NEW YORK—Concluding a protracted legal battle in which the popular singer-songwriter stood accused of plagiarism, a federal jury found Thursday that singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran did not infringe upon anyone’s intellectual property with his song “I Wish I Were An Oscar Mayer Wiener.” “What you need to understand is that pop songs are harmonically and lyrically very simple, so yes, my song may use a similar chord progression and the exact same lyrics as a famous jingle used to sell hot dogs, but that doesn’t make it a copyright violation,” said Sheeran, who testified in his own defense, telling the Manhattan courtroom that ruling in favor of the plaintiff, processed meat purveyor Oscar Mayer, would have a chilling effect on artistic expressions of wanting to be an Oscar Mayer wiener. “It’s all part of the folk music process. Long before anyone thought of advertising hot dogs on television, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie sang of how an Oscar Mayer wiener is what they’d truly like to be, and you can trace this through to the Beatles and Bob Marley, who each in their own way sang about how, if they were Oscar Mayer wieners, everyone would be in love with them. The theme of envying an Oscar Meyer wiener continues today, especially in hip-hop, and will be here long after we’re gone.” Shortly after the verdict was read, Sheeran reportedly attended a ceremony at which multiplatinum certification was awarded to his album My Bologna Has A First Name.
Children, gather ’round: Smokey Robinson wants to talk to you about all the sex he’s had, and you can’t stop him. The 83-year-old musician has a new album, and it’s called Gasms. Because it’s about sex, see?
“When people think of gasms, they think of orgasms first and foremost…I tell everybody: ‘Whatever your gasm is, that’s exactly what I’m talking about,’” he told The Guardian this week in a prerelease interview.
His gasms are certainly of the “or-” variety, as he made very clear in the interview, claiming that he had an affair long ago with Diana Ross while he was married to his first wife, The Miracles bandmate Claudette Rogers Robinson. (VF has reached out to a representative for Ross for comment.)
While he denied that he and Aretha Franklin ever had a romance (though he clarified that “she was fine”), he said that he and Ross had “a thing” for about a year.
“I was married at the time. We were working together and it just happened,” he said. “But it was beautiful. She’s a beautiful lady, and I love her right ’til today. She’s one of my closest people. She was young and trying to get her career together. I was trying to help her. I brought her to Motown, in fact. I wasn’t going after her and she wasn’t going after me. It just happened.”
Ross eventually broke it off with him, he said, “because she knew Claudette, and she knew I still loved my wife. And I did. I loved my wife very much.”
While Robinson was about as open as the book could be throughout the interview, he was curiously noncommittal about a certain urban legend: that he and Ross had a secret baby, and that that secret baby was Michael Jackson.
“Oh, my God! I never heard that one, man! That’s pretty good. That’s funny! That’s funny!” He said he would call Ross and ask her if she’d heard the theory. Which, again, not a no, just saying.
While the alleged Ross affair was decades ago, much of the interview centered on Robinson’s decision to center his new record on the 83-year-old libido. Then again, age is, as they say, only a number. He told TheGuardian that “I feel 50.” He discussed how his sexuality has changed since his teenage years: not much!
“I still feel the same way, only I’m wiser with it,” he said. “When you’re young and you have those exploratory feelings about sex, you haven’t lived long enough to know the value of it. So yes, I have a different attitude to it, but I still feel sexual. And I hope I’ll always feel like that. Okay, chronologically, I’m 83, but it’s not really my age.”
You know what? Good for him. Robinson joins the proud tradition of elder statesmen of entertainment sharing tales of their sexual exploits, with Paul Newman as a notable entry in the genre. In his posthumous memoir, Newman detailed his absolute horniness for wife Joanne Woodward and the dedicated sex room that they dubbed “the Fuck Hut.”
“Joanne gave birth to a sexual creature,” he wrote. “We left a trail of lust all over the place. Hotels and public parks and Hertz Rent-A-Cars.”
And if you’re sitting here clutching your pearls gasping, “think of the children!” it’s fine—Newman and Woodward’s daughters are totally cool with all of us knowing details of their parents’ frequent trips to Bonetown.
“I mean, I knew they were affectionate,” Melissa Newman told VF. “You could sense that that was there all the time…. I always say, ‘They had two doors on their bedroom. With bolts.’”
And the…hut? “Oh, I love the Fuck Hut,” she said. “I was just like, that’s very funny.”
Given this new and apparently fertile territory of celebrity content to mine, we’d like make a humble suggestion to our aging entertainment icons. Why not add a bullet point to the estate planning? When they sit down with the lawyers and the notaries to make sure that specific taxidermied pets and beloved couches go to the proper recipients, they should also have the option to put their bedroom (or hut) exploits on the record, with a plan for how and if they’d like those tales to be released. A gasm to remember them by. Please.
Faze Clan, which as recently as last year seemed an unstoppable cultural force for the genre of dudes who both play video games and aspire to own lambos, is in trouble. As we’ve reported, the clan’s decision to go public has been a disaster, with their shares now practically worthless, but as bad as things were last month, this week they’re getting worse.
The Week In Games: Trapped-Filled Towers And Teenage Dreamers
Last year Faze’s star seemed to be shining brightest when Snoop Dogg walked onto the stage during the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show wearing the clan’s gold chain around his neck. The veteran rapper had been convinced to lend his name to Faze’s marketing efforts after they offered him a spot on their company’s board of directors, $1.9 million in stock and then a further $248,000 in shares to his son and “companies controlled by his spouse and his manager”.
Now, with Faze “effectively a penny stock”, things are looking bleaker. With those shares now worthless, Snoop Dogg has left the company, an SEC filing made earlier today revealed. As Dexerto report he resigned, “effectively immediately”, on March 29.
G/O Media may get a commission
Snoop’s departure isn’t just a PR hit, it also presents some logistical challenges for Faze’s marketing, who in addition to having to deal with losses of over $50 million for the year now have to scale back their social media boasts as well. As this excellent Forbes piece from 2022 recalls, one of Faze’s chief marketing strategies has been to combine the social media follower count of all their members—and celebrity signings—into a single figure. Last year, for example, they claimed a “total reach” of 526 million people, but almost 200 million of that number came from celebrity signings like Snoop, whose 20.9 million Twitter followers, 80.1 million Instagram followers and 26 million TikTok subscribers will now have to be removed from Faze’s calculations (which were inflated anyway, since they count total subs/followers, not allowing for one person to follow them across multiple platforms).
Ryuichi Sakamoto, the famed Japanese musician and composer, has died at the age of 71.
What Gotham Knights And Shrek 2 Have In Common
He had been battling failing health for several years, having been diagnosed in 2014 with throat cancer, then bowel cancer in 2021. Through all his treatments and surgeries, however, he continued to write music and perform, even giving an online performance as recently as December 2022.
Sakamoto is perhaps best known for his work composing the score to several films, especially The Last Emperor (for which he won an Academy Award), The Last Buddha, The Revenant (which saw him nominated for a Golden Globe) and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, in which he also appeared on-screen alongside David Bowie.
Yet he was also famous for his earlier pop career, both as a solo artist and as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, an electronic group that was huge in Japan in the early 80s. YMO had an impact on Western musicians and markets as well; their song “Computer Game” charted in the UK, and they appeared live on Soul Train in 1980.
Incredible visuals This smart TV has access to a wide array of streaming services, all of which are easier to navigate, has 4K visuals for a stunning picture, and comes with an Alexa Voice Remote too.
Over his decades-long career writing music Sakamoto even worked on a few video games, from 1989 RPG Tengai Makyou: Ziria, the first game in the long-running Far East of Eden series, to 2006’s Dawn of Mana, for which he composed the opening theme (for more on this surprisingly excellent but also confusing credit, see here)
His most recent contribution to a video game was 2014’s wonderful Hohokum, in which (among other excellent selections) the track Reticent Reminiscence, a collaboration between Sakamoto and electronic musician Christopher Willits, appears.
Sakamoto died on March 28, with the announcement of his passing coming after his funeral on April 2. He is survived by his four children, one of whom is Japanese pop star Miu Sakamoto.
Those were Marcus Mumford’s first words upon hearing Sam Claflin and Riley Keough’s version of “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb),” a track he wrote with executive music producer Blake Mills for Daisy Jones & the Six. “Why did Sam fucking Claflin get to sing it?” Mumford jokingly tells Vanity Fair. “I was kind of pissed at him too, because I knew he didn’t grow up as a singer, and he sang the hell out of that recording. I was like, Fuck you, man. I’ve done this for years, trying to get to sound good. You just swoop in with your chiseled jaw, and fucking smash it out of the park, first time. It feels unfair.”
Longtime friends and collaborators, Mumford and Mills penned the fiery back-and-forth between Keough’s Daisy Jones and Claflin’s Billy Dunne while working on his latest record at Los Angeles’ Sound City Studios. “This was honestly a fun distraction in the middle of what was quite an intense session, when we were writing those first songs together for Self-Titled. So it was a relief imagining writing from the point of view of characters,” Mumford says. “We wrote two different versions—one that Billy would sing originally, and then one with the edits that Daisy made when she came in.”
There’s no question which character the Mumford & Sons front man found it easier to write for. “I love tapping into denial—I’m a Billy guy,” Mumford says. “There’s a song on my record called ‘Prior Warning,’ which is a version of ‘Look at Us Now,’ lyrically, anyway. So there were some correlations in my story and Billy’s, Daisy coming in and being like, ‘You’re full of shit, dude.’ I’ve had people close to me in my life who have played that role.”
Lacey Terrell/Prime Video
After hearing the show’s rendition, Mumford and Mills decided to record a more modernized version with a powerhouse female vocalist. Enter Maren Morris. “I love her solo music. I also really love The Highwomen, and she always seemed to me, from afar, the member that seemed to keep the train on the tracks. I don’t know why,” Mumford says. “Because Brandi [Carlile]’s this dynamo, and Amanda [Shires] seems like that too. I know Natalie [Hemby], and she’s just the sweetest, one of the best writers around in my view. It just felt to me Maren was kind of an anchor in that band. So I was stoked to meet her anyway, and just felt like she would be able to access the attitude that we needed on this song. Thank God she said yes, really.”
It was an easy decision for Morris, despite never having met Mumford. “Meeting and having to dive right into a song can be daunting,” she tells Vanity Fair. “But, honestly, he and Blake just have such a lived-in rapport. And being at Sound City, it was my first time being at that studio, but they’ve obviously laid down so much land in that place and made so many great records. It’s just such a positive place to record music.”
Mumford and Morris spoke over phone and via email about the best way to update the song for 2023. “The recording is brilliant for the time that [the show] was set in, but you don’t hear many six-minute-long guitar solos on the radio right now,” Mumford says. The pair managed to strip the track down to its essence, “this feeling of singing this really direct lyric in a very succinct way,” Mumford says, while retaining the song’s stadium-tour feel. As Morris says, “it has such a soaring chorus that it deserves a full band behind it.”
Some of Canada’s top music talents are headed to the Juno Awards in Edmonton this weekend.
The annual celebration of homegrown music takes place over two nights in Alberta’s capital, with pop singer the Weeknd leading the nominees with six, though he’s not expected to attend.
Most of the trophies will be handed out Saturday at a gala dinner for the music industry. The main show airs Monday on television — a shift from the Junos’ usual Sunday night slot in order to avoid overlapping with the Oscars.
Kim’s Convenience star Simu Liu returns as host of the Junos broadcast, where a handful of marquee awards will be handed out, alongside performances from Jessie Reyez, Tenille Townes and a 50th anniversary tribute to Canadian hip-hop.
Here are five other things to watch for on Junos weekend:
THE LEADERS
Among his six nominations, Toronto hitmaker the Weeknd is up for album of the year for Dawn FM, single of the year for “Sacrifice” and artist of the year.
But he’s only one of many familiar artists in top contention. Calgary newcomer Tate McRae and Napanee, Ont., pop princess Avril Lavigne are tied with five nods each.
They will compete against each other in four of those categories — single, album, pop album and fan choice.
Course on Drake and The Weeknd offered at Ryerson University
THE TRIFECTA
Threes, threes, threes across the board! Rarely do the connections align in the way they have for three Juno contenders this year.
Story continues below advertisement
Rising Montreal producers Banx and Ranx hold three nominations, one of which they share with collaborator Preston Pablo on “Flowers Need Rain,” up for single of the year.
Pablo is a three-time nominee himself, as is Montreal pop newcomer Reve who earned the accolades in part for her work with Banx and Ranx in the studio.
All three of them will connect when they perform a medley together on the broadcast.
Canadian duo Banx and Ranx on their hit ‘Headphones’
THE PERFORMERS
An eclectic selection of other artists is booked to play Monday’s big show, including Oji-Cree singer-songwriter Aysanabee, hard rockers Alexisonfire, Punjabi-Canadian viral rapper AP Dhillon and Nashville-based country singer Tenille Townes.
But even with a stacked lineup, one question lingers: will host Simu Liu sing again? Last year, the Marvel star slipped on a guitar for a parody rendition of Lavigne’s hit “Complicated.”
Story continues below advertisement
Juno organizers won’t say if viewers can expect an encore.
Nickelback will remind us of their legendary status when the rockers are inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame by Ryan Reynolds.
The actor will appear on Monday’s broadcast in a pre-recorded video message to the band while Edmonton Oilers captain Connor McDavid offers an assist in person.
The Hanna, Alta., natives will then launch into an explosive medley of their greatest hits.
On Saturday, Chad Kroeger and his buddies could walk away winners too as they hold their 38th career nomination for Get Rollin’ in the rock album of the year category.
Story continues below advertisement
National Music Centre to celebrate Nickelback ahead of JUNOs honour
JOEL WOOD VS. NORTHERN CREE
Saturday night is also where one of the friendliest of possible Juno showdowns will take place. Cree musician Joel Wood competes against his own Alberta Indigenous singing group Northern Cree in the traditional Indigenous artist or group of the year category.
Wood is nominated for his album Mikwanak Kamosakinat, while Northern Cree is in the running for Oskimacitahowin: A New Beginning.
Joel’s father Steve Wood, another member in Northern Cree, told The Canadian Press it’s “absolutely wonderful” to see both albums vie for a win in the same category.
Alberta’s Northern Cree Singers featured on Spotify’s Indigenous playlist
It’s a drizzly winter afternoon—New York at its least hospitable—and Lola Leon has found refuge in a bowl of red-sauce pasta. The musician and model is tucked into a quiet table at SoHo’s Sant Ambroeus, refueling after a late night in Ridgewood working with her producer and friend Eartheater. An incognito Leon looks the part of an off-duty dancer: bare face, black sweatshirt, hair scraped back into a bun. “It’s really giving, my hair is so dirty that it’s the only thing I can do with it right now,” she says between languid bites of penne. Even a set of cherry red nails reads as against-type. “If you see me on a regular basis, I’m usually missing, like, three,” she adds with a droll, down-tempo delivery.
The 26-year-old is in the swing of self-reinvention. Her familiar first name, Lourdes (given by parents Madonna and Carlos Leon), has fallen by the wayside. After shrugging off music as a possible pursuit—she instead studied dance at SUNY Purchase—Leon made her way onto the scene last year, with a summer single that heralded the November release of Go, her debut EP. If a taste for mononyms runs in the family, the musician has landed on Lolahol. I ask if the epithet has taken on a different depth of meaning in the months since she coined it. “I just think that the name itself is depth,” Leon says, leaning into the literalism alongside the ambiguity. “Eartheater calls it ‘Lola’s lair.’ It’s kind of just, like, inviting people into my world, maybe into my brain a little bit. My spirals.”
Leon’s latest role, though, is more surface-level than subterranean. This spring, she appears in her first-ever makeup campaign, representing the newest foundation from Make Up For Ever. Called HD Skin, it’s a velvet-finish powder formula designed for adjustable coverage—the sort of thing one can dial down or stipple on as needed, with the trust that it will behave accordingly. “That is what’s important to me: I don’t want to look like a wreck under lights, sweating, in the middle of the heat,” Leon says, hinting at upcoming performance dates. The waterproof foundation, packaged in an iPhone-slim compact, suits an unpredictable night out. But finding the right product for a given skin type and situation is a trial-and-error process—emphasis on the error, she jokes. “When I was younger and first started using makeup, I would just put the most insane amount of foundation in my hands, rub my hands together, and then smear it all over my face,” the musician recalls. “It was such a thick coating, but I just felt that that looked good in my mind.” The habit wasn’t enough to make her swear off the stuff. “I think starting with a clean base and having everything be even is important.”
Beauty still has its hazards. The same brows that dominate the Make Up For Ever campaign portraits—high, neat hedges framing Leon’s chestnut eyes—are “a disaster right now,” she laments. “I was dermaplaning, a.k.a. shaving your face, and I shaved off the beginning of my whole eyebrow. So I’m just looking crazy for a couple weeks, but it’s okay.” Luckily the mishap followed her recent runway turn for Luis De Javier’s New York Fashion Week debut, held inside a storied former synagogue. “I felt really lucky to be there,” she tells me, singling out the inspired casting and well-matched looks, styled by Patti Wilson. Leon modeled a strapless red leather minidress, with devil horns protruding from the bust; visible among a smattering of tattoos was her own lanky devil above the right elbow. “I don’t know,” she smiles. “People say that I can be a little prickly, so the horns make sense.”
Self-defense seems like an attendant mechanism for a famous upbringing. Hiccups have a way of becoming tabloid catnip, as when Leon, a former Marc Jacobs campaign star, arrived tardy to the designer’s February fashion show. (She made it inside, she assures me.) “Obviously I respect Marc and all the work that he does, but I think when people are making a story out of something, they’ll just kind of run with whatever they think is going to be interesting and gossipy.” Jacobs’s show touchingly paid homage to the late Vivienne Westwood: knitwear twisted into “tit top” rosettes, voluptuous dresses, coats with upturned collars and models’ arms folded tightly across their chests. To Leon, the stiff outerwear was a reminder that “you kind of have to be hypervigilant and hyperaware at the same time as minding your own business.”
But within that exoskeleton, there’s a sense of cheek. I bring up a lyric in “Lock&Key” (“No sleep, next plane, no sleep, make up”), which seems to reflect the harried pace of a certain kind of life. “That’s a Lady Gaga reference,” Leon points out, referring to an interview clip turned soundbite that swept the internet. “I was like, Oh my god, I have to use some parts of this. It was just too funny and too camp not to.” There’s a shade of reality in the words: “I love it when I actually have the fucking time to do my whole face,” she says, explaining that it’s usually a hasty situation. “[Makeup] really has the ability to, like, make you feel like a different type of bitch.”
Look, you probably saw the show and noticed it straight anyway regardless, but just in case you didn’t, here are a bunch of people all making the same joke: that Rihanna’s halftime performance at the Super Bowl tonight looked just like a Smash Bros. stage.
To be fair, it’s not really a joke. More a case of just stating the clearly obvious. All that was missing some some backup dancer getting punched into space.
G/O Media may get a commission
In case you want to read more about the performance itself—one of the all-time great Super Bowl halftime shows—The AV Club have some coverage you can check out:
As a musician, Rihanna’s greatest strength—the thing that most sets her apart from her peers—has always been her catalog. Other artists may be better singers or dancers, but, besides Mariah Carey, no living artist has more number-one hits than Rihanna. It makes sense that Team Rih would try to cram as many of these songs into her 13-minute Super Bowl Halftime Show set as possible—unfortunately, the trip down memory lane came at the expense of other kinds of showmanship.
Rihanna opened the set high above the field, standing on one of many eye-popping floating stages, powering through her anthemic “Bitch Better Have My Money.” This was easily the best moment of her performance, and the stage stunned visually. Plenty of other artists have recently taken to the sky during their time at the Super Bowl, but none used the space in such a deliberate way. Rih flashed a smirk with all the cockiness we’ve come to expect from someone who’s dubbed herself “Bad Girl Riri”—a welcome reminder of what we’ve missed in the past seven years without a Rihanna album.
“No, but Gyariana killed it,” Caveat writes in the caption, perhaps underselling the surreality of watching a sharp-toothed Water/Flying type handle Ariana Grande’s vocal runs with ease while she’s dressed as a tastefully nude Misty.
The puppet was a collaboration between friends, Caveat tells me over email—Matti made the head and puppet, Zac and Alex worked on the body.
“It was inspired by Carmen Farala from Drag Race España who did this amazing snake look I loved,” she says. “I wanted to reinterpret it in my own way. Why not Misty being constricted by a Gyarados? I even had Staryu earrings from my friend, Girl1000 Jewellery! It was a fun interpretation that hadn’t been done before and it meant that Gyariana (her name) could duet with me doing “Rain On Me” for the show finale. She even shot water out in the final chorus!”
G/O Media may get a commission
It’s a camera. For your car. The Ring Car Cam’s dual-facing HD cameras capture activity in and around your car in HD detail.
A jaw-dropping Gyariana, to me, marks just another night for Caveat, who has been performing her video game-themed drag show SlayStation in London since December 2021. The Gyrados performance was part of its recent Pokemon-themed Master Ball.
About founding SlayStation, Caveat says she “decided I wanted to start my own show and space and thought, ‘Why not combine my two passions, video games and performing?’”
Caveat, who is trans, had never attempted cosplay before starting SlayStation, but felt like “video games have always let me express myself and my identity in a safe space, especially while I was still figuring it out in the real world.”
“I really wanted to portray the importance of that for me and so many other people with the event,” she continues.
Video games form the rhinestone-glued platform to Caveat’s plans—even her name was inspired by Odin Sphere. And only a little over a year old, SlayStation has already motivated plenty of video game drag, including a Goldeen cosplay topped with inky fake lashes, a glamorous Lopunny, and for Caveat, Bayonetta.
“As a 6’4” woman, I felt like I could really do her justice,” she tells me.
The event is already gaining recognition through TikTok and through industry pros like Kim Chi, who competed on season eight of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and British Drag Race star Dakota Schiffer, who both attended SlayStation’s Master Ball event.
But it isn’t only fun to look at. it’s also creating a vibrant and comfortable space for queer video game fans.
“The best show I’ve seen in a good while,” one Instagram commenter wrote on SlayStation’s post highlighting the importance of trans representation. “So much love in the room, cannot wait for the next one.” They’ll only have to wait a bit longer—there’s a Doki Doki Literature Club-themed event coming in February, and Caveat tells me she’s already planning “a big Final Fantasy show in a few months to celebrate the new games.”
Well, there’s a tribe of people who live here; we like each other and hang together. I’ve had this same conversation with people here who are progressive and they all say, “We feel we live somewhere where we can join the fight and it’s going to make a difference.”
How did you feel whenRoe v. Wadewas overturned?
It was a shock—complete and utter dismay. It’s hard to wrap my head around it; like did that actually happen? It seems so unreal.
Preorder Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You from Amazon or Bookshop.
Your husband manages you and you’ve collaborated with him a bit on songwriting. How is it living, working, and touring with him?
It’s hard. At first it felt like it was stabilizing my life, but working on the book with Tom and living with him has been incredibly stressful. Women say [they have] hormonal things, but I think men have that too.
You’re singing, but still unable to play guitar onstage. How do you feel touring and performing?
It’s exhausting. I enjoy the shows but the travel really tires me out.
You toured with Tom Petty and did a Hollywood Bowl concert with him the weekend before he died (in 2017)?
Yes, I had toured with him [previously] and we did the Hollywood Bowl together; we were just beginning to form a great friendship. Then he died. His death really affected me.
Did you go through your own bad period of drugs or drinking?
The drinking, yes. Some drugs, psychedelics mostly. The drinking didn’t come in until my 20s, 30s. As for drugs, I’ve never really got into the hard stuff. I’m a wine drinker, but I’d go into the bars on tour and the wines were horrific. So a friend told me to have vodka tonics instead.
You’ve credited Bob Dylan and Neil Young as musical influences; are there any female musicians who inspired you?
I loved Bobbie Gentry—she was the first female voice I heard whose voice was low and husky. Most of the female voices I heard were high, pretty voices—Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez. They had these amazing ranges and I could never sing like that; it was frustrating. I also listened to Memphis Minnie, Dinah Washington, and I loved Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette.
What’s the new album like?
I’ve got some great guest artists singing background vocals on it: Bruce Springsteen, Margo Price, Angel Olsen. I started cowriting with (New York City–based singer-songwriter) Jesse Malin—and one of my favorite songs on it is called “New York Comeback.” We recorded some stuff at the historic RCA studios in Nashville where legends like Tammy [Wynette] and Dolly [Parton] recorded.
Can you believe it’s the 44th anniversary of your first album?
No, the thing with time just blows my mind.
All products featured on Vanity Fair are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
2016 was T-Pain’s Twitch channel’s inaugural year, and it’s also the first time Pain remembers getting trolled. “At the time, my music career was kind of on a downward spiral,” he says during our Zoom call this Monday. “People were coming into my chat and telling me stuff like, ‘You’re only streaming because you don’t have any more music money.’ It wasn’t true, but it kind of hit home because I was thinking that same shit.”
T-Pain is now the CEO of Nappy Boy Gaming, a passionate piece of his 2006-founded media empire Nappy Boy Entertainment. He runs and selects the members of its stream team, which includes BigCheese and Granny. When NBG started, he wasn’t used to getting trolled. But he does have experience with backlash—you might remember some of it from when you knew him best, when he was the guy on the radio singing with Auto-Tune.
Born Faheem Najm in Tallahassee, Florida (his artist name means “Tallahassee Pain,” because he struggled while living there), T-Pain started making music as soon as his 10-year-old hands would let him. He was only 20 when his debut single “I’m Sprung,” certified platinum in 2006, came out. That song makes Pain’s voice glossy with extreme pitch-correction, and later hits like 2007’s “Bartender” and “Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin’)” feature the same Auto-Tuned vocal cascades.
He was always committed to the art of it. He used to sample games like Streets of Rage 2 and GoldenEye007 (he reminisces about working with the former back in “oh my God, 1998, this was way back,” he says, laughing). In using Auto-Tune, he never sounds robotic (“Kids today wouldn’t understand what it’s like to sing into a fan and try to sound like T-Pain,” says a YouTube comment with over 20 thousand upvotes), he sounds like T-Pain, pleasantly metallic, the sound you get from clinking together a couple of $400,000 diamond necklaces. It became a covetable sound, reproduced by other 2000’s club rulers like the Black Eyed Peasand Kesha, and even still by huge rappers and alt-pop stars, like Travis Scott, Lil Yachty, and Charli XCX.
But, in the beginning, Pain’s peers were unwilling to give him credit. Usher, at one point, told him that he fucked music up, and Jay-Z bitterly called for “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” with his 2009 song (“this shit violent / This is death of Auto-Tune, moment of silence”). The collective backlash led to a depressive period “that left [T-Pain] unmotivated to make any more music,” a New Yorker profile from 2014 says, but the fog lifted around that time, which happens to coincide with when Pain was first exposed to Twitch streaming at a PlayStation event in 2013.
He became attached to “this feeling that I wasn’t alone,” and realized streaming was a social, gratifying alternative to gaming alone in his room, or being stuck on a plane or stage without another human being to connect with.
He tells me he “took the reins into [his] hands” in 2016, starting his own channel and eventually forming his own stream team because he felt like it.
“I saw Markiplier watching BigCheese,” T-Pain says, “and I immediately got this feeling that I need to create something where I can use my name and my platform to get this guy seen. I need to get more eyes on this guy. I was like, ‘I need to create a gaming organization.’”
“It was kind of on a whim,” he admits, but he sticks with it partially because he likes being on his stream team, too, and protecting the sense of wonder that video games give him.
It was difficult initially. It turned out that internet commenters inherited Jay-Z’s objections to T-Pain’s career.
“The negativity sticks out so much,” he says about receiving his first round of hate comments. “I was screaming in my house, and I was getting mad at my wife for nothing because these fucking assholes on Twitter talking shit. Telling everybody, ‘don’t talk to me today, this one guy on Twitch said I was a fucking has-been.’”
But he learned, as everyone online must learn, that the anonymous losers in your comments section can’t be trusted.
“This is when I was getting 200 viewers, like, that was my top, that was big for me. When a lot of those viewers were saying ‘you’re on the stream because you don’t have money anymore,’ […] I started feeling like that. […] But I realized that those were just terrible people.”
Once he came to conclusion that “fuck those guys. Nevermind. Back to our regularly scheduled program,” like he says, he committed to streaming and nourishing that wonder. He cites TimTheTatman, Moistcritikal (“that’s the fucking homie”), and virtual YouTuber CodeMiko (“there’s a whole $10,000 system sitting in my game room doing nothing because I found out [motion capture] was more instructions than I thought it was”) as streamers he’s a fan of. It’s obvious that he loves streaming as a discipline.
You can also tell from decades of interviews, podcast appearances, and music—I noticed it, too, during our call—that T-Pain loves laughing. He slips into booming ha ha ha!’s as cheerily as you wiggle off a sweater when you’re warm, which could be why he found so much success on Twitch, where he now has close to 900 thousand followers. He is palpably nice.
Tabloids and DeuxMoi have mostly trained us out of believing celebrities can be so nice, no strings attached, but T-Pain exudes undeniable charisma. He has so many interesting stories to tell, and I’m happy to sit and let time pass as I listen.
Like, in 2021, he told his viewers about meeting Prince’s bass player. He called him on the phone so that T-Pain and Prince could introduce themselves, but Prince instead shouted “where the fuck you been at, man, we’ve been trying to jam for an hour!” as soon as he picked up.
The bass player “said ‘hey man, I’m sorry about that, but, man, I got T-Pain right here.’ Prince said, ‘I don’t want to talk to no motherfucking T-Pain,’” T-Pain recalls, cackling so hard he needs to rip his headphones off for a second. It starts a chain reaction—everyone in the room is cracking up, and so is everyone watching at home. “I was like, ‘bro, it’s fine!’”
He talks to viewers like we’re all at the bar together; he doesn’t operate with the untouchability of someone who influenced two decades of popular music, though he’s willing to demystify that world for everyone. He does it a lot—he just streamed for six hours the other day, scrolling through YouTube and analyzing his music while chat asked him innocent questions, children talking to their teacher. “What’s your favorite music video?”
He’s willing to entertain in infinite ways, giving subscriber insider looks at how he makes music, playing Battlefield 1, Fortnite, racing games with a steering wheel controller, Call of Duty…whatever he can get his hands on, really. The NBG team is similarly eclectic, playing Red Dead Redemptionin full grandma drag or, like Cardboard Cowboy, showing viewers hours of custom animations before finally deciding to play The Last of Us.
That impulse T-Pain had once, to support and amplify creators he admires, has proven to be long lasting. It continues to guide Nappy Boy Gaming. When it comes to adding new streamers to NBG’s roster, “I still look for people who would otherwise not be seen,” he says.
T-Pain likes streamers who seem like pure fun. Good people. “I scour Twitch, and I watch people, and if I stumble upon you and see you may need some help, or you got low views, and I feel like you deserve more…there you go. That’s how you get signed to Nappy Boy Gaming.”
“You don’t have to be really good at games [to get signed to NBG],” he continues. “You just got to be a good person that likes to make people laugh and lift people up. Just don’t be a dick.”
T-Pain has a genuine joy for streaming, but there are materials to be gained from it, too. He told famous jackassSteve-O on his podcast last year that he makes a lot of money on Twitch, and actually, “I’m making more money off of video games than I’ve made in the last four years,” he said. But he’s not sticking to Nappy Boy Gaming—continuously adding streamers to his roster, chatting for hours with subscribers—solely because he needs the money. Not to brag, but he’s good.
“This isn’t, like, my main thing. I have other ways of making money. It’s fine,” he says, though, if he did dedicate all his time to streaming, it would work out to something like $60,000 per hour, he claims, and that doesn’t hurt. But what might matter more to T-Pain is that NBG is helping him fulfill a long quest for overdue legitimization. He says that the NBG accomplishment he’s most proud of is getting recognized by the games industry at large.
“We just did an activation last night with Ubisoft. Just having Ubisoft not say, ‘We got T-Pain to play our game,’ they said, ‘We got Nappy Boy Gaming to play our game,’ you know, to be recognized as an organization and not just having people be like, ‘We’re cool now, we got a rapper to play our shit,’ […] is the crowning achievement,” he says. “It’s not just somebody that we think is famous. It’s not just a celebrity endorsement. It’s Nappy Boy Gaming. That’s the crowning achievement for me, just having that thing be separate.”
Gaming has helped T-Pain, once spitefully shouldered out by his industry, reach an unconventional, but still triumphant, apex. That, in addition to using the fame he kindled anyway for a good cause, is enough for him.
“When I ultimately leave this earth, I want people to be able to say, ‘That was fun. That was a good goddamn dude, he helped a lot of people,” he says, his comfortable laugh rolling out again like spilled marbles.
“That’s really all I want. I don’t really have any other achievements, or anything like that, that I want. I want the people that I helped to feel the way that I feel.”
LOS ANGELES—As awards season arrives and critics take note of the film’s problematic whitewashed casting, the Golden Globe–nominated Elvis faced increased scrutiny this week for casting Austin Butler in the role of the iconic Black singer. “Using a white actor to portray a world-renowned African American who single-handedly revolutionized pop music is regrettable, to say the least,” critic Ibrahim Lawrence wrote in the Los Angeles Times, suggesting that actors of color had little hope of succeeding in today’s film industry if producers couldn’t even bring themselves to give a Black man the starring role in a musical biopic about Elvis Presley. “And it’s so unnecessary. Why not cast Jonathan Majors? LaKeith Stanfield? Even Michael Ealy could’ve knocked it out of the park, but once again, Hollywood has chosen to engage in historical erasure to fit a white-centric ideal, in this case an Elvis who would be palatable to a larger demographic. Hearing classics like ‘Baby Let’s Play House,’ ‘Hound Dog,’ and ‘In The Ghetto’ coming out of a white man’s lips is nothing short of jarring.” Though his decision to take the part has been condemned in most quarters, many critics have nonetheless praised Butler for his refusal to wear blackface in his depiction of Presley.
Akon may not be a religious guy, but he still tries to keep his music respectful on the Lord’s day.
The musician was interviewed for The Guardian‘s weekly series “Sunday with…” and was asked about his Sunday routine. He explained, “These last few years I never know where I’ll wake up,” but it’s usually a day off from work so he’ll spend it “under the comforter in a hotel room, watching Netflix and drinking peppermint tea.” But when he’s at home in Atlanta, he’s hanging out with his kids and “there’s always a schedule if they’re around: movies, sports, bowling… I’ve got an alley in my basement, that helps. Even then I’m not in the kitchen. Sundays are for ordering junk food: wings, burgers, that sort of thing.”
He’ll also “sometimes” carves out a little time to work, although he says, “The music I make on Sundays is more family friendly… You don’t want too many ‘shake-your-asses’ on the Lord’s day. Else I might be playing a birthday or bar mitzvah.” And while he may be respectful of the Lord’s day, don’t expect to find Akon in a house of worship on Sunday anytime soon. He said, “I’m not a religious person. Religious knowledge is passed down depending on who knows what; it’s not always accurate.” But the “Smack That” singer added, “Every day is spiritual” and “Sunday is quiet—the peace does me good. Silence is the soundtrack to a day off in the music industry.”
While he may not identify as religious now, in 2015, Akon told The National that his relationship with Islam was the key to his success. “I was born a Muslim and, depending on what part of Senegal you came from, music was considered haram [unlawful] and there has always been a debate about Islam and music,” he explained. “I never looked at the performing aspect of the music itself but on the intention. Even if you look at the daily prayers in Islam we pray in melody, when we hear the call to prayer in any part of the world it is also done with melody, so no one can tell me that music is haram. Now this is my personal point of view and I am not speaking for anyone else. Now I am not in a position to judge any man and I don’t expect them to judge me as well, but no matter what decision you decide to make just do right by it. Because, at the end of the day, Allah is watching and he knows what is in your heart.”
Too many innocent people to count have died at the hands of devout Swifties, hell-bent on revenge. For your own safety, never say these things to a Taylor Swift fan.
2 / 23
“Her negligence led to a massive ground beef recall.”
“Her negligence led to a massive ground beef recall.”
Unless you have a death wish, we would avoid blaming Taylor for any nationwide E. coli outbreaks.
3 / 23
“We have no idea where Taylor Swift was the morning of April 19th, 1995.”
“We have no idea where Taylor Swift was the morning of April 19th, 1995.”
Sure, we’ve been told that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had no help blowing up the FBI headquarters in Oklahoma City, but Taylor’s lack of an alibi can’t be ignored.
4 / 23
“I don’t care if you got tickets, young lady. You’re not going out on a school night.”
“I don’t care if you got tickets, young lady. You’re not going out on a school night.”
Mom, come on!
5 / 23
“She doesn’t even design her own album art.”
“She doesn’t even design her own album art.”
Taylor’s fans hate being confronted with the fact that her Photoshop and Illustrator skills are mediocre at best.
6 / 23
“Her Capital One ads are uninspired.”
“Her Capital One ads are uninspired.”
This is very insulting because all Taylor Swift fans watch these commercials on a loop for several hours each day.
7 / 23
“Every musician has their strengths and weaknesses.”
“Every musician has their strengths and weaknesses.”
Eat shit and die, how about that?
8 / 23
“I loved her ‘Piano Man’ era.”
“I loved her ‘Piano Man’ era.”
This is a common mistake, but that’s actually Billy Joel.
9 / 23
“The Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger was extremely problematic long before you saw fit to take notice.”
“The Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger was extremely problematic long before you saw fit to take notice.”
Look, an antitrust ally is an antitrust ally, regardless of how they got there, okay?
10 / 23
“My favorite folklore is ‘Botan Dōrō.’”
“My favorite folklore is ‘Botan Dōrō.’”
No offense to the Japanese people, but this haunting parable about loving a ghost has nothing on the song “cardigan.”
11 / 23
“I know that her nice girl image is fake because she regularly eggs my house.”
“I know that her nice girl image is fake because she regularly eggs my house.”
No need to ruin the façade for them too.
12 / 23
“She can only summon lightning when it’s stormy out.”
“She can only summon lightning when it’s stormy out.”
Taylor can and will strike you dead by lightning on a sunny day just for saying that.
13 / 23
“More people are deserving of the Nobel Prize in physics.”
“More people are deserving of the Nobel Prize in physics.”
I guess you haven’t read her research as the lead scientist of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
14 / 23
“I’ve written more songs about John Mayer.”
“I’ve written more songs about John Mayer.”
That’s just a weird thing to brag about.
“She can’t dance!”
Well, neither could Martin Luther King Jr., but we still listen to all his bops.
16 / 23
“Taylor Swift is just a stage name. Her real name is Ogbert McCarthy.”
“Taylor Swift is just a stage name. Her real name is Ogbert McCarthy.”
Don’t be mean, there’s no need to spoil her mystique.
17 / 23
“Midnights is good but it’s no Der Ring des Nibelungen.”
“Midnights is good but it’s no Der Ring des Nibelungen.”
While it’s fair to say that Midnights doesn’t hold a candle to Wagner’s 15-hour epic opera, it’s not nice to remind people about that.
18 / 23
“She’s just for teen girls.”
“She’s just for teen girls.”
No, she was just for teen girls, but now those teen girls are 30 and have developed an appetite for revenge.
“The dubstep icon?”
Swifties have worked hard to forget Taylor’s brief electronic dance music phase back in the aughts.
20 / 23
“I work for Ticketmaster.”
“I work for Ticketmaster.”
You really shouldn’t tell anybody that.
21 / 23
“I’m really only into K-Pop”
“I’m really only into K-Pop”
It’s just a matter of time before she dominates that genre as well.
22 / 23
“She’s going to die someday, just like everyone else.”
“She’s going to die someday, just like everyone else.”
No, you’ll die someday. And according to the posts on Taylor Swift message boards, that day is today.
On Friday, a Los Angeles jury found the rapper Tory Lanez guilty of shooting Megan Thee Stallion. Megan accused Lanez of shooting her in the feet in July 2020 following an argument between them that took place in an SUV, and prosecutors brought gun and assault charges against the Canadian rapper. During eight days of testimony, Megan offered an emotional account of the night of the fight and said that Lanez offered her and her former friend and assistant Kelsey Harris, who was also in the car, $1 million not to speak out. Lanez’s attorneys tried to position Harris as the shooter, and Lanez declined to testify. Lanez faces up to 22 years and 8 months in prison after being convicted on all three counts in the case.
In a statement, Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón pointed to the backlash Megan has received since going public with her accusation. “You showed incredible courage and vulnerability with your testimony despite repeated and grotesque attacks that you did not deserve,” he said. “You faced unjust and despicable scrutiny that no woman should ever face and you have been an inspiration to others across La County and the nation.”
“The jury got it right,” Megan’s attorney Alex Spiro said. “I am thankful there is justice for Meg.”
In her testimony last week, Megan largely repeated what she’s said in interviews and on social media about what happened on the night of the shooting. In her telling, an ongoing conflict over the course of an evening–the group had been coming from a pool party at Kylie Jenner’s home–escalated after Lanez said in the car that he had had sexual relationships with both Megan and Harris. She said the argument turned towards the state of the two rappers’ careers. “Tory was basically telling me I wasn’t shit,” she testified, “and I said, ‘Actually, You ain’t shit. This is where you at in your career. This is where you at with your music.’ And I feel like that really rubbed him the wrong way.” Then, according to Megan, she exited the vehicle, and Lanez yelled, “Dance, bitch!” and began shooting at her.
During his cross-examination of Megan, Lanez’s attorney George Mgdesyan tried to discredit her account by eliciting an admission that she lied in an interview with Gayle King when she said that she hadn’t had a sexual relationship with Lanez. Mgdesyan also asked why Megan had initially said she had stepped on glass, which Megan addressed in her testimony. “This was the height of police brutality and George Floyd, and if I said this man just shot me, I didn’t know if they might shoot first and ask questions later,” she told the jury. “In the Black community, in my community,” she continued, “it’s not really acceptable to be cooperating with police officers.” Megan also testified that as a woman in her industry, “people have a hard time believing you anyway.”
The defense effort was not enough to sway a jury against Megan’s account of the night. As prosecutor Alexander Bott said during his closing remarks on Wednesday: “If you believe Megan, that’s enough.”
Mgdesyan said Friday evening that Lanez may file an appeal. “We are shocked by the verdict. There was not sufficient evidence to convict Mr. Peterson,” the attorney said in a statement, Page Six reported. “We believe this case was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt. We will be exploring all options including an appeal.”
The jury’s decision marked the end of a trial surrounded by online contention and, in some cases, the proliferation of false rumors about the case. On Thursday, just after the jury began deliberating, several prominent hip-hop outlets and bloggers sent out tweets claiming that a verdict had been reached finding Lanez not guilty on two charges, only to retract them after it quickly emerged that the jury was on lunch break. An NBC News report this week explored how a crop of gossip bloggers had shaped the tenor of social media discussion around the trial. “It’s been very clear, as I’ve seen entertainment and gossip spaces commenting on the case, that she has been set up as someone who is out for herself, lying, and problematic in all these ways,” Catherine Knight Steele, a University of Maryland communications professor, told the outlet. “This points to the way that mis- and disinformation, and misogynoir, is trafficked because of its profitability, even in the Black community. It’s profitable for these sites to traffic in the most vile stereotypes about Black women.”
The dynamic in some ways echoed Megan’s description of the attacks she said she has faced since accusing Lanez. “If I would have known that coming out and speaking my truth would come with people agreeing with me being shot,” she testified last week, “if I would have known, I would have started to lose my confidence.”
Lanez is scheduled to be sentenced on January 27. He could also be deported following his conviction.
Over eight days of testimony, the details of a fight between rappers Megan Thee Stallion and Tory Lanez have unfurled in a Los Angeles courtroom. In 2020, Lanez allegedly shot Megan in the feet as an argument between the two escalated. At the time, Megan’s star was already on the rise, and the tabloid-ready circumstances—the altercation took place in Hollywood Hills after a pool party at Kylie Jenner’s home—helped fuel more than two years of combative discussion on social media. Megan’s career has scaled further heights in the years since the incident, and when she appeared at the trial last week to testify on behalf of the prosecution, supporters stood outside the courthouse with signs reading “I Stand With Megan.” Lanez has pleaded not guilty on the gun and assault charges he faces over the alleged shooting. On Wednesday, he declined to testify as his defense team rested its case.
Delivering his closing remarks on Wednesday, prosecutor Alexander Bott sought to refocus some of the chaos. “If you believe Megan and what she said last Tuesday, this case is over,” he told the jury, as Law & Crime reported. “We’re done. If you believe Megan, that’s enough.” Megan’s testimony last week largely echoed the account of the alleged shooting she has given on social media and in interviews. “Tory was basically telling me I wasn’t shit,” she told jurors, “and I said, ‘Actually, You ain’t shit. This is where you at in your career.” Megan claimed that as she exited the SUV they were in, Lanez said, “Dance, bitch!” and began shooting at her.
The trial proceedings have sometimes been scattered and contradictory. Prosecutors said Megan’s former bodyguard Justin Edison would testify, but he never appeared, and authorities couldn’t track him down in time for the case’s conclusion. Megan’s former friend and assistant Kelsey Harris, who was present in the SUV on the night of the alleged shooting, testified that she never saw Lanez with a gun, but prosecutors played a recording of a statement she had previously made to them in which she said Lanez was the shooter. Lanez’s lawyer George Mgdesyan said in his opening statement that a romantic quarrel between Megan and Harris over Lanez ran parallel to arguments they had had over the rapper DaBaby and the Brooklyn Nets player Ben Simmons, but these purported conflicts didn’t come up in testimony.
In news reports, Megan’s own testimony rang the loudest, especially as it related to the backlash she said she received after going public with the alleged shooting. In his closing statement on Wednesday, Bott quoted from Megan’s testimony: “If I would have known that coming out and speaking my truth would come with people agreeing with me being shot, if I would have known, I would have started to lose my confidence.”
“Megan Pete is a liar,” Mgdesyan said during his closing statement on Wednesday, using the rapper’s birth name, according to Law & Crime. “She lied about everything in this case.” Mgdesyan asked why Megan hadn’t publicly shared that she’d had sex with Lanez. Citing the rapper’s Grammys and Billboard chart achievements, he said that Lanez had in fact gotten the worst of the backlash. “You know who it’s been bad for?” Mgdesyan said, pointing at Lanez. “That man right there.”
Mgdesyan acknowledged that Megan had been shot on the night in question, so he tried to sway jurors toward the theory that Harris was the shooter. He repeatedly pointed to Harris’s invocations of her Fifth Amendment rights, according to Law & Crime, as a way of arguing that she was covering for herself. Bott addressed Harris’s contradictory statements in his remarks on Wednesday: “Something happened to Kelsey.”
“Maybe she took one of those bribes,” he reportedly went on—a reference to Megan’s testimony last week that Lanez offered her and Harris $1 million not to say anything about the alleged shooting. (In her testimony, Harris denied taking a bribe.)
A jury began deliberating after the closing statements. Lanez faces 22 years in prison if convicted on all counts.
In August 2020, Megan Thee Stallion addressed a story that had been circulating for the last month. Tabloids and gossip sites were stringing together details of an alleged shooting that took place after a party at Kylie Jenner’s Los Angeles home. The rapper Tory Lanez was arrested on a concealed-weapons charge, and Page Six reported the most explosive account: that Lanez had shot Megan in the foot amid an altercation that took place around an SUV. On Instagram, Megan claimed that the substance of it was true, and in the coming months, prosecutors brought assault and gun charges against Lanez.
The legal matter dragged on for the next two years after Lanez pleaded not guilty to all the charges, but Megan’s ascent to Grammy awards and Billboard hits amplified the aftermath, and the case continued to attract periodic waves of public attention. Eachrapper released music making reference to it, as social media pages and YouTube channels debated the available evidence. Megan offered further details in an interview with Gayle King, and wrote an essay for TheNew York Times focusing on how her experience fit into the broader context of violence against Black women.
On Monday morning, the alleged shooting arrived in front of a Los Angeles jury. As Rolling Stonereported, the prosecution began its case by establishing in opening arguments that Kelsey Harris, a former best friend and assistant of Megan who was at the scene of the alleged shooting, would offer testimony that confirms Megan’s account. “Kelsey will tell you that she just saw her close friend get shot by the defendant,” assistant district attorney Alexander Bott reportedly told jurors. Bott went on to say that Megan will testify that Lanez shouted “Dance, bitch!” before shooting at her.
Lanez’s legal battles deepened in September after the R&B singer August Alsinaclaimed on Instagram that the rapper assaulted him in Chicago. No charges over the allegation have been filed, but prosecutors argued in a pretrial hearing that Lanez violated his bail conditions, as TMZ reported, and Judge David Herriford placed him on house arrest before releasing him last week in anticipation of the trial proceedings.
In his opening remarks on Monday, Lanez’s attorney George Mgdesyan said that Megan was the only person at the scene who heard Lanez say “Dance, bitch,” according to Rolling Stone. The lawyer reportedly said that on the night of the alleged shooting, Megan resented the time Lanez was spending with Jenner, and that Corey Gamble, the boyfriend of Jenner’s mother Kris, would testify about seeing an argument begin at Jenner’s home. Continuing his statement, Mgdesyan claimed that Harris had been the one to discharge the gun after Lanez revealed in the car that he had a sexual relationship with Megan in addition to the one he had with Harris. (According to Mgdesyan, Harris claimed that this meant Megan had crossed her for the third time in this way, after parallel romantic conflicts broke out over the rapper DaBaby and the NBA player Ben Simmons.)
While Lanez has never assembled the kind of mainstream profile that Megan has occupied over the past few years, he’s built a steady following, and to some degree retained it amid the aftermath of the alleged shooting. In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, his Quarantine Radio series on Instagram Live turned him into a breakout star of the social-media-centered entertainment ecosystem that sprung out of the moment. Lanez no longer has a major label deal—he and Interscope Records parted ways in February 2020—and in his post alleging that Lanez beat him up, Alsina wrote, “Dude has no real friends, and is on a crash out mission.” But he continues to release music independently, and appeared on The Breakfast Club in September to discuss a new album. In his public comments about the alleged shooting, Lanez has described Megan as a jealous ex who framed him. (Megan told Gayle King that she and Lanez haven’t had a sexual relationship.) In February, amid a spate of reports and legal developments in the case, Megan posted a screenshot of a death threat she had received on social media.
“I want him to go to jail. I want him to go under the jail,” Megan toldRolling Stone in June. “I feel like you’ve already tried to break me enough. You’ve already shot me. So, why are you dragging it out like this? Like, what else? Have you hated me this much the whole time and I didn’t see it?”
If convicted on all counts, Lanez faces up to 22 years and eight months in prison. The trial is expected to last between five and seven days.
Call of Duty Warzone 2.0 players are about to get what they wanted…sort of. The red-hot online shooter is getting Combat Records with its Season 01 Reloaded midseason update, which will go live December 14. Sounds good. But the catch is, it’s starting fresh: no information from the games you completed before that date will be counted toward your stats.
Traditionally, all the Combat Record does is log your and other players’ performance, including total time played, kill/death ratios, killstreaks, and other competitive stats, and players have beenwanting it to come to Warzone 2.0 since the game came out in November. However, a new blog Activision dropped today about the forthcoming patch revealed that the eagerly awaited feature comes with a significant caveat.
“Record will only be from the activation date forward, and will not include statistics from Season 01 launch through Season 01 Reloaded (November 16 to December 14),” read the update blog.
Kotaku reached out to Activision for comment.
For competitive players, this news comes down like a heavy slap in the face—nothing you do until December 14 will be officially documented. If you pop out your most impressive killstreak and no Combat Record is around to write it down, did you even have a killstreak?
G/O Media may get a commission
Personally, I’m not sure if this one is as bad as some fans aremaking it outto be. But I can understand their frustration, especially when considering the fact that Combat Record is a typical CoD feature that was missing from launch. It also doesn’t help that Warzone 2.0’s launch was one of this year’s most clunky and bugged. As pleasurable as the free game is to actually play, fans’ goodwill clearly has its limits.
But in the dark age between now and December 14, when stats will finally start being recorded, you can focus your attention to anticipating other midseason updates Warzone 2.0 is getting, like a Rocket League-inspired Warzone Cup with ATVs. Or you could, you know, try to just enjoy playing the game.
