As Jay-Z prepares to be inducted into the Rock & Roll of Fame on Saturday in Cleveland, he dropped two new tracks on Friday.
“Guns Go Bang” featuring Kid Cudi, and “King Kong Riddim” featuring Jadakiss, Conway The Machine and British rapper BackRoad Gee, are both from the soundtrack of the new Netflix western The Harder They Fall. Hova co-produced the film, which stars Idris Elba, Regina King, LaKeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz.
Alicia Keys serenades her husband, Swizz Beatz, in the video for “Best of Me,” which is the second single from her upcoming double album, KEYS. The 15-time Grammy winner also announced that she will drop KEYS on December 10. “Best of Me” follows “LA LA” featuring Swae Lee, which was released on September 9.
“My new album, KEYS, will have two types of songs,” she commented Tuesday in an Instagram video. The first album named, Originals, which Alicia produced, features “laid back piano vibes.’ The second disc, named Unlocked, which she produced with Mike WiLL Made-it, is described as “upbeat, drums, level up vibes.”
A$AP Rocky, who was a surprise guest during 50 Cent‘s Rolling Loud New York set Thursday, released a new track titled “Sandman.” The song was included on his 2011 mixtape, Live. Love. A$AP, which became available Friday on streaming platforms for the first time. The project was Rocky’s first release, and now he’s celebrating his 10th anniversary as a recording artist.
Finally, Lil Uzi Vert, who also performed Thursday during Rolling Loud New York event at Citi Field, has fans ready for Halloween with his latest track, “Demon High.” It’s his first solo single of the year. In May, he and Don Tolliver dropped “His & Her’s” featuring Gunna under the name Internet Money.
Little Big Town had a major piece of news to share on Friday: They’re the opening act for The Eagles’ upcoming 50th anniversary tour.
The five-stop stadium trek will take place over the month of June 2022, and will include four shows in the U.K. and one in the Netherlands. It will conclude with a set at London’s 10-day music festival BST Hyde Park.
“We’ve been DYING to share this news,” LBT wrote on social media. “What a bucket list dream come true. We’re headed to Europe, including HYDE PARK, with The Eagles!!!!”
As direct support for the legendary rockers, they won’t be the only country-contingent group onstage: The Eagles’ current lineup includes Vince Gill.
Tickets for the tour dates go on sale November 5.
We’ve been DYING to share this news. What a bucket list dream come true. We’re headed to Europe, including HYDE PARK, with The Eagles!!!! Tickets on sale Friday, 11/5. pic.twitter.com/bgnKeki5kZ
(NEW YORK) — Four New York City firefighters have been suspended after driving their truck to a state senator’s office while on duty, asking for the politician’s home address and telling him the city would have “blood on its hands” over the city’s vaccine mandate.
The group, from Ladder 113 in Brooklyn, went to the office of state Sen. Zellnor Myrie in the company’s fire district in uniform and asked to speak to him, although as a state official he had no involvement in the city mandate from Mayor Bill de Blasio.
All city personnel, including firefighters, must have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine by the time they show up to work on Monday. Those who do not get vaccinated will be placed on unpaid leave.
The senator was not there at the time, but the firefighters spoke to a staff member.
“They said they wanted to let people in the community know that the trucks weren’t going to be running and that they were going to shut down firehouses,” a person familiar with the conversation told ABC News.
It was, the person said, a “cordial conversation” though at one point the firefighters said the “city would have blood on its hands.”
“I think it is highly inappropriate,” Myrie, a Democrat, said in an interview with New York ABC station WABC. “It is incredibly disturbing that those entrusted with keeping us safe would be on duty, protesting a vaccine mandate that had nothing to do with a state elected official. … My staff is rattled, they’re shaken up by it. And frankly, I am upset that we’re even having this conversation.”
The firefighters told the senator’s staff member they wanted the choice of whether to get vaccinated and expressed a view that it would be safer for them to get tested every week.
Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett take to the studio for the video for “Night and Day.”
Much like “Love for Sale,” the title track of Gaga and Bennett’s most recent collaborations album, the dynamic duo take viewers inside the recording process of the song, which was penned by acclaimed Broadway songwriter Cole Porter, and was featured in the 1932 musical Gay Divorce.
Accompanied by session players, the two superstar singers step up to the mic, capturing the theatrical nature of “Night and Day,” taking notes and workshopping the song during the recording process. Throughout the session, Gaga can be seen adoringly looking at her duet partner, the performance ending with a double-cheek kiss.
Love for Sale reached #1 on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart and landed inside the top 10 on the all-genre Billboard 200 after its September release.
It marks the final studio recording of Bennett’s career. It was revealed in February that the 95-year-old music legend has been living with Alzheimer’s since 2016.
When a lot of people didn’t know where their next paycheck was coming from, Billy Joel made sure his band did.
During a recent interview, Joel revealed that he made sure the money kept flowing for his band members during the COVID-19 pandemic, even though live shows were shut down.
“I did pay them full salary for a year,” Joel told Howard Stern on Stern’s satellite radio show. “I have a great band, I’m so happy to have them on stage.”
The “Piano Man” went on to explain that he wanted to express his appreciation for the team that stuck by him through all these years, even when he had some financial issues of his own.
“I don’t do as many gigs as I used to do…back in the day when I had some money issues, I wasn’t able to take care of the band the same way I am now. I wasn’t able to compensate them…and I wanted to take care of the band,” said Joel.
Joel is set to kick off an 11-stop tour on November 5, starting in New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
Fetty Wap pleaded not guilty to federal drug charges during an arraignment Friday in Central Islip federal court in Long Island, New York, ABC News confirms.
Federal prosecutors asked that the rapper be detained pre-trial, which the defense did not contest.
“This defendant is part of an organization that systematically distributed 100 kilograms of fentanyl and heroin across Long Island,” assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Wenzel said.
Prosecutors noted Fetty Wap, birth name William Junior Maxwell II, faces a minimum of 10 years in prison and a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted.
The rapper was arrested Thursday during the Rolling Loud music festival at Citi Field in Queens, New York. He was charged with five others, including a New Jersey corrections officer, with conspiring to distribute and possess controlled substances across Long Island and New Jersey.
2021 just keeps on getting better for Elton John. After scoring his first number-one single in his native U.K. in nearly 20 years with “Cold Heart” two weeks ago, his latest album, The Lockdown Sessions, has debuted at number one on the Official U.K. Albums Chart.
The Lockdown Sessions, which features Sir Elton singing with everyone from Stevie Wonder, Stevie Nicks and Charlie Puth to Miley Cyrus, Eddie Vedder and Lil Nas X, is Elton’s first chart-topper in Great Britain since 2012.
On Instagram, a delighted Elton writes, “This album is all about the capacity for music to bring people together to form new friendships and connections. And right now I couldn’t feel more connected to my amazing fans in the U.K. who made this happen.”
He continues, “When I started collaborating with some of my favorite artists at the start of the pandemic, I couldn’t have dreamt in my wildest dreams it would lead to a number one album. I am so proud of what we have created and thrilled that it has connected with our fans to such a degree. It shows the spirit of collaboration and togetherness that can still happen in the most trying circumstances.”
Elton’s songwriting partner Bernie Taupin didn’t co-write any of the tunes on The Lockdown Sessions — with the exception of “Cold Heart” — but he still jumped into Elton’s comments section to write, “Yea buddy congratulations.”
Elton’s last #1 U.K. album was 2012’s Good Morning to the Night, which featured dozens of his old hits remixed and spliced together by Australian dance duo Pnau, the same team who similarly put together “Cold Heart.”
(NEW YORK) — Another 28 million Americans are one step closer to getting vaccinated against COVID-19 after the Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized the Pfizer shot for 5-11-year-olds.
Children will be one of the last groups in the U.S. to become eligible for the vaccine. Protecting them against COVID-19 is a major step in getting the country back on the path to normalcy after an unexpected late-summer surge that disproportionately impacted unvaccinated Americans and filled hospitals to the brim.
“As a mother and a physician, I know that parents, caregivers, school staff, and children have been waiting for today’s authorization. Vaccinating younger children against COVID-19 will bring us closer to returning to a sense of normalcy,” Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said in a statement Friday afternoon.
The process now heads to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An advisory committee for the CDC will meet on Tuesday to discuss the pediatric vaccine safety and efficacy data, as an advisory FDA panel did this past week, and then CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is expected to give the final signoff soon afterward.
That means kids could begin getting shots at some point next week and become fully vaccinated by December.
In anticipation, the White House planned to unleash millions of vaccine shipments across the nation as soon as FDA authorization was announced. Vaccine sites will have to wait for the CDC’s word to begin administering the vaccine, but stock will be on hand.
“The bottom line is that we will be ready immediately following FDA and CDC decisions so that parents can get their kids vaccinated quickly, easily and conveniently,” White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients said at a briefing with reporters on Thursday.
The White House purchased enough shots for all 28 million 5-11-year-olds and on Thursday announced plans to purchase another 50 million shots by April 30, 2022, which could also be used for children under 5, if and when there is authorization for that age group.
Though there was some debate at the FDA advisory meeting about the potential side effects for children 5-11 — particularly because myocarditis, a condition involving inflammation of the heart, has been linked to the vaccine in teenage boys and young men — the panel nearly unanimously voted in favor of the vaccine, deciding that the risk was worth the benefit.
None of the 2,200 kids who received the Pfizer-BioNTech pediatric vaccine last June in the clinical trials have experienced serious side effects, including myocarditis.
Meanwhile, nearly 2 million kids ages 5-11 have gotten COVID, and 8,300 have been hospitalized with COVID-19. A third of those children ended up in the ICU and over 100 have died.
“To me the question is pretty clear. We don’t want children to be dying of COVID, even if it is far fewer children than adults, and we don’t want them in the ICU,” Dr. Amanda Cohn, an epidemiologist with the CDC, said at the FDA meeting on Tuesday.
Dr. William Gruber, the senior vice president of Pfizer Vaccine Clinical Research and Development, told ABC News in an interview Friday that he also saw the vaccine as a way to protect children from the emotional instability the virus has wrought. Widespread vaccination could keep children out of quarantine after being exposed at school and ensure the safety of indoor activities ahead of the winter.
He pointed to the benefits of “allowing children to be children.”
“This allows that to open up again, we’ve been seeing step-by-step progress and opening up society. It’s time for that to happen with children as well,” Gruber said.
Whether parents will embrace the vaccines for their kids is still a question. In an October poll, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that about a third of parents with kids ages 5-11 were willing to vaccinate their kids right away, while another third wanted to “wait and see.” The figures represented a slight uptick in vaccine acceptance among parents of elementary-school-aged kids since July, but they have stayed steady since September.
The CDC director on Thursday emphasized the urgency of getting kids vaccinated, even as the country recovers from an alarming uptick of cases and begins to relax again.
“There’s urgency because we’re seeing disease in children, we’ve seen deaths in children and we’ve seen long COVID,” Walensky said at a White House briefing.
And as America saw during the delta surge, unvaccinated areas will be the most vulnerable if there are future spikes in cases.
“Certainly we have seen cases come down before and a way to prevent surges again is to get more and more people vaccinated and make sure that we have protection,” Walensky said.
Are Dan + Shay planning to release holiday music this year? Some fans certainly think so, as the duo have been on social media this week dropping hints about something Christmas-y to come.
“60 days ’til Christmas. Just sayin’,” Dan + Shay wrote on their socials. While they didn’t share many more details than that, fans poured into the comments section, clamoring for Christmas music from the group, or possibly even a full holiday album.
It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility: Last year, Dan + Shay dropped a pair of original holiday tracks, “Take Me Home for Christmas” and “Christmas Isn’t Christmas.” On the heels of their success with those two songs, the pair posted an end-of-year reflection letter to fans just a couple of days after Christmas 2020, which said they were thinking about putting out more holiday music in 2021.
“It’s been really encouraging, and has inspired lots of conversations about doing more next year (if you think we should, let us know),” they wrote at the time, adding, “It’s always been a dream of ours to release Christmas music.”
In non-holiday related news, Dan + Shay are still riding the high of their latest album, Good Things. They’re also on the road for their The (Arena) Tour, which makes up some dates that were canceled amid the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and also includes brand-new stops.
(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration is launching a new effort with The Rockefeller Foundation to encourage schools to set up surveillance COVID testing for students and staff, ABC News has learned.
The effort, which will be led by the Education Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comes seven months after President Joe Biden pledged $10 billion for testing by schools.
The idea is that school districts around the country, particularly elementary schools with large populations of unvaccinated children, would routinely test kids, teachers and other staff for COVID-19 to prevent the spread of the virus.
But some states have rejected their share of the $10 billion in federal funds for COVID-19 testing in schools while others have been painfully slow in actually implementing virus mitigation plans.
A survey of the nation’s 100 largest school districts from the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that less than 15% of those schools are utilizing federal funding dollars to establish COVID-19 in-school screening programs.
Meanwhile, pediatric COVID cases increased this summer with many school districts reporting mass quarantines at the beginning of the school year.
