Elton John Fans Impressed With Honor, Battle Against AI: ‘Keep Fighting the Good Fight!'
Elton John Fans Impressed With Honor, Battle Against AI: 'Keep Fighting the Good Fight!' originally appeared on Parade.
was honored with the Creators' Champion Award on Wednesday, June 4 in London at Billboard's Global Power Players event.
The pop music icon was joined by his manager/husband when he accepted the award for calling for fair use and protection for musicians' work in relation to AI use.
🎬 SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬
John, 78, posted his speech, in which he addressed the data bill currently being debated in the British government, on his official Instagram account.
'The onus is now on the government to do the right thing and have transparency added to the bill. We've asked them so many times to come to us. We've had so many meetings with them saying that we wanted to work with you,' John said in his speech.
'Copyright has to be transparent and seek permission,' he added. 'These two principles are the bedrock of the industry and they must be included in the data bill as a backstop. Let's be clear: We want to work with the government, we want our government to work with us. We are not anti-AI and we are not anti-Big Tech.'Fans on Instagram applauded the 'Rocket Man' singer for receiving the award and battling for what he believes in.
'Keep fighting the good fight!' one fan posted.
'So Amazing 😍❤️❤️❤️Young people need support to build a better worldCongratulations 😊🙌💖💖💖💖💖🌟,' another one added.
'Elton John is a living legend 🎹✨Hits, heart, and more flair than anyone—no one does it like him. Still iconic after all these years! 🌟,' another fan wrote.
Elton John Fans Impressed With Honor, Battle Against AI: 'Keep Fighting the Good Fight!' first appeared on Parade on Jun 5, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Jun 5, 2025, where it first appeared.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Chappell Roan Reflects on Being Labeled a ‘Villain'
Chappell Roan is making no apologies. While serving as a guest alongside Sasha Colby on an episode of TS Madison's Outlaws posted Monday (May 19), the pop star opened up about embracing her 'villain' era after speaking out about toxic fan behavior last year. And while she was feeling candid, Roan also slammed a particular pop-culture update account. On the topic of her public image, the Missouri native first quipped that she's 'had like three' villain eras since skyrocketing to fame in 2024 following the success of Billboard Hot 100 hit 'Good Luck, Babe!' 'I was the new girl in the pop game, where I was like, 'I don't give a f–k what you say to these girls who have been doing this since they were 10,' she began on the podcast. 'I did not get famous until I was 26, so I had a lot of time to realize, 'Oh, this is what it's like to be an adult and how to be respected in a job.'' More from Billboard Leave Chappell Alone: Why Do Fan-Artist Relationships Turn Toxic, And What Can Be Done? Lady Gaga Wins 2025 Sports Emmy for 'Hold My Hand' Pre-Super Bowl Tribute to Disaster Victims A$AP Rocky Teases New Song at Cannes During 'Highest 2 Lowest' Premiere 'I've been treated better at my doughnut shop job than I have on a f–king [red] carpet,' she continued. 'People on the news treat me worse than how customers did. And I think when I started to say, 'Don't talk to me like that' … That doesn't mean that I'm a villain or ungrateful for what I have. It's like, 'Why is this customary?'' Roan went on to compare how certain fans have treated her to the way 'people were so evil' to stars such as Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton in the past. 'That behavior is still, they're still doing it. … Do you want me to just get to the point where I become agoraphobic? Or so stressed out or so anxious to perform?' she said. 'You want me to get to that point? Because if I don't say anything, I will. If I do not stand up for myself, I will quit because I cannot bear this. I cannot bear people touching me who I don't know. I cannot bear people following me.' 'I cannot bear people saying I'm something I'm not,' she added. 'That's what's really hard online. People just assume you're the villain.' The interview comes about nine months after Roan first made headlines for addressing what she saw as 'predatory' fan behavior, calling out obsessive listeners who would touch her without permission or stalk her whereabouts. Her posts on the subject sparked a wider discussion on stan culture and the sacrifices celebrities must make to be in the public eye. Though many sympathized with Roan, others were quick to deem her ungrateful. Regardless, the 'Pink Pony Club' musician has previously said that her experiences in public have improved drastically since she said her piece. 'I think people are scared of me,' Roan said on Call Her Daddy in March. 'I think I made a big enough deal about not talking to me that people do not talk to me. I've been with people, like, friends who are artists, and when they're with me, they're like, 'It's a force field around us. People don't come up to me if I'm with you.'' But now that she's washed her hands of toxic fan treatment, Roan has a few other things she'd like to see 'banned.' While playing a game of 'Ban It, B—h!' on Outlaws, the Grammy winner said she's had enough of people's hot takes — 'I don't care. … You don't know what you're talking about' — as well as cork shoes and a widely followed pop culture account on X. 'Pop Crave,' she said on the show. 'Ban it!' Listen to Roan on Outlaws below. Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The Weeknd on the ‘Deeply Psychological, Emotional Ride' Behind the Music in His ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow' Film
The following story contains spoilers from Hurry Up Tomorrow. Four months after The Weeknd released his Billboard 200-topping album Hurry Up Tomorrow, XO fans are finally able to watch the film that inspired its inception in theaters, starting Friday (May 16). More from Billboard The Weeknd Reveals 'Hurry Up Tomorrow' Album 'Didn't Exist' Before the Film 'American Idol': How to Watch Season 23 Finale Online REI Anniversary Sale: Shop the 20 Best Tech, Clothing & Outdoor Deals for Up to 30% Off Directed by Trey Edward Shults, Hurry Up Tomorrow follows a fictional version of the superstar (also named Abel) who's 'plagued by insomnia' and 'is pulled into an odyssey with a stranger who begins to unravel the very core of his existence,' according to the official synopsis. But what's soundtracking his nightmarish journey digs even deeper into The Weeknd's lore. 'Wake Me Up,' the Justice-featuring synth-pop album opener, also serves as the film's opening 'concert song.' The show The Weeknd performs at a that looks identical to the ones he held in Brazil and Australia last fall, where he wore a black and gold kaba — a hand-embroidered Ethiopian robe historically worn by royals and traditionally worn at weddings — and sang atop a rock-hewn church, resembling Lalibela, in the northern region of his motherland. He debuted 'Wake Me Up' at his São Paulo show in September. 'We always wanted a performance song that we can open the film with, and in the vein of a pop record, and 'Wake Me Up' was the inspiration,' The Weeknd tells Billboard. He performs the song again at a different concert later in the film, where he ends up losing his voice – mimicking The Weeknd's real-life experience at Inglewood's SoFi Stadium in September 2022, when he had to cut his concert short for the same reason. That incident, as well as The Weeknd's sleep paralysis diagnosis, are key influences in Hurry Up Tomorrow. The film's Oscar-winning sound designer Johnnie Burn says they remixed the first 'Wake Me Up' performance in the film '35 times, trying to get the balance of how much crowd sound you would hear, how the music would come across. Are you hearing it from Abel's perspective? We tried that. Are you hearing it from the audience's perspective? No. Are you hearing it from a deeply psychological, emotional ride? Yeah, you are.' Burn, who says he went from 'dancing around my kitchen to Abel's music' as a fan to 'dancing around the mixing room' with the man himself, says the process involved everything from asking Mike Dean for 'a new synth line that sounds a bit more live' to miking The Weeknd while he recorded new lyrics that better suited the storyline. When The Weeknd was changing up a few lyrics during the cutaways, 'I said, 'Well, you're probably in quite an adrenaline state when you go out in front of 80,000 people.' So I made him do push-ups to get kind of worked up,' Burn recalls with a chuckle. 'He was like, 'What, now?' And I was like, 'Yeah, get down and give me 20.'' Burn says the song that required the most fine-tuning was the cathartic centerpiece 'Hurry Up Tomorrow,' which The Weeknd explains was inspired by the titular track from Robert Altman's 1973 satirical noir film The Long Goodbye, because of how frequently it appears. 'You hear it throughout the entire film, different iterations of it. You hear it on the radio, you hear a pop version of it, subjectively in the score, diegetically, a mariachi band will sing it every time he goes to Mexico. And I wanted to do that with 'Hurry Up Tomorrow,'' he explains. Abel first plays Anima (played by Jenna Ortega) a stripped-down draft of it off his phone in a hotel room. Moved to tears, Anima admits she relates to its autobiographical lyrics — because her father left when she was a kid, her mother struggled to raise her alone and she abandoned home to forge her own path that's fraught with inescapable loneliness. The next morning, Abel turns around while sitting on the hotel bed and faintly hears Anima singing some of the first verse in the shower behind closed doors. He later encounters his younger self, who's swaddled in a gabi, a white handwoven Ethiopian cotton blanket, and singing a few lines in Amharic, the primary language of Ethiopia. But after Anima douses him and the hotel bed he's tied to with gasoline — and right as she holds a lighter above him — Abel belts an a cappella version that feels like he is literally singing for his life: 'So burn me with your light/ I have no more fights left to win/ Tie me up to face it, I can't run away, and/ I'll accept that it's the end.' 'You're seeing the making of it, not literally me making it, but the themes and the concept and the melody and the soul of it is being made throughout the film. By the end of it, it's fully blossomed into this song, which essentially is what the film is saying,' says The Weeknd, who adds that he had 'to finish the lyrics the night before I had to perform it at the end.' But outside of the Hurry Up Tomorrow tracks, fans will be surprised to hear two earlier songs from The Weeknd's discography in the film: his 2021 blockbuster hit 'Blinding Lights' – which is the top Billboard Hot 100 song of all time – and 'Gasoline,' the first track from his 2022 album Dawn FM. Anima analyzes the emptiness and heartache in the songs as she hysterically lip-syncs and dances to them, and she later questions Abel if he's the true toxic subject behind his music. 'What I am doing by the end of the film is, I'm lighting my persona up on fire. But to tap into that, you need to go into the back catalog a little bit, and take in what I'm saying in some of these lyrics and how they're masked by pop elements,' he says. 'It's always been a joke that joke with The Weeknd music, where it makes you sing and dance and it feels jolly. And then when you actually get into the themes of it, it's something much deeper — and maybe a call for help, who knows. That's how [Anima's] reading it, and essentially forcing myself to face myself.' There are other callbacks to his catalog in the sound design. The guttural shrieks heard right after Anima swings a champagne bottle over Abel's head and knocks him out when he first tries leaving the hotel room sound reminiscent of the title track of his 2013 debut studio album Kiss Land. The 'Easter eggs,' as Burn calls them, extend beyond the film — as fans pointed out online that the ending of 'Hurry Up Tomorrow,' which serves as the final track of The Weeknd's album, seamlessly transitions into the beginning of 'High For This,' the first track off his 2011 debut mixtape House of Balloons. While Hurry Up Tomorrow bids farewell to the character Abel Tesfaye has played for over a decade, it also underscores the long-standing symbiotic relationship between music and film in The Weeknd's world. 'When you hear the screams in the record and you hear all these horror references and you feel scared, listen to the music — because I want you to feel what I'm feeling. Kiss Land is like a horror movie,' The Weeknd told Complex in his first-ever interview back in 2013. 'We wanted to do something we've never seen or heard on screen before,' he says now. 'We were able to do these big swings, and I think they landed well in the film. I'm really proud of the music, and I'm proud of the sonics of it. It's much different from the album. It's like its own experience.' Best of Billboard Kelly Clarkson, Michael Buble, Pentatonix & Train Will Bring Their Holiday Hits to iHeart Christmas Concert Fox Plans NFT Debut With $20 'Masked Singer' Collectibles 14 Things That Changed (or Didn't) at Farm Aid 2021
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The Weeknd Wanders Through Purgatory in ‘Baptized in Fear' Music Video
The Weeknd unveiled the eerie music video for Hurry Up Tomorrow album cut 'Baptized in Fear' on Friday (June 6). In the cinematic clip, the R&B crooner sits alone in a desolate row of church pews as he sings, 'I fell asleep in the tub, I was met with paralysis/ My foot hit the faucet, water started flowin' in/ Couldn't scream for help, I just slowly felt the pressure hit/ Moving one toe was the only form of motion left/ Can't breathe for air, can't breathe.' More from Billboard The Weeknd on the 'Deeply Psychological, Emotional Ride' Behind the Music in His 'Hurry Up Tomorrow' Film Chappell Roan Did the Viral 'Apple' Dance During Charli xcx's Primavera Sound Set: 'Love You B-ch!' 50 Years Ago, Elton John Became First Artist to Enter Billboard 200 at No. 1 - Just How 'Fantastic' Was the Feat? From there, the artist born Abel Tesfaye watches in wonder as his hand is slowly engulfed in a liquid marble akin to the soulless statues that populate the visual before wandering out into the equally empty grounds of the churchyard, which, according to a release, represents the singer's 'battle with inner demons, a purgatory that he must endure, fighting for rebirth.' Though not released as an official single like 'Timeless,' 'São Paulo' and 'Cry for Me,' 'Baptized in Fear' has become a fan-favorite highlight of The Weekend's latest No. 1 LP, which he previously billed as his final album under his famous moniker, but has since noted that it may be a 'rebirth' instead. Billboard ranked the track among the best on Hurry Up Tomorrow upon the project's January release, calling the cut both 'dark and morbid' and 'The Weeknd at peak form.' The surprise video for 'Baptized in Fear' also follows the theatrical release of Hurry Up Tomorrow, the full-length psychological thriller directed by Trey Edward Shults that serves as a companion piece to the album. Watch The Weeknd's new music video for 'Baptized in Fear' below. Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart
