the Energy Department’s view, referring to Sullivan’s comments.
In 2021, the president launched a 90-day push for the U.S. intelligence community to “redouble their efforts” to find a more definitive conclusion regarding the source of the virus.
In a declassified summary of that work, released in August 2021, U.S. intelligence agencies said they remained “divided on the most likely origins of COVID-19” but that the two key hypotheses remain possible: either natural exposure to an infected animal or an accidental lab leak.
Consensus among top officials in the Biden administration has similarly been that the pandemic originated in one of those ways.
Four elements of the U.S. intelligence community said in 2021 that they had “low confidence” COVID-19 was initially spread from an animal to a human, while one element assessed with “moderate confidence” that the first human infection was the result of a “laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” and pointing to the “inherently risky nature of work on Coronaviruses.”
The agencies, however, generally agreed that the virus was most likely not developed as a biological weapon and that China’s leaders did not know about the virus before the start of the global pandemic.
This analysis marked something of an evolution from the earliest prevailing view after the pandemic began in early 2020 when, despite some fringe skepticism — often emanating from voices with a long record of criticizing China — the idea that COVID-19 jumped from animal to human somewhere in nature became the overwhelming consensus.
Political voices in favor of the lab-leak theory, particularly from former President Donald Trump, served to polarize the issue further and largely pushed the scientific community away from a willingness to consider that possibility.
The U.S. intelligence agencies said in their 2021 summary that baring new information, a more definitive explanation would not be possible without Beijing’s cooperation.
“Origins tracing is a matter of science,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said following the report’s release. “China always supports and will continue to participate in the science-based origins study.”
A joint World Health Organization-led team had presented a range of options in its own March 2021 report, calling a lab leak “extremely unlikely” but offering pathways for further investigation.
Team members voiced frustration with the lack of cooperation from the Chinese government — echoed in international criticism that politics had stymied science.
Since then, the WHO has become increasingly receptive to the possibility that the virus resulted from a lab leak. In July 2021, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged that ruling out a lab leak theory was “premature” and recommended audits of the Wuhan labs in further studies.
China’s subsequent rebuff left the WHO to proceed without them as part of the U.N. agency’s recommended phase two study.
ABC News’ Will Steakin contributed to this report.
Antonino D’Urso/KONTROLAB/LightRocket via Getty Images
(CUTRO, Italy) — A least 58 migrants were killed and more than 81 were rescued Sunday when the human smuggling boat they were aboard slammed into the rocks off the coast of southern Italy and “disintegrated” just feet from the shoreline, officials said.
Up to 150 migrants reportedly from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria — countries ravaged recently by poverty, natural disasters, conflicts and civil unrest — were crammed aboard the 66-foot-long wooden boat when it crashed into a rocky shore of eastern Calabria, which forms the tip of Italy’s boot shape, according to the Italian Coast Guard.
At least 20 migrants were hospitalized, one in need of intensive care, said Manuela Curra, a provincial government official. One survivor was taken into custody for questioning after migrants identified him to authorities as one of the human traffickers, RAI state television reported.
Antonio Ceraso, the mayor of the seaside resort city of Cutro, told Italian news media outlets that children, including a baby, are among the dead.
Bodies, covered in cloth, were being brought to a local sports stadium in the nearby Crotone that has been turned into a temporary morgue.
A priest was on hand to administer last rites over some some of the dead as bodies washed up on the beach.
Ceraso said the boat carrying the migrants hit rough seas and the rickety vessel “disintegrated” when it hit the rocks. He said wreckage is strewn across 1,000 feet of coastline. Describing what he saw at the scene of the crash, he said it was a “gruesome sight that stays with you for the rest of your life.”
The search for survivors is ongoing with coast guard crews combing the choppy waters in boats and with aircraft and local firefighters searching on jet skis.
At the Vatican, Pope Francis prayed for the survivors and the loved ones of those killed during his Sunday address in St. Peter’s Square.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose right-wing administration has taken a hard line on migration since her election in October, issued a statement expressing “deep sorrow for the many human lives torn away by human traffickers.”
Mediterranean from North Africa. At least 20,333 migrants have been killed or have gone missing while attempting the crossing, which experts describe as one of the most dangerous in the world since 2014, according to the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project.
“It is a huge tragedy which shows the absolute need to act firmly against irregular migration channels,” Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said in a statement, adding that Sunday’s tragedy highlights the urgency of cracking down on human smuggling sea crossings.
(ST JOHN, US Virgin Islands) — The sudden death of former American swimming champion Jamie Cail is under investigation by authorities in the U.S. Virgin Islands, authorities said.
The 42-year-old Cail was found unresponsive in a residence she shared with her boyfriend in St. John, the U.S. Virgin Islands Police Department said in a statement.
“This case is presently under investigation by the Criminal Investigation Bureau,” according to the police statement.
Cail’s boyfriend, whose name was withheld by police, told investigators he left a bar and went back to their residence to check on Cail just after midnight on Tuesday, according to police.
“Upon his arrival, he discovered his girlfriend on the floor,” police said.
The boyfriend and a friend took Cail in a private car to the Myrah Keating-Smith Clinic, where efforts to save her life failed, police said.
Police were notified of the death about 2:39 a.m. Tuesday, authorities said.
No additional information on Cail’s death was disclosed by police, who urged anyone with any information to contact the Criminal Investigation Bureau.
Cail was originally from Claremont, New Hampshire, and was a star swimmer for much of her youth, her family told ABC affiliate station WMUR in Manchester.
She was also a member of the University of Maine’s women’s swim team in the 2000-2001 academic year, according to the school’s alumni association.
As a teenager, Cail was a member of a relay team that won a gold medal at the 1997 Pan Pacific Championships, according to SwimSwam.com, an online swimming news site.
“She was just she was she was a very beautiful person,” a friend told WMUR. “She had a huge heart. She was really loving and kind and well-loved and popular on the island and everybody knows her.”
(WASHINGTON) — Self-help author Marianne Williamson told donors on Sunday that she will run for president as a Democrat in 2024, mounting what is likely to be a primary challenge to President Joe Biden from his left flank.
Williamson, who also sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 but failed to make any primary, will likely challenge Biden from the left, should he ultimately run for reelection as expected. She is unlikely to get any institutional support, including from powerful progressives in Washington, as the Democratic Party appears to be coalescing around the president.
In the donor email, obtained by ABC News, Williamson suggested she will offer a clashing vision to Biden’s, arguing the country is fundamentally heading in the wrong direction while implicitly responding to concerns over her electability.
Williamson wrote that she will formally launch her bid during a speech this coming Saturday.
“My qualification is not that I’m experienced at running that system, but that I’m best qualified to help transform it. Washington is filled with good political car mechanics, but the problem is that we are on the wrong road,” she wrote.
