Badflower has released a new song called “Johnny Wants to Fight” off the band’s upcoming album, This Is How the World Ends.
If you’re wondering why “Johnny Wants to Fight,” that’d be because frontman Josh Katz‘s narrator is sleeping with Johnny’s girlfriend.
“Johnny wants to fight, let him fight/ Let him paint my f***ing face all over town,” Katz sings. “Johnny Wants to Fight” is available now via digital outlets and steaming services. You also can check out a lyric video for the tune at Badflower’s official YouTube channel.
“Johnny Wants to Fight” is the fourth track to be released from This Is How the World Ends, following “Family,” “Don’t Hate Me” and “F**boi.” The album, the sophomore follow-up to 2019’s OK, I’m Sick, arrives in full on September 24.
Foo Fighters are among the nominees for Group of the Year at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards.
The prize is among the just-announced VMA “social categories,” which will be chosen through MTV’s social media channels. Bracket-style voting is set to begin this Saturday, September 4, via MTV’s Instagram Story.
Other nominees include Twenty One Pilots, BTS, Jonas Brothers, Maroon 5, Silk Sonic, BLACKPINK and CNCO.
Foo Fighters are already up for three other VMAs this year: Best Rock, Best Choreography and Best Cinematography, all for the “Shame Shame” video. They’ll also be honored with the Global Icon Award.
Foo Fighters are also performing during the VMA ceremony, which premieres September 12.
Kool & the Gang’s Robert “Kool” Bell in 2012; Rob Ball/WireImage
Kool & the Gang reached a milestone with the release of their 25th studio album, Perfect Union, two weeks ago. However, it was difficult to celebrate following the recent passing of two of the founding members.
Saxophonist Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas died on August 7, one year after Ronald Bell, brother of band leader Robert “Kool” Bell, died in 2020.
“Our last show with Dennis Thomas was in Los Angeles on 4th of July weekend,” Kool tells People about their performance at the Hollywood Bowl. “We didn’t know that he would pass two or three weeks later. It was the greatest show. We blended very well with the live orchestra and it was great. We didn’t know that he would be leaving us after that.”
Perfect Union is the Grammy Award-winning band’s first album in eight years, and was conceived by Ronald Bell.
“[He] put together most of this album before he passed,” Kool continues. “The album represents the perfect union the band makes together and the theme of what not only our country, but the world is trying to achieve right now. “
After more than 50 years, Kool & the Gang is ready to document their impressive longevity with a project inspired by their 1974 party classic.
“We’re working on a documentary, a movie as well,” Kool reveals. “My working title is Hollywood Swinging: The Kool and the Gang Story.”
Despite so much recent tragedy, including the passing of his wife, Sakinah, in 2018, Bell is grateful for what has been a very special life.
“A lot of different things over the years were testing periods for me, learning periods of my life,” the 70-year-old bassist comments. “This experience has been a blessing, to be able to travel around the world and see so many different things.”
(WASHINGTON) — Lawmakers and prosecutors continue to piece together the events of the violent insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and now, a new film offers a firsthand perspective from the firefighters and paramedics who responded.
The documentary-style video, produced by DC Fire and EMS and released on YouTube, offers an hour-by-hour account of their attempts to provide life-saving care amid a flurry of violence, turmoil and death.
“The resources we had in place were quickly overwhelmed,” Deputy Fire Chief Daniel McCoy says in the first few minutes of the film.
McCoy and his team surged resources to the park south of the White House where demonstrators and rioters first gathered. That morning, they also deployed personnel to survey the Capitol and surrounding area, anticipating the crowd would head in that direction.
Paramedic Sgt. Alethea Brooks described the chaos while she was trying to provide aide to the injured. Rioters spat at her and called her racial slurs multiple times, she said.
“You always know there are people that you have to help regardless, it doesn’t matter if you’re a murderer,” Brooks says. “It’s our job to not judge and we’re just here to help. But it definitely makes it harder when you know that the people that you’re helping are actually harming our brothers — our brothers in blue — and have no regard for me.”
Another paramedic, Rocco Gabriele, describes how his gear was taken by rioters and his supplies were dumped out while he was treating a patient.
“We did what we could with what we had and we did it fast,” he said.
Gabriele, Brooks and several of their colleagues described the extreme difficulties involved with providing care amid such a hectic scene.
During the fray, one of the people attempting to breach the inner halls of the Capitol was shot by a police officer. First responders had to carry her out before providing care because the paramedic team was worried for their own safety.
The violent nature of the crowd also made it difficult for first responders to access and treat many of the police officers who were injured. There were about a thousand documented assaults against law enforcement over the course of the day, according to recent legal filings from the Department of Justice.
Among the dead was Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who suffered a stroke that the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for the District of Columbia said caused his death.
After paramedics had been alerted that Sicknick collapsed on an upper level of the Capitol building, they began working on a plan to get him out. Due to the state of emergency, the elevators were out of service so a team of National Guardsmen and Capitol Police carried him out in a wheelchair, one of the first responders recounted.
A congressional committee continues to investigate the events surrounding Jan. 6 and is attempting to obtain any relevant records it can find, such as call logs, as well as the type of first-hand accounts featured in the film.
Drake Certified Lover Boy album cover-Republic Records
Friday was highlighted by the release of the most anticipated album of the year, Drake‘s Certified Lover Boy, which finally dropped after months of delay. The follow-up to Drake’s five-times-platinum 2018 album, Scorpion, includes 21 tracks. The star-studded project features Jay-Z, Travis Scott, Rick Ross, Future, Young Thug, Lil Wayne, Lil Baby, Lil Durk, Ty Dolla $ign, Kid Cudi, 21 Savage and many more.
Like Drake, Soulja Boy also is feuding with Kanye West, and earlier this week Draco blasted Yeezy in a marathon Twitter Rage. He’s accusing West of erasing his verse from the song “Remote Control” on the Donda album after telling Soulja Boy that he loved it.
Now the “Crank That” rapper, who has over 60 mixtapes, has dropped another mix project, titled Swag 4. He promoted it with a photo of stacks of cash on Instagram. The 14-song mixtape includes a track with the title “Shawn Carter,” which is of Jay-Z’s legal name.
Anderson .Paak, who has been enjoying his massive success with Bruno Mars as the duo Silk Sonic, has dropped a new solo song, “Fire in the Sky.” The mid-tempo track about falling in love is featured on Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings soundtrack, which also features Swae Lee, Jhene Aiko, Rick Ross, 21 Savage and Saweetie.
Finally, Bobby Shmurda has shared a new freestyle song, “No Time for Sleep,” his first since being released from prison in February after serving five years for conspiracy to commit murder. The song is his first new solo single in seven years, and he will have a chance to perform it for the first time this weekend at Jay-Z’s Made in America festival in Philadelphia.
Late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury was born 75 years ago this Sunday, September 5.
Mercury, who died from AIDS in November 1991 at age 45, is widely regarded as one of the all-time great rock singers. His powerful vocals, flamboyant persona and dynamic performing style helped Queen become one of the most popular and successful bands on the planet.
Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara on the African island of Zanzibar in 1946, and his family lived there until 1964, when they moved to the U.K. In 1970, Mercury teamed up with guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor in a band called Smile, and after the addition of bassist John Deacon, the group changed its name to Queen.
Queen blended a variety of genres including rock ‘n’ roll, hard rock, prog-rock, classical, pop, funk and rockabilly for a unique sound that captivated a wide variety of music fans. Mercury was responsible for writing many of the band’s biggest hits, including “Killer Queen,” “Somebody to Love,” “We Are the Champions,” “Bicycle Race,” “Don’t Stop Me Now,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “Play the Game” and, of course, the enduring rock anthem “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Freddie also co-wrote Queen’s classic 1981 collaboration with David Bowie, “Under Pressure.” Mercury’s performance with Queen at London’s Wembley Stadium at the 1985 Live Aid festival is widely considered one of the highlights of that historic event.
Mercury also released a pair of solo albums during the 1980s, one of which, 1988’s Barcelona, was a duets project with Spanish opera singer Montserrat Caballé.
Mercury and Queen’s other members were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2001 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003.
In commemoration of Freddie’s 75th birthday, three special T-shirts are on sale now at Queen’s online store.
(NOTE LANGUAGE) NBC’s sitcom AP Bio just returned for a fourth season on Peacock.
The series stars It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia lead and co-creator Glenn Howerton as Jack Griffin, a former Harvard philosophy professor begrudgingly tasked with teaching at his hometown high school in Ohio.
Instead of teaching, however, he sets his students on a series of missions to get back at a fellow academic who stole his dream job.
The series was never a ratings hit for NBC, but it developed a dedicated core audience who successfully fought to save it season after season.
Howerton explains to ABC Audio that AP‘s creative trajectory is a blessing in disguise. “There is this little bit of sort of like a kamikaze pilot mentality where you’re like, ‘This might be it…So I’m just f***ing going for it, man.”
He adds, “You know…look, I experienced it on Sunny…in those early seasons especially, we were like ‘Nobody’s going [to watch] this. I don’t know if anybody’s really even getting what we’re doing. So let’s just do it.’ It’s like it’s almost like we’re doing it for ourselves, you know?…And then you find out that, like, lots of people are watching and lots of people do love it.”
Stand-up and actor Patton Oswalt, who plays the school’s hysterically powerless Principal Durbin, agrees that this season, they’re going for broke.
“We know our writing staff, we know how willing to push the envelope they are,” he says. “And so knowing that they have yet another season — on a streaming platform where they get even more wiggle room — it was just that anticipation of, ‘Oh, God, what are they going to send us? I cannot wait to read these scripts!'”
Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
For months now, anyone who watched Dawson’s Creek on Netflix didn’t hear the show’s iconic theme song, “I Don’t Want to Wait” by Paula Cole, play over the opening credits. But on Friday, Netflix finally announced the good news: The song is back.
The reason the song had disappeared, reports Billboard, is allegedly because the show’s production company, Sony Pictures, was trying to save money by not licensing the song for DVD and streaming services. Meanwhile, Paula had re-recorded “I Don’t Want to Wait” and her other hits, similar to the way Taylor Swift is doing, and for the same reason. That cleared the way for the song to return.
As Paula tells Billboard, “This is a result of fans’ protestations, and I’m very touched and very humbled by that. Sony finally listened and contacted me and we made a deal using my new re-recorded master. It supports me, the artist.”
While she didn’t disclose the financial arrangement, Paula tells Billboard, “it’s a good deal” that’s enough to pay her daughter’s college tuition.
Now that “I Don’t Want to Wait” — which peaked at #11 in 1998 — is back, Paula tells Billboard that she hopes it’ll bring attention to the rest of her catalog, as well as her upcoming 12th album. She says what’s happened with Dawson’s Creek proves that that her “work will stand the test of time,” adding, “This is a beautiful testament to that — having patience and letting the fans have a voice. It’s beautiful and I’m very humbled by it.”
(NEW YORK) — The deaths of 13 people, all but two of whom lived in basement apartments, during New York City’s catastrophic flooding this week have renewed attention on the oftentimes illegal dwellings, with city officials looking to bolster evacuation efforts for vulnerable residents in extreme weather.
A record 3.15 inches of rain fell in one hour in the city Wednesday, all but stalling the city’s subway system and prompting dozens of water rescues. At least 13 people have been reported dead in New York City after the remnants of Hurricane Ida swept through the region.
The rapid rainfall inundated residences away from the city’s coastline not prone to flooding, damaging scores of homes and turning at least six basement apartments into death traps.
“The danger came from above,” as opposed to storm surge, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said during a press briefing Friday, while calling for more effective early warnings ahead of “wicked” weather that she said will undoubtedly become more frequent due to climate change.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday the city will be working on a “more severe kind of warning and more severe set of actions that will be a jolt to people.”
“What we saw in some of these basement apartments on Wednesday was people need to be evacuated who are far away from the coast, because of the sheer intensity and speed, the amount of rain that came in such a brief period of time,” he said, calling this extreme weather “a whole new ballgame.”
“We can say now that extreme weather has become the norm. We need to respond to it differently,” de Blasio told reporters.
The mayor said the city would need to impose travel bans more frequently, instructing people to leave the streets and get out of the subways, and evacuate more New Yorkers ahead of future storms.
To target those who live in basement apartments, changes could include cellphone alerts or door-to-door evacuations, the mayor said. But first, the city would need to create a database of what is conservatively estimated at more than 50,000 basement apartments, impacting at least 100,000 people, de Blasio said.
“We need to have an absolute accounting of all of them and then we can apply these door-to-door techniques if we need to,” he said. “We’ve got to have a clear database to work from and certainly begin with knowing the areas, which we do know, where they are prevalent.”
With many of the city’s basement apartments illegal conversions, oftentimes providing affordable housing to low-income New Yorkers and undocumented immigrants, the city would work with community organizations and other trusted messengers to reach residents, the mayor said.
“We have an illegal basement problem and then we have a problem that so many people end up in illegal basements are fearful to communicate for fear they might be evicted or, worse in their mind, deported,” de Blasio said. “It’s just an extraordinarily challenging set of circumstances.”
Five of the six apartments where 11 people died during the storm were illegally converted cellar and basement apartments, according to the city’s buildings department. Four of them were in Queens and one in Brooklyn. The lone legal basement apartment was in Queens, where a 48-year-old woman was found unconscious and unresponsive at a home near Corona.
Those who died in the illegal conversions included a 43-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man at a basement apartment in Jamaica, Queens; a 50-year-old man, a 48-year-old woman and a 2-year-old boy at a cellar-level apartment in Flushing, Queens; and a 66-year-old man at a cellar unit in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, based on statements from the city’s building department and New York Police Department.
City officials encouraged basement apartment residents to call 311 or 911 to report issues without fear of being vacated, unless they are facing life-threatening danger.
The risks posed to those living in basement apartments were raised in the city’s “stormwater resiliency plan,” released in May. It included an initiative to develop notifications for basement dwellings “to keep residents out of harm’s way” during extreme rain events, but the completion date wasn’t until 2023.
When asked about that timeline Friday, de Blasio said, “Clearly we have to change that.”
“This is a new deal we’re dealing with now, a new reality,” the mayor said. “We have to take the very muscular approaches that we have, the very forceful approaches like mandatory evacuation, like mandatory travel ban, and use those in ways we never had before, because events are just changing the paradigm constantly.”
On Friday, New York Attorney General Letitia James called on the city to provide emergency housing vouchers to all New Yorkers living in unregulated basement apartments, as extreme weather events have become “the rule, not the exception” due to climate change.
“We know that New York’s housing crisis has gone too far when tenants have to risk their lives just to have a roof over their heads,” James said in a statement. “To prevent these problems in the future, we must also ensure that basement units are safe for human occupancy and regularly inspected. Overcoming the twin threats of climate change and a housing crisis will not be simple, but we must ensure measures are in place to protect our neighbors and prevent a future catastrophe.”
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards also pointed to the city’s affordable housing crisis in the wake of the deadly flooding while pushing for more infrastructure investments in neighborhoods that have been “historically left behind.”
“The reason people are in basement apartments is because of the failure of New York City to really truly build out affordable housing,” he told Pix11 Friday morning. “I was a basement baby myself. … We lived in basements because it provided an affordable opportunity. So this was a failure on many levels, and we need to make sure we’re never back here again.”
ABC News’ Mark Crudele contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The Arizona man seen sporting a Viking helmet and fur vest during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol pleaded guilty Friday to one felony count related to his participation in the riot.
Jacob Chansley, the self-proclaimed “QAnon Shaman” who entered the Senate chamber and left an ominous note on a desk for then-Vice President Mike Pence, pleaded guilty to unlawfully obstructing an official proceeding — the most serious charge in the government’s indictment against him.
The other five charges against Chansley were dropped as part of a plea agreement he entered into with federal prosecutors.
Chansley is set to be sentenced November 17 and his conviction carries a maximum sentence of up to 20 years in federal prison — although another Capitol rioter who pleaded guilty to the same felony charge last month was only sentenced to eight months.
Chansley’s attorney, Al Watkins, said during a Friday hearing that he is seeking Chansley’s release pending sentencing, which a federal prosecutor said the government would oppose.
Chansley is one of the few rioters who has remained detained over the past eight months despite not being accused of participating in any violence against law enforcement during the riot.
Prosecutors argued he posed a danger to the public given his actions on Jan. 6, noting that he was among the first 30 members of the pro-Trump mob to enter the building and that he carried an American flag tied to a pole with a sharp object at the tip, which the government characterized as a “dangerous weapon.”
Upon entering the Senate chamber, Chansley could be seen in videos calling on other rioters to join him up on the dais where Pence was previously presiding over the counting of the electoral college vote.
Before being escorted out, Chansley left a note on the desk that said, “It’s Only A Matter of Time. Justice Is Coming!”
At least 600 individuals are currently facing federal charges in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to an analysis of public court records by ABC News.
As of Friday, approximately 60 accused rioters had either pleaded guilty or have plea hearings scheduled in the coming weeks.
