Arcade Fire has announced a North American headlining tour in support of the band’s brand-new album, WE.
The outing will launch October 28 in Washington, D.C., and will wrap up December 1 in Toronto. Each show will feature an opening acoustic set from Beck.
Tickets go on sale next Friday, May 13, at 10 a.m. local time.
Prior to the North American run, Arcade Fire will launch a European tour in late August, which will stretch to October. Feist will open those shows.
For the full list of Arcade Fire’s tour dates and all ticket info, visit ArcadeFire.com.
WE, the sixth Arcade Fire album and first since 2017’s Everything Now, is out today. Arcade Fire will celebrate the record’s arrival with their milestone fifth performance on Saturday Night Live tomorrow.
The Rolling Stones have debuted two previously unheard live performances that will appear on the upcoming archival concert album Live at the El Mocambo, which will be released next Friday, May 13.
Renditions of The Stones’ 1972 hit “Tumbling Dice” and their funky 1976 gem “Hot Stuff” are available now as digital downloads and via streaming services, and you also can check out visualizervideos for the tunes at the band’s official YouTube channel.
As previously reported, Live at the El Mocambo features performances from two shows that the British rock legends played at the 300-capacity Toronto club on March 4 and 5, 1977.
The album, which will be available as a two-CD set, a four-LP collection on either black or neon vinyl, and digitally, features The Stones’ full March 5 concert plus three bonus performances from the previous night.
The concerts were booked as secret shows, where attendees were winners of a ticket giveaway, and The Stones were billed under the moniker The Cockroaches.
The Stones’ set list included a variety of covers, hits and deep cuts. One of the tunes the band played, “Worried About You,” would be released on 1981’s Tattoo You.
Only four songs from the El Mocambo concerts have been officially released previously, appearing on 1977’s Love You Live album alongside many tracks that were captured during The Stones’ 1975 and ’76 tours.
Prior to the release of the “Tumbling Dice” and “Hot Stuff” performances, The Stones premiered two other tracks from the live album — “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Rip This Joint.”
(WASHINGTON) — With a leaked draft opinion revealing this week that the U.S. Supreme Court appears poised to overturn nearly 50 years of abortion rights precedent, Democrats and activists are sounding alarms that other rights not explicitly listed in the Constitution — but long-considered protected as implied rights of privacy — could be threatened next.
“If the rationale of the decision — as released — were to be sustained, a whole range of rights are in question — a whole range of rights,” President Joe Biden told reporters on Tuesday, offering his first public reaction to the document as the court confirmed its authenticity.
“If the right to privacy is weakened,” said Vice President Kamala Harris, “every person could face a future in which the government can potentially interfere in the personal decisions you make about your life.”
Their anxiety, legal experts told ABC News, is not only with Roe being overturned but in how it would be overturned — and whether the final opinion’s language and reasoning could set the stage for other unenumerated rights — those not directly listed in the Constitution — to be similarly sent back to be decided by the states.
While Justice Samuel Alito writes in the draft opinion that the court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization concerns only abortion and does not extend to other rights, experts say his current justification for overturning Roe opens the door to imperil other long-standing liberties the court has upheld for decades.
Here’s what legal experts are saying about the draft text:
Alito’s ‘originalist’ approach
The Supreme Court grounded its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade on the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause, which the court has said guarantees Americans an implicit “right to privacy,” though that phrase is not used in the Constitution.
Justice Harry Blackmun described the constitutional underpinnings of that right when authoring the opinion: “This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy,” the 1973 decision read.
But Alito — rejecting stare decisis, the legal doctrine intended to bind courts to abide by past rulings, as it relates to abortion — called the court’s decision on Roe “egregiously wrong from the start.” Taking an originalist approach, he argues in the draft opinion obtained by Politico that there’s no explicit right to privacy, let alone the right to an abortion, in the Constitution.
“It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned,” Alito writes, calling the Roe decision “remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text,” and arguing that stare decisis “does not compel unending adherence to Roe’s abuse of judicial authority.”
Taking issue with Alito’s reasoning, Biden said Wednesday he believes the court’s current conservative majority would agree with failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s view that the right to privacy should not have been guaranteed with the court’s ruling in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut, which overturned a ban on married couples’ access to contraception.
“Griswold was thought to be a bad decision by Bork, and my guess is, the guys on the Supreme Court now,” Biden said.
Marc Spindelman, a professor at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, said it’s because of Alito’s reasoning — appearing to reject court precedent and the right to privacy in favor of an originalist interpretation of the Constitution — that puts other precedents, like the right to same-sex intimacy in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 and same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, at-risk, since those rights were also bound to the Fourteenth Amendment.
“From the point of view of originalist reasoning, it’s difficult to see what is distinctive about abortion compared to other rights that are now constitutionally protected but that originalist methodology, in principle, threatens,” Spindelman said.
Kate Shaw, a professor at Cardozo School of Law and an ABC News contributor, echoed that view.
“The whole method that the Roe Court used, which is basically to say what are the kind of key attributes of liberty that the Constitution has to protect, whether or not they’re written in the document, Alito says that method is totally illegitimate,” she said. “And instead, what the Constitution should be read to protect is the explicitly enumerated rights and a small, a small list of unenumerated rights, but only rights that are deeply rooted in history and tradition.”
Spillover concern
Alito wrote in the draft opinion, “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”
“What sharply distinguishes the abortion right,” he said, is that it destroys “potential life,” and that “none of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion.”
In deciding whether a right is protected, Alito said the court “has long asked whether the right is ‘deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition’ and whether it is essential to our Nation’s ‘scheme of ordered Liberty.'” In Alito’s view, abortion does not meet that standard.
“What Alito says is, don’t worry. Our decision today is only about abortion, not about anything else,” Spindelman said. “But if an originalist approach is the touchstone for judgment in the case, then it’s hard to see how or why the decision should not apply to other kinds of individual rights that the Court has said are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
That approach, in principle, could doom any right that didn’t exist since the country’s founding, Spindelman said.
“It’s difficult to see why if once you pull row up from the roots, why decisions of more recent vintage ought to stay in the ground to be counted by the court as part of its respect for its own precedent,” he added.
So, could the court find a way to pull abortion from the right to privacy without unraveling other precedents? Former Justice Antonin Scalia clerk and vice-dean at the NYU School of Law, Rachel Barkow, doesn’t think so.
“I think that you can’t coherently do it,” she said. “Unfortunately, that is actually what erodes the legitimacy of the court as an institution because it’s not the leak that’s going to damage the court’s legitimacy, it’s not upholding rationales and being consistent over time.”
The problem for the court, she said, is that the Roe decision is part of a line of cases bound to recognizing the right to privacy, “and the draft opinion shows no respect for the right to privacy, and in light of that, all the cases that rely on that right to privacy would also find themselves falling under the same rationale.”
“I think the bigger thing that the public sees is no precedent is safe,” Barkow said “The court’s willingness to just cast aside a 50-year-old precedent, not just any precedent, but one that has been the subject of these confirmation hearings, and it’s a reason that they’re sitting there is they gave assurances to senators that they weren’t going to overrule it, and then they did.”
“I don’t think anyone can really take that group of people’s word if they say, ‘Oh, no, the other precedents are safe,'” she added. “I think they cried wolf one time too many.”
The opinion could change
When the court confirmed the document’s authenticity on Tuesday, it stressed in a statement that it “does not represent a decision by the Court or the final position of any member on the issues in the case.”
Experts stressed to ABC News that court opinions can change throughout their drafting. The leaked decision could potentially emerge with a different decision entirely — or completely unchanged.
“We don’t know exactly what this final opinion is going to look like when it is issued,” Shaw said. “But I would say absent something truly extraordinary and unexpected happening inside the court, some version of this opinion will be issued as the opinion of the court in a matter of weeks that will be the law of the land, and Roe versus Wade will be no more.”
And if so, the question becomes how soon the fate of other privacy rights will come before the court — from states and others challenging their constitutionality, using the conservative justices’ own arguments.
(NEW YORK) — Michelle Obama is honoring her mom in a special way.
Ahead of Mother’s Day, the former first lady announced that an exhibit in the highly anticipated Obama Presidential Center in Chicago will pay tribute to her mother, Marian Robinson.
In a video Friday shared first with ABC News’ Good Morning America, Obama reflected on the close relationship she has with her mother and the values that Robinson instilled in her at a young age.
“Growing up with my mom was always an adventure,” Obama said. “It was trips to the library as a toddler to learn about ABCs; it was the entire family piling into our car to go to the local drive-in; and my mom inviting family over for New Year’s Eve, passing around her special hors d’oeuvres and toasting in the new year.”
“But above all else,” she added, “my mother gave me that nonstop, unconditional love that was so important for me to grow up. In so many ways, she fostered in me a deep sense of confidence in who I was and who I could be by teaching me how to think for myself, how to use my own voice and how to understand my own worth. I simply wouldn’t be who I am today without my mom.”
The exhibit, called “Opening the White House,” will focus on community and family while also making sure everyone who visits the presidential center “feels at home,” Obama said.
The upcoming exhibit will also feature scale replicas of the White House’s East Room, where the Obamas once held dinners, as well as the Blue Room and the South Lawn, where the family hosted garden tours and the Easter Egg Roll.
“This is just one part of the story we’re telling at the Obama Presidential Center,” Obama said. “I am so excited to announce that we will be dedicating a space at the Obama Presidential Center in her honor.”
In her memoir, Becoming, Obama opened up about her mother, whom she called the “first grandmother” because she lived with them in the White House. During their eight years there, Robinson would help Obama balance the demands of raising a private family in a very public house.
Obama ended her Mother’s Day tribute to her mom by saying that she hopes everyone will be able to see the exhibit when the presidential center opens to the public in 2025.
“In the years ahead, we want to welcome you to Chicago to see it — maybe even with your mom,” she said. “So Happy Mother’s Day everyone. And especially to you, mommy. Love you.”
A Day to Remember has announced a U.S. headlining tour.
The outing will be divided into two sections, dubbed Just Some Shows and Just Some More Shows. Just Some Shows will run from July 27 in Baltimore to August 27 in Portsmouth, Virginia, while Just Some More Shows picks up October 1 in Pensacola, Florida, and wraps up October 28 in Irvine, California.
Beartooth, The Ghost Inside and Bad Omens will support on Just Some Shows, while the Just Some More Shows bill includes The Used, Movements and Magnolia Park.
Tickets to all dates go on sale next Thursday, May 12, at 10 a.m. local time. For the full list of dates and all ticket info, visit ADtR.com.
A Day to Remember will be touring behind their new album You’re Welcome, which was released March 2021. Earlier this year, they released a new version of the You’re Welcome track “Re-Entry” featuring Blink-182‘s Mark Hoppus.
Xavi Torrent/Redferns; Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Bud Light
Yungblud and WILLOW‘s long-awaited collaboration has finally arrived.
The joint track, which the pair first began teasing last December, is titled “Memories,” and is available now via digital outlets. You can watch its accompanying video, which stars both artists, streaming now on YouTube.
“I think with ‘Memories’ I wanted to create a song that would allow people to let go of past trauma in any regard whether that be a relationship, whether that be abuse, whether that be a misconception in terms of race, in terms of gender, in terms of anything,” Yungblud tells ALT CTRL Radio on Apple Music 1. “I wanted to create a song that would allow people to scream in one room and take each other’s burdens on together because if we carry it together, the load is easier.”
“Memories” follows Yungblud’s single “The Funeral,” and WILLOW’s Paramore-sampling PinkPantheress collaboration “Where You Are.”
(NEW ORLEANS) — The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival kicked off in New Orleans last weekend after two years and three cancellations due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The energy is just out of this world. I feel like there’s just such an overwhelming feeling of like, love and camaraderie — from the musicians to the participants,” Robin Barnes, who is known as the Songbird of New Orleans, told ABC News.
Barnes is set to perform at the festival on Sunday, its closing day.
For New Orleans — considered by many as the birthplace of jazz — the festival is the city’s musical heartbeat.
The 10-day cultural festival attracts over 400,000 visitors to New Orleans each year and draws musicians from around the world and pumps an estimated $400 million into the local economy.
“The economical side of it is extremely significant,” Barnes said, adding that while tourism in the city ebbs and flows throughout the year, Jazz Fest is a “musical mecca” and its return is a “game changer” for musicians around the city.
“It’s almost just a breath of relief,” Barnes, who is part of the jazz duo Da Lovebirds with her husband Casey Pat, said.
“For musicians, with the gig economy, every gig is a paycheck … so coming from a pandemic, we’ve all had to learn to basically survive with no money,” she added.
And the sorrows for the jazz community amid the pandemic have been immense in other ways. The human toll of the virus touched every corner of the jazz world as dozens of jazz musicians and producers died of COVID-19, including New Orleans jazz legend Ellis Marsalis.
“I feel like the amount of loss or lack of having music during the pandemic was able to really just force us to have such a renewed appreciation and love for the music,” Barnes said.
Hurricane Ida, which also wreaked havoc in New Orleans in September, swept away the Karnofsky Tailor Shop and Residence, a historic jazz landmark that Louis Armstrong once considered a second home and many musicians affected by the destruction.
As Jazz Fest returned to the city, the New Orleans Public School Board reversed a 100-year-old rule banning jazz in New Orleans schools.
Kenneth Ducote, NOLA public schools historian, found the obscure rule and brought it to the board’s attention.
“There was no prior discussion. There was no analysis, there was no theory, theoretical analysis of jazz,” he told ABC News’ Good Morning America of the rule.
Although it was mostly unenforced, Ducote brought it to the school board’s attention which reversed the rule.
“It was really important for us to pass it because, to be honest, this is a policy that was rooted in racism,” Olin Parker, president of the New Orleans Parrish school board, told GMA.
Barnes, who is the mother of a 2-year-old daughter named Riley, said reversing the rule is a “symbolic” move that shows the community’s appreciation for jazz and its impact on New Orleans history.
As for Riley, who was born during the pandemic, Barnes said she is excited to have her daughter experience Jazz Fest for the first time.
Although jazz is the cornerstone of the event, the festival celebrates all the indigenous music and culture of New Orleans and Louisiana and includes music from various genres, including blues, R&B, gospel, Cajun, zydeco, Afro-Caribbean, folk, Latin, rock, rap, country and bluegrass, according to the festival’s website.
This year’s headlining acts include The Who, Stevie Nicks, Willie Nelson, Foo Fighters, Jimmy Buffett and The Coral Reefer Band, Luke Combs, Lionel Richie, The Black Crowes, The Avett Brothers, Erykah Badu and Norah Jones.
Barnes said that the festival “encompasses the diversity” of New Orleans and so many people come because “there is something for everyone.”
(WASHINGTON) — U.S. employers added 428,000 jobs to their payrolls in April, the latest figures released Friday by the Labor Department show.
The increase marks the 12th straight month of job growth above 400,000.
The biggest gains in employment last month occurred in leisure and hospitality (78,000), manufacturing (55,000) and transportation and warehousing (52,000), according to the Labor Department.
The unemployment rate, meanwhile, remained unchanged at 3.6%.
Despite quick-spreading rumors circulating the internet Thursday night that Georgia YouTuber and self-proclaimed “relationship guru” Kevin Samuels died, as of early Friday morning, the Fulton County Medical Examiner has yet to confirm the news.
As detailed in an incident report provided by the Atlanta Police Department to ABC News, at approximately 6:04 p.m. on Thursday, May 5, authorities responded to a call regarding a person injured at an apartment on E Paces Ferry Road in Atlanta. Upon arriving at the home, an officer observed the fire department administering CPR to a Black male, who was unresponsive on the floor of his apartment.
The officer then met with a woman who identified the male as Kevin Samuels.
According to the incident report, currently categorized as “Miscellaneous Non-crime,” the woman stated that she met Samuels the evening prior and spent the night with him. Upon Samuels’ complaint of chest pain, the woman attempted to help him but he fell on top of her, after which she called 911. The woman also said she requested the 911 operator to contact the front desk for a defibrillator to help keep Samuels responsive until hospital staff arrived.
Samuels was later transported to Piedmont Hospital for care.
A Monday evening press release from Chief Medical Examiner Karen E. Sullivan states in full, “The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office can neither confirm nor deny the reported death of Kevin Samuels. If further information becomes available, an updated press release will be issued.”
Samuels is known as a popular social influencer who often went viral due to his controversial relationship advice and remarks. Many people strongly disagreed with his dating opinions — often times aimed at Black women — including his most recent proclamation that, “If you have made it to 35 years old and you’re unmarried, you are a leftover woman.”
ABC News has reached out for confirmation of Samuels’ condition and will update this story as more information becomes available.
The clip for the Fergie-sampling track stars “Girl from Rio” singer Anitta as a mysterious woman who spies on Jack with a telescope as he exits a building, and then gets on a motorcycle and rides into the night down a road painted with letters spelling out “Glamorous” — the name of the Fergie song in question.
In the clip, which switches from black-and-white to color, we see Jack in the studio, in the club, on a runway with a helicopter, and on what looks like the same nighttime road Anitta is driving on. It ends with him opening the trunk of a car, only to see a beam of light pour out and shoot up to the sky, which could be a nod to the 1984 cult classic Repo Man.
As previously reported, Come Home the Kids Miss You features Justin Timberlake, Pharrell, Drake and Lil Wayne. There’s also a song called “Dua Lipa,” in which Jack raps, “I catch a groove like Dua Lipa/I’m tryna do more with her than do a feature.”
Speaking to Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 about the album, Jack explains its theme is all about bringing a piece of his glamorous life back to his home in Louisville, Kentucky.
“I take these experiences where I’m flying through the Hollywood Hills or I’m on a private jet to Miami…I experience stuff no one from my city is getting to experience,” he explains. “And I take that home and go, ‘Let me tell you about it.’”
The full interview drops Saturday at 11 a.m. ET on Jack’s YouTube channel.
