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.
Lauren Alaina is opening up about one of the darkest times of her life, when she battled an eating disorder. The 26-year-old was just 15 when she was on American Idol, quickly getting a harsh taste of life on reality TV after she discovered a blog that called her “Miss Piggy,” complete with a pig snout on her face.
The discovery caused Lauren to resort to bulimia to lose weight, shedding 45 to 50 pounds by the end of the American Idol tour.
“[People] can be really cruel, and I didn’t have tools to deal with that,” Lauren toldEntertainment Tonight.
It was only when doctors told her that her purging could have a permanent impact on her singing career that she found the strength to stop.
“They told me that if I didn’t stop, I would never sing again, and I didn’t want that,” Lauren said. “That was a wake-up call for me, and it took me a few years even after that to really get into a better place. And I still go check in with the therapist every once in a while, specifically for an eating disorder.”
Lauren’s new album, Sitting Pretty on Top of the World, which includes duets with Trisha Yearwood and Jon Pardi, is out now. Her book, Getting Good at Being You: Learning to Love Who God Made You to Be, will be out on November 23.
Most of the categories have already been announced for the MTV Video Music Awards and voting is underway. But nominees in two additional “social categories” were just announced on Friday, with voting on those starting this weekend and next week.
You can start voting for Group of the Year Saturday, September 4 on MTV’s Instagram Story, in bracket style. The nominees are BLACKPINK, BTS, CNCO, Foo Fighters, Jonas Brothers, Maroon 5, Silk Sonic and Twenty One Pilots. Technically, Silk Sonic and Twenty One Pilots are duos, not groups, but MTV seems to be making a distinction between solo artists, and acts with two or more members.
Starting Tuesday, September 7, you can vote for “Song of the Summer” on MTV’s Instagram Story; again, it’ll be bracket-style voting. The nominees are:
Billie Eilish — “Happier Than Ever”
BTS — “Butter”
Camila Cabello — “Don’t Go Yet”
DJ Khaled ft. Lil Baby & Lil Durk — “Every Chance I Get”
Doja Cat — “Need To Know”
Dua Lipa — “Levitating”
Ed Sheeran — “Bad Habits”
Giveon — “HEARTBREAK ANNIVERSARY”
Justin Bieber ft. Daniel Caesar & Giveon — “Peaches”
The Kid LAROI with Justin Bieber — “Stay”
Lil Nas X ft. Jack Harlow — “Industry Baby”
Lizzo ft. Cardi B — “Rumors”
Megan Thee Stallion — “Thot S**t”
Normani ft. Cardi B — “Wild Side”
Olivia Rodrigo — “good 4 u”
Shawn Mendes & Tainy — “Summer Of Love”
The MTV VMAs, hosted by Doja Cat, air live from Brooklyn, NY on Sunday, September 12 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
(AUSTIN, Texas) — A website seeking anonymous tips on people violating Texas’ new law restricting abortions has been inundated with spam after viral calls from social media users.
The law, which went into effect on Wednesday, bans physicians from providing abortions if a fetal heartbeat is detected (including embryonic cardiac activity). This can happen as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. While the law prohibits the state from enforcing the ban, it instead authorizes private citizens to bring civil suits against anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion.
A “whistleblower” website set up by the anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life calls on community members to anonymously report anyone they think might be violating the law — which can even include a driver taking someone to a clinic.
As the online submission form spread across the internet, scores of social media users from TikTok to Twitter reacted by calling on people to flood the tip line with anything but violators.
One TikTok user said in a video that she had submitted 742 fake reports of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — a proponent of the law — getting an abortion.
“It would be a shame if TikTok crashed the Prolifewhistleblower.com website,” the caption stated. “Real shame.” The video garnered more than 80,000 likes and more than 480,000 views.
Another TikTok user even says he coded an iOS shortcut to let iPhone users submit false reports repeatedly. His video garnered more than 175,000 views.
The calls soon emerged on Twitter, Reddit and beyond — with users sharing images of themselves reporting fictional characters such as “Shrek” to uploading nonsensical memes online.
Diana, a New York-based social media user who asked to be identified by just her first name due to concerns speaking out could make her a target, told ABC News that she submitted an anonymous tip reporting a “Simpsons” character as an abortion physician.
Diana said she felt the law was a “huge blow to women’s rights” and a “huge step backwards.”
“It’s just a little step that I could do with my smartphone, it’s not like I did anything amazing, but there are people out there doing real work and I support them and I wish I was brave enough to do that,” she said.
“The purpose is to clog their inbox because it’s ridiculous,” she added. “You’re making your citizens turn against each other too, so it’s kind of two-fold if you ask me, you’re asking people to tattle on people that are — some of them may be trying to get life-saving services.”
“I think the main goal is to stop them from finding people that are trying to get life-saving services or personal health services,” she added, but said she would also be “happy” if her message even just angered someone on the receiving end.
This is not the first time social media users across the nation have banned together for a digital protest. Last year, TikTok users claimed responsibility for the dismal turnout at a Trump campaign rally — saying they mobilized to reserve tickets at the event they had no intention of attending.
Sidney Poitier poses with his honorary Oscar March 24, 2002 at the 74th Academy Awards; LEE CELANO/AFP via Getty Images
When the $482 million Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opens on September 30 in Los Angeles, it will pay tribute to one of the greatest actors of all time, Sidney Poitier.
The entrance to the new venue, the Grand Lobby, is being named after the iconic Oscar winner.
“It is an incredible honor to name our grand lobby — the nucleus of the Academy Museum — in celebration of Sir Sidney Poitier, whose legacy of humanitarian efforts and groundbreaking artistry continues to inspire us all,” Academy Museum director Bill Kramer said in a statement.
The trailblazing 94-year-old actor’s film credits include Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do It Again and Lilies of the Field, which earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1964, the first Black performer ever to win the award. Poitier has received numerous honors in his distinguished career, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2009.
“Sidney’s tremendous impact on the motion picture industry, and on audiences around the world, is inseparable from the story of his longstanding, collegial relationship with the Academy, said Poitier’s wife, Joanna Shimkus Poitier. “To be honored now as the namesake of the Academy Museum’s lobby, the place of access to everything that lies within, is almost like receiving a second Oscar, for lifetime achievement.”
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures features six floors of exhibitions covering the history of filmmaking. On Tuesday, September 7, Spike Lee will be featured in a special conversation with Shaka King, director of Judas and the Black Messiah starring Oscar nominee Daniel Kaluuya. The event will be livestreamed at 6 p.m. PT.
