As teased earlier this week, Imagine Dragons has released a new song called “Enemy.”
The track, a collaboration with hip hop artist JID, was recorded for the upcoming animated Netflix series Arcane, which was inspired by the popular League of Legends video game.
You can download “Enemy” now via digital outlets. Its accompanying video, which features animated versions of ID and JID spliced in with Arcane footage, is streaming now on YouTube.
By the way, Imagine Dragons previously entered the League of Legends world with their song “Warrior,” which was recorded for the game’s 2014 World Championship.
As for ID’s non-LoL music, the band just dropped a new album, Mercury — Act 1, in September. It includes the singles “Follow You” and “Wrecked.”
Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
This weekend in Cleveland, it’s the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony. And each year, there’s always a story about an artist who doesn’t want to go because they either don’t like Rock Hall, or they’re feuding with their former band mates. Back in 2017, Steve Perry was one of those artists who wasn’t going to show up for his induction as a member of Journey…but now, looking back, he’s really glad he did.
“Yeah, it turned out to be one of the most fun things I’ve ever done,” Perry told ABC Audio. In his case, he said he was concerned because “it had been so many years and the band’s moved on.” In addition, he didn’t want to make Journey’s current lead singer, Arnel Pineda, feel uncomfortable.
“I love Arnel and I thought, y’know, out of respect for him and just where they’d gone, I thought I would just leave it alone,” he says. “Then I had a friend of mine telling me, ‘Look, you deserve to be there — you should be there too.'”
“One thing led to another, and I went,” he recalls. “And backstage, it became clear to me what I was doing there, and what I needed to say. I sketched some stuff on a paper, and when I got out there, I pulled the paper out and said, ‘I got some things to say!'”
He laughs, “They gave us all about five to six minutes…and I thought, ‘That’s not going to cut it for me!’ So I went ahead and took the moment, and thanked everybody.”
The first person Perry thanked was ex-Journey manager Herbie Herbert, who was responsible for him joining the band. Herbert passed away Monday at age 73.
Perry’s first Christmas album,The Season, is out November 5.
Ava DuVernay says she and Colin Kaepernick had a similar story in mind when it came time to create the Netflix limited series Colin in Black & White.
“It wasn’t just [a] story that appeal[ed] to me, it was a story that appealed to Colin Kaepernick as well and the things that we wanted to say about his early life,” DuVernay tells ABC Audio.
Serving as both co-creator and director, DuVernay says the six-episode journey allows viewers to see “how anyone’s early life really adds up to who they are today.”
“And it’s worthy of examination,” she says. “It’s worthy about thinking, ‘Where do I come from? And how do I get these thoughts in my head? And do I still believe those things? Or is this just a habit?’… And all of these questions that we embed in the piece.”
While the Kaepernick-centered series primarily focuses on Colin’s young-adult years after being adopted by a white family, DuVernay says the drama also showcases an experimental “new form” of storytelling which includes elements of animation, live action, and social commentary.
“I think some people think this is a documentary, it’s not,” she says. “Some people think it’s just a straight kind of celebrity childhood biopic thing. It’s not that either. And so discovering a new form for it was really challenging, but fun.”
Meanwhile, Jaden Michael, who plays a young Kaepernick, thanks DuVernay for consistently creating opportunities for people of color to tell these important stories.
“I think with time… we will have greater and more nuanced conversations,” he says. “And I think Colin in Black & White is a great way to start that conversation of ‘Let’s change it up a little bit.'”
Colin in Black & White launches on Netflix Friday.
Forget never never land, Metallica is off to the classroom.
The metal legends are launching their own Masterclass series, in which they will teach “being a band,” including everything from making an album to “navigating egos” and “giving criticism.”
“We have sustained our bond for more than 40 years because we’ve learned a lot about each other and ourselves over time,” says frontman James Hetfield. “In our class we not only teach MasterClass members how we write songs and find inspiration for our music, but how the experiences we’ve had together have contributed to successful creative collaboration.”
All four Metallica members will take part, and will be breaking down the making of classics including “Enter Sandman,” “One” and “Master of Puppets.”
For a preview of what you can expect, you can check out a trailer for the Masterclass streaming now on YouTube. Additional info can be found at MasterClass.com.
This report is a part of “Rethinking Gun Violence,” an ABC News series examining the level of gun violence in the U.S. — and what can be done about it.
(NEW YORK) — In the bitter debate over gun control, battle lines are often drawn around the Second Amendment, with many in favor of gun rights pointing to it as the source of their constitutional authority to bear arms, and some in favor of tighter gun control disagreeing with that interpretation.
But if the purpose of the debate is to reduce the tragic human toll of gun violence, the focus on Second Amendment is often misplaced, according to many experts on guns and the Constitution.
They say the battle lines that actually matter have been drawn around state legislatures, which are setting the country’s landscape on guns through state laws — or sometimes, the lack thereof.
Joseph Blocher, professor of law and co-director of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke Law School, described the patchwork of state laws that exists across the country as a “buffer zone” for the Second Amendment.
“Before you even get to the Constitution, there’s a huge array of other laws super protecting the right to keep and bear arms,” Blocher said. “This collection of laws is giving individuals lots of protection for gun-related activity that the Second Amendment would not necessarily require, and certainly, and in almost all of these instances, that no lower court has said the Second Amendment would require.”
Adam Winkler, a professor of law at the UCLA School of Law, also said the Second Amendment is losing its legal relevance in distinguishing lawful policies from unlawful ones as the gap between what he calls the “judicial Second Amendment” and the “aspirational Second Amendment” widens.
Winkler defines the “judicial Second Amendment” as how courts interpret the constitutional provision in their decisions, and the “aspirational Second Amendment” as how the amendment is used in political dialogue. The latter is “far more hostile to gun laws than the judicial one,” he said — and also more prevalent.
“The aspirational Second Amendment is overtaking the judicial Second Amendment in American law,” he wrote in the Indiana Law Journal in 2018, a sentiment he repeated in a recent interview with ABC News. “State law is embracing such a robust, anti-regulatory view of the right to keep and bear arms that the judicial Second Amendment, at least as currently construed, seems likely to have less and less to say about the shape of America’s gun laws.”
Winkler told ABC News the aspirational or “political” Second Amendment has become the basis for expanding gun rights in the last 40 years.
“In the judicial Second Amendment, gun rights advocates haven’t found that much protection,” Winkler said. “Where they found protection was by getting state legislatures, in the name of the Second Amendment, to legislate for permissive gun laws.”
The debate around the Second Amendment (and why some say it might be overrated)
The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads in full:
“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The role of the Second Amendment, like many constitutional rights, is to put limits on what regulations the federal government can pass, and scholars and lawyers have debated its scope since it was ratified in 1791.
Before the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision in 2008, much of the debate revolved around the meaning of a “well-regulated militia.” The Heller decision struck down a handgun ban in Washington, D.C., and established the right for individuals to have a gun for certain private purposes including self-defense in the home. The court expanded private gun ownership protection two years later in McDonald v. City of Chicago, determining that state and local governments are also bound to the Second Amendment.
“The Bill of Rights, by its terms, only applies to the federal government, but the Supreme Court, through a doctrine known as incorporation, has made almost all of its guarantees applicable against state and local governments as well. That’s what the question was in McDonald,” Blocher said. “But some states have chosen to go above and beyond what the court laid out.”
Notably, the court in Heller carved out limitations on that individual right and preserved a relatively broad range of possible gun regulation — such as allowing for their restriction in government buildings, schools and polling places — but in many instances, state legislatures have decided not to use the authority that the court has granted them.
“Most states have chosen not to use their full regulatory authority,” Blocher said. “If a state decides not to forbid people from having large-capacity magazines, for instance, that doesn’t necessarily result in a law. It can be the absence of a law that has the most impact.”
It goes back to that widening gap between the judicial Second Amendment as the courts interpret it and the aspirational Second Amendment as used in politics, according to Winkler and Blocher.
“There’s a difference between the Second Amendment as interpreted and applied by courts and the Second Amendment as it’s invoked in political discussions. And for many gun rights advocates, the political version of the Second Amendment is quite a bit more gun protective than the Second Amendment as the Supreme Court and lower courts have applied it,” he said.
Laws based on the ‘aspirational’ Second Amendment
There are a few laws many experts say bolster gun rights in ways the Second Amendment does not explicitly require.
In more than 40 states, preemption laws expressly limit cities from regulating guns — with some going so far as to impose punitive damages such as fines and lawsuits on officials who challenge the state’s rules. This means, even if a highly populated city had overwhelming support to pass a local ordinance regulating guns, a preemption law in the state would restrict local officials from taking any action.
After the National Rifle Association formed its own political action committee in 1977, it began targeting state legislatures with the preemption model and found it was a more effective way to bolster the rights of gun owners than going through Congress.
The effort picked up momentum when a challenge, on Second Amendment grounds, to a local ordinance in Illinois banning handgun ownership failed in 1982 — years ahead of the 2008 Heller decision. So, he said, the NRA raised the specter of Quilici v. Village of Morton Grove to lobby for preemption laws in order to lessen local governments’ abilities to regulate guns in the first place.
In 1979, two states in the U.S. had full preemption and five states had partial preemption laws. By 1989, 18 states had full preemption laws and three had partial, according to Kristin Goss in her book “Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America.”
“There’s been a concerted effort by gun rights organizations to enact gun-friendly legislation in the states. And they do so using the rhetoric of the Second Amendment, even though nothing about the Second Amendment necessarily requires the state to pass such legislation,” said Darrell Miller, another expert on gun law at Duke University School of Law.
While a densely populated area with a high crime rate may want to enact stricter gun policies not necessarily suited for other areas in a state, preemption laws restrict local governments from doing so.
For example, in Colorado, a preemption law had prevented cities and municipalities from passing gun regulation measures. Boulder tried to ban semi-automatic weapons in 2018 after a gunman with an AR-15-style rifle opened fire at a high school in Parkland, Florida, leaving 17 dead and surpassing the Columbine High School shooting as the deadliest high school shooting in American history.
But a state court struck down the ban on March 12 of this year — 10 days before a 21-year-old man with a semi-automatic Ruger AR-556 pistol killed 10 people at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder. The judge’s decision did not hang on the Second Amendment but rather a violation of Colorado’s preemption law.
Colorado in June became the first state to repeal its preemption law — a move gun-regulation activists such as those at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence have hailed as a reflection of what voters want. More than half of Americans support more gun regulation, according to data from recent surveys by Pew Research Center and Gallup.
There’s also the presence of “permitless carry regimes,” said Jake Charles, another gun law expert at Duke University, which is when legislatures interpret the Second Amendment as giving individuals the right to bear arms in public without a permit, an interpretation the Supreme Court has not made.
In all 50 states, it is legal to carry a concealed handgun in public, subject to varying restrictions depending on the state, but at least 20 do not require permits for either open or concealed carry of firearms, with Texas becoming the latest to enact what advocates call “constitutional carry.”
Permitless or “constitutional carry” is not something the Supreme Court’s reading of the Second Amendment currently calls for.
Experts say that could change.
In New York state, a person is currently required to prove a special need for self-protection outside the home to receive a permit to carry a concealed firearm. A challenge to the constitutionality of a “may-issue” permit law, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Corlett, will be heard by the Supreme Court this fall — the court’s first major case on guns in a decade, coming as the makeup of the court swings right due to three appointments from former President Donald Trump.
“There are about half a dozen states which have laws similar to New York’s, so if the court strikes it down, we can expect to see challenges to those states’ laws in short order,” Blocher said.
The partisan debate continues
Allison Anderman, senior counsel at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, stressed that, in part because of the influence of state statutes, the Second Amendment should not be a barrier to gun regulation.
She also said that because the Second Amendment’s political definition is entrenched in the true, judicial one, the debate surrounding it gets muddied up and the passion is, perhaps, misplaced.
“It’s a rallying cry. It’s easy. It’s a sound bite,” she said. “But the Second Amendment gets thrown around politically in a way that’s not based in law.”
Blocher agreed and argued the Second Amendment debate is among the most partisan in the nation.
“The gun debate has gone far beyond judicial interpretations of the Second Amendment and these days has much more to do with personal, political and partisan identity,” he said.
Foo Fighters and Machine Gun Kelly are among the nominees for the 2021 American Music Awards.
Dave Grohl and company will compete against the “Bloody Valentine” rocker in the Favorite Rock Artists category, along with All Time Low, Glass Animals and AJR.
Glass Animals and AJR are also up for the Favorite Pop Duo or Group award.
2021 breakout star and pop-punk disciple Olivia Rodrigo leads all nominees, with a total of seven nods.
The 2021 American Music Awards will take place Sunday, November 21 at 8 p.m. ET. The ceremony will broadcast live on ABC.
After “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” shot up to the top of the Billboard charts, it was only a matter of time before Kidz Bop got its hands on the sexually-charged song. However, Lil Nas X apparently wasn’t expecting just how far the music brand would go to make his X-rated anthem “child friendly.”
The Grammy winner took to Twitter and shared a peek at the super-sanitized lyrics, which read, “I wanna lie on the beach in Hawaii/ I want that jet lag from livin’ and flyin’/ Put a smile on your face whilst we’re dinin’.”
Of course, those who know the song by heart know the actual lyrics are way more explicit.
A further look at the clean edition shows that the brand also shifted the R-rated lyrics “Cocaine and drinking with your friends” to a watered down “Singin’ and dancin’ with your friends.”
Fans had a blast poking fun at the lyrical changes, especially over the inclusion of words like “whilst” and “dining.”
For those who prefer a squeaky-clean version of this year’s top songs, you can pre-order Kidz Bop 2022 for $12 on the brand’s official website. The album also includes child-friendly versions of “Astronaut in the Ocean,” “Save Your Tears,” “Peaches,” “Mood” and more.
Understandably, Cardi B‘s “Up” and Ariana Grande‘s “34+35” did not make the cut.
On the latest installment of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the eponymous host reacted to her friend Jason Sudeikis‘ SNL sketch spoofing her, called Mellen.
The conceit of the skit was that with more men sitting at home during the pandemic, network executives “took 10 seconds” to come up with a male-skewing alternative for DeGeneres’ long-running program.
The result of the execs’ poor planning was dressing Sudeikis like Ellen, dubbing him Mellen, and ripping off her show. “All the fun daytime energy of Ellen with a hard, masculine edge,” according to the SNL sketch.
The result is an admittedly poorly thought-out combination of vests, “awkward male dancing,” and fistfights in the audience. “Ellen’s lawyers called the series, ‘cease and desist,'” the sketch says.
On her show, the real Ellen explained she was surprised by the sketch, when she and wife Portia de Rossi were watching SNL “as we do every week.” She screened the SNL version for her own audience, and then admitted with a laugh, “I would actually watch that show.”
She then called out Sudeikis, saying, “Jason, when you’re ending Ted Lasso, we should do that show.”
Charlie Puth is giving fans a tease of an upcoming song, but not before providing some insight.
Taking to Instagram on Tuesday, the singer explained, “I’m very bad at expressing my feelings, which is why I usually just hide them in music, but as I write this next part to this song, I feel like I should tell you why I’m singing it so it’s not random when you hear it.”
Puth, 29, explained, “I went through a very bad breakup one time, and I felt like I lost a year of my life.”
He then played a snippet of the track while he bobbed his head to the beat and lip-synced on camera.
In the teaser, Puth slings some pretty intense lyrics at his ex, singing, “You took away a year of my f****** life, and I can’t get it back no more/ So, when I see those tears coming out your eyes, I hope it’s me.”
After a beat drop, the song continues, “You didn’t love when you had me, but now you need me so badly/ You can’t be serious. That’s hilarious.”
The “We Don’t Talk Anymore” singer captioned the video, ” I was scared to post this,” but fans were happy that he did.
“I need thissss,” one user commented, while another urged, “Release it already!”
(NEW YORK) — The NAACP on Thursday called on members of the NBA, WNBA, NFL, NHL and MLB to consider not signing with teams in Texas as a protest against several controversial laws passed recently in the state.
In the two-page letter given first to ABC News, the NAACP took jabs at state lawmakers, calling the state “a blueprint by legislators to violate constitutional rights for all, especially for women, children and marginalized communities.” The NAACP noted the state’s controversial laws on abortion, voting rights and coronavirus mask mandates as reasons for free agents not to sign with Texas teams.
“As we watch an incomprehensible assault on basic human rights unfold in Texas, we are simultaneously witnessing a threat to constitutional guarantees for women, children and marginalized communities,” NAACP National President Derrick Johnson and NAACP Texas State Conference President Gary Bledsoe wrote in the letter. “Over the past few months, legislators in Texas have passed archaic policies, disguised as laws, that directly violate privacy rights and a woman’s freedom to choose, restrict access to free and fair elections for Black and Brown voters, and increase the risk of contracting coronavirus.”
“If you are a woman, avoid Texas. If you are Black, avoid Texas,” the letter continued. “If you want to lower your chances of dying from coronavirus, avoid Texas.”
Texas’ SB8, the strictest anti-abortion law in the country, has caused protests nationwide and a current legal fight between the state and Department of Justice. The law bans abortions after a so-called fetal heartbeat is detected, which is about six weeks into a pregnancy and often before a person knows they are pregnant.
Republicans in the state also spent months trying to overhaul the voting system in the state, even though Democrats say the new rules will make it harder for minority voters to take part in elections. Although there was no evidence of widespread fraud in Texas following the 2020 election, Republicans claim they are seeking to restore voter confidence in the state’s elections.
Gov. Greg Abbott, the only politician who is mentioned by name in the NAACP’s letter, has also been a vociferous opponent of mask and vaccine mandates to fight COVID-19.
There are nine Texas teams playing the leagues mentioned by the NAACP: the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, San Antonio Spurs and Houston Rockets; the NHL’s Dallas Stars; the WNBA’s Dallas Wings; MLB’s Texas Rangers and Houston Astros; and the NFL’s Houston Texans and Dallas Cowboys.
With the NHL, NFL and NBA seasons less than halfway over, the leagues won’t welcome free agency until well into 2022. MLB free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series, where the Astros are currently playing.
The letter comes just a few months after MLB took a stand against Georgia’s voting overhaul this past baseball season when it moved the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest.
The civil rights group is calling on athletes to “seek employment with sports teams located in states that will protect, honor and serve your families with integrity.”
The group added, “Until the legislation is overturned, Texas isn’t safe for anyone.”
