Lil Wayne‘s “Lollipop” is officially in the Diamond club.
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, the single featuring Static Major has earned 10 million sales and streaming equivalents, becoming the rapper’s first Diamond song to date.
“Lollipop” released in 2008 and was one of 16 tracks on Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III album. It sat atop the Billboard Hot 100 for five nonconsecutive weeks following its release and won a Grammy for Best Rap Song in 2009.
Recently, the hit resurfaced on TikTok, peaking at #1 on the U.S. Top Tracks and #2 on the Viral chart.
(NOTE LANGUAGE) David Bowie’s wife, supermodel Iman, graces the cover of January’s British Vogueand while the rocker died of cancer in 2016, Iman cautions anyone from referring to him as her late husband.
“He is not my ‘late husband.’ He is my husband,” she tells the mag. “I don’t mind at all being referred to as ‘David Bowie’s wife.’” But, Iman says she and the rocker made it a point to remind people she was more than just married to him. “He never introduced me by saying, ‘Meet my wife.’ He’d always say, ‘Meet Iman, my wife,'” she says. “So we both already had our own identity. We were separate but together.”
Iman shares that it was hard to grieve the loss of her husband because of all the media attention surrounding Bowie’s death. She noted she and her daughter were very private and it all got to be “too much,” so they eventually had to leave their New York home “because the public were always at the front door.”
She says that while she understood all the attention his death received, “there was a point where it was like: ‘OK, go home now.’” Iman explains, “You had people who would take your picture, sell it and then come to you and say, ‘I feel your pain,’” adding, “And, I’m like, ‘No, b****, you don’t feel my pain, get away from me.’”
(ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.) — A mother is speaking out about how dangerous respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, can be as her 2-year-old battles the disease.
Jazlynmae Gonzalez just spent her birthday in the pediatric ICU at the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque and has been trying to fight off the virus for the last two weeks.
Her mother, Melissa, told ABC News that Jazlynmae was having such trouble breathing that she was intubated and had to spend eight days on a ventilator.
Now, her family and her doctors hope she’s slowly on the mend, though still on oxygen, working to breathe on her own.
“You could see like her ribs, like her skin sucking through like her ribs,” Melissa told Faith Abubey Wednesday afternoon. “She had a lot of shoulder breathing, nose flaring and just like if somebody was running a marathon and just breathing you know hard and fast.”
She called seeing her daughter get so sick the “scariest thing” she’s seen.
“Knowing I can’t do anything to make it better, and just do ‘mommy’s little quick fix,’ and just wake her up, and tell her, it’s okay,” Melissa said. “That’s been the hardest thing.”
Over the past several weeks, pediatric hospitals have been reporting they are at capacity or near capacity due to an early surge of RSV cases.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, RSV is particularly dangerous among infants and young children, including those with weakened immune systems, have chronic lung or heart conditions or have neuromuscular disorders.
Every year, between 58,000 and 80,000 children younger than age 5 are hospitalized every year and between 100 and 500 children die from the condition.
Also complicating matters is an early flu season and COVID-19 cases ticking up after holding steady for months,
UNMH staff said the hospital has been struggling to deal with the “tripledemic” and is currently well over 100% capacity.
“It’s hard. Our ERs are full, our waiting rooms are full,” lead pediatrician Dr. Anna Duran told ABC News. “Our physicians are having to examine patients in the waiting room, you know, and we’ve run out of space.”
She continued, “We just have to continue seeing each and every patient, because they will continue to come.”
UNMH said it put up a tent outside of its emergency department on Friday to help relieve some of the strain.
The hospital is in its eighth straight week of the children’s hospital being above capacity — and in recent weeks, it has now seen the same exact thing happen on the adult side, spokesperson Chris Ramirez told ABC News.
However, data from the CDC shows RSV cases may be receding after peaking in mid-November.
Weekly cases have declined from 15,188 the week ending Nov. 26 to 12,571 the week ending Dec. 3, according to an ABC News analysis of the data.
Melissa said she hopes Jazlynmae is home by Christmas and that by sharing her daughter’s stories, other parents can watch for the signs of RSV before it progresses to a serious condition.
“I don’t want another mom, another dad, another sibling to go through what we went through,” Melissa said. “It’s the most heart-wrenching thing to watch your baby go through…and it’s not just a little cold. Because that little cold? I could have lost my baby.”
K. Michelle wants to celebrate the release of her final R&B album with fans across the U.S., so she’s hitting the road with her just-announced trek.
Titled the I’m the Problem Tour, the outing will see the singer traverse to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, her native Memphis and some not-yet-announced cities, where she’ll sing songs off her album. Concertgoers will also be treated to an introduction to her alter-ego, Puddin’, who will entertain fans with performances of her unreleased country music.
K. Michelle’s I’m the Problem Tour is named after the R&B album it supports. The project, she explains in a statement, will give fans “the K Michelle that they remember and grew to love to the one now.”
“It shows growth, but it shows the same honesty,” she continued, “and it shows the topics and things that they come to me for as an artist. I have to be honest.”
The release date for I’m the Problem is currently unknown. As for the tour, tickets for the Q&A VIP experience and Standard Meet & Greet are available on kmichellevip.com/
Stephen “tWitch” Boss, who was the in-house DJ for The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and later became a co-executive producer of the program, has died, ABC News has confirmed.
He was 40.
Boss was a competitor on So You Think You Can Dance’s fourth season in 2008, and ended as a runner-up; he would return to the show as an All-Star, and in 2022, when the show returned to TV, a judge.
Boss’ wife, Allison Holker Boss, confirmed his passing in a statement obtained by ABC News. “Stephen lit up every room he stepped into. He valued family, friends and community above all else and leading with love and light was everything to him. He was the backbone of our family, the best husband and father, and an inspiration to his fans.”
She continued, “To say he left a legacy would be an understatement, and his positive impact will continue to be felt,” she continued. “I am certain there won’t be a day that goes by that we won’t honor his memory. We ask for privacy during this difficult time for myself and especially for our three children.”
Allison also added, “Stephen, we love you, we miss you, and I will always save the last dance for you.”
Indeed, Allison’s last Instagram post was a “Holiday Sunday Funday” dance with tWitch, who she referred to as “my lover.”
Well, there’s no doubt Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour is one of the hottest shows out there, and it’s earned Elton yet another honor.
StubHub is out with its 2022 Year In Live Experiences report and, thanks to the tour, which wrapped in the U.S. in November, Elton earns the honor of Top Global Touring Artist of the Year. He beats out Harry Styles for the top spot, with a third British act, Coldplay, landing at three. The rankings are based on cumulative ticket sales on StubHub North America and Viagogo international marketplaces over the past year.
Bad Bunny lands in the number four spot, with veteran rockers Mötley Crüe rounding out the top 5, thanks to their big stadium tour with Def Leppard.
Taylor Swift took to Instagram to thank her fans for remembering her birthday, which was Tuesday, December 13.
Taylor posted a photo of herself and her musical collaborator Jack Antonoff in a room surrounded by various musical instruments, including a double bass across her lap. She captioned the pic, “Thanks for all the beautiful wishes today!! I spent my 33rd birthday in the studio of course. Wouldn’t have it any other way. Love you!”
Does the fact that Taylor is in the studio mean that even more music is coming from the increasingly prolific artist? She recently toldVariety, “I’m making more albums at a more rapid pace than I ever did before, because I think the more art you create, hopefully the less pressure you put on yourself. I’m happier when I’m making things more often.”
Meanwhile, New York City’s iconic Empire State Building saluted Taylor on its TikTok page, creating a montage of videos showing the building lit up in different colors, each one soundtracked to a different Taylor song from each of her albums. For example, Speak Now was purple, Red was, of course, red, 1989 was blue, Reputation was green, Lover was pink and folklore was white.
The caption reads, “Happy Birthday to the Music Industry herself.” In the comments, the “building” wrote, “‘Welcome to New York’ was actually written about me.”
L-Sheryl Crow; R-Sandy Hook Promise co-CEO Mark Barden; In Plain View Entertainment
In 2017, Sheryl Crow released a song called “The Dreaming Kind” to benefit Sandy Hook Promise, a charity that was established after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Sheryl has just released another song benefiting the charity to mark the 10th anniversary of the shooting.
Sheryl recorded the track, a live version of “I Shall Believe,” from her debut album, at a benefit in Nashville last month with the Promise Band, led by Mark Barden, the co-CEO of Sandy Hook Promise. The charity educates and empowers youth and adults to prevent violence in schools, homes and communities.
The Nashville performance will be part of a 2023 documentary called A Father’s Promise, which is about how Barden co-founded Sandy Hook Promise after losing his son Daniel in the shooting and how he rediscovered his passion for music.
Sheryl has also teamed up with the social giving app Cauze, which has offered to match the first $50,000 in donations to Sandy Hook Promise. You can donate online now.
On December 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Twenty were students between the ages of 6 and 7; six were adult staff members. It was the deadliest mass shooting at an elementary school in U.S. history.
The movies, ranging from the film that started the Marvel Cinematic Universe, 2008’s Iron Man, to the 1989 Disney animated classic The Little Mermaid, to an 1898 snippet of Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans previously thought lost, were chosen “for their cultural, historic or aesthetic importance to preserve the nation’s film heritage.”
Other selections include the 1972 ‘Blaxsploitation’ action film Super Fly, filmmaker John Waters‘ 1988 kitsch classic Hairspray, the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally, and the 1990 cult favorite comedy House Party.
As it does after each new class is announced, Turner Classic Movies will host a television special to screen a selection of films named to the registry. It airs Tuesday, Dec. 27, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern time.
In the announcement, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige noted in a statement, “The notion that here we are, almost 15 years after the release of Iron Man, and to have it join the Film Registry tells us it has stood the test of time and that it is still meaningful to audiences around the world.”
Films selected for the 2022 National Film Registry, in chronological order:
Mardi Gras Carnival (1898) Cab Calloway Home Movies (1948-1951) Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) Charade (1963) Scorpio Rising (1963) Behind Every Good Man (1967) Titicut Follies (1967) Mingus (1968) Manzanar (1971) Betty Tells Her Story (1972) Super Fly (1972) Attica (1974) Carrie (1976) Union Maids (1976) Word Is Out: Stories of Our Lives (1977) Bush Mama (1979) The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982) Itam Hakim, Hopiit (1984) Hairspray (1988) The Little Mermaid (1989) Tongues Untied (1989) When Harry Met Sally (1989) House Party (1990) Iron Man (2008) Pariah (2011)
Megan Thee Stallion took the witness stand in a Los Angeles courtroom on Tuesday, where the hip-hop star recounted the events that led up to the night when she was allegedly shot and injured by rapper Tory Lanez in the Hollywood Hills.
The Grammy-winning artist, whose birth name is Megan Pete, testified that on the night of July 12, 2020, she got out of a car following an argument with Lanez and as she walked away, she turned her head and saw him with a gun, according to a reporter with Los Angeles ABC station KABC, who was in the courtroom.
“He was holding the gun pointing at me,” Megan said, and claimed that he said “dance b****” and fired his gun, injuring both her feet.
“I froze…I felt shocked,” she said. “I wasn’t really sure if this was happening…I looked at the ground and saw the blood…everyone was shocked.”
Megan also alleged that Lanez offered her money to stay quiet, claiming that he apologized to her as police arrived on the scene and said, “Please don’t say anything, I’ll give you $1 million.”
Lanez’s attorneys did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment following Megan’s testimony.
Lanez, born Daystar Peterson, was initially charged in October 2020 with one felony count each of assault with a semiautomatic firearm and carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle, according to charging documents obtained by ABC News.
Lanez was charged last week with an additional felony count of discharging a firearm with gross negligence, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office confirmed to ABC News.
Lanez pleaded not guilty to all three felony counts in the case.
