Brandon Marshall On Kendrick Lamar Halftime Show & How It's A Huge Moment For Hip-Hop
Brandon Marshall caught up with Billboard's Tetris Kelly on the red carpet for 2025 Fan Duel Super Bowl party powered by Spotify.
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Buzz Feed
28 minutes ago
- Buzz Feed
Taylor Swift Gets Restraining Order For Alleged Stalker
Hot Topic 🔥 Full coverage and conversation on Taylor Swift Taylor Swift was granted a temporary restraining order Monday against Brian Jason Wagner, a 45-year-old Colorado man who has allegedly visited her home several times and claimed she is the mother of his child, per court documents reviewed by Billboard. The order was signed by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Debra R. Archuleta and reportedly requires Wagner to stay at least 100 yards away from Swift and her home. It is set to expire with a June 30 hearing about a potentially more permanent restraining order. Swift wrote in her petition Friday that Wagner first visited her Los Angeles residence on July 9, 2024, and returned at least twice that month. The Grammy winner further noted that she doesn't publicly share her address and never gave it to Wagner. 'Therefore, the fact that Mr. Wagner has determined where I reside and visited the property several times, refusing to leave and claiming to need access, makes me fear for my safety and the safety of my family,' she wrote in the petition reviewed by Billboard. Swift said he once arrived 'carrying a glass bottle that could have been used as a weapon.' 'During each of these visits, I am informed that Mr. Wagner made various statements about living at my property (not true), being in a relationship with me (not true), believing I am the mother of his son (not true), and needing to see me in person,' she added in her filing. Swift's legal proceedings were only launched after two more visits from Wagner last month, however, when her staff ran a background check and learned he had a criminal record and had claimed in 'lengthy communications' from jail that he was in a relationship with Swift. Wagner allegedly even illegally obtained a California driver's license listing Swift's address as his own. The singer, who unfortunately has a lot of experience with stalkers, described his claims as 'disconnected from reality' in her filing. In 2017, 29-year-old Mohammed Jaffar entered Swift's apartment building in New York City after harassing her management company, fawning over Swift on social media and describing her security guard as a 'gatekeeper,' The Guardian reported at the time. In 2018, 22-year-old Roger Alvarado broke in and used her shower before taking a nap in Swift's bed. Later that year, another man reportedly traveled more than 1,000 miles to her Los Angeles home with ammunition, a knife, rope and gloves in his car. Swift has used facial-recognition technology to identify potential stalkers at her concerts. The singer, who recently triumphed in a yearslong fight to reclaim the rights to her first six albums, wrapped her Eras Tour in December. The effort became the highest-grossing tour of all time, and the first to earn more than $1 billion — and $2 billion — in revenue.
Black America Web
34 minutes ago
- Black America Web
Roxannes Revenge - How A Teenage Battle Rapper Changed Hip-Hop Forever
Source: Richard Bord / Getty 2024 will be remembered as the year of the diss track. In addition to Kendrick and Drake going back and forth, we saw battles between Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, Ice Spice & Latto, Quavo & Chris Brown. Even Marlon Wayans wrote a country diss track against Soulja Boy. As we celebrate Black Music Month, it's only right that we credit the first diss track to become a viral sensation. At just 10, Roxanne Shanté was making noise in the underground rap scene. By 14, she was an undefeated battle rapper and a member of the Juice Crew. That opportunity came when she ran into neighbors Marley Marl, Mr. Magic, and Tyrone Williams, who were frustrated after U.T.F.O. backed out of a show. Though hesitant at first, Shanté was convinced to record a freestyle that became a seven-minute track disrupting U.T.F.O's plans. The diss track played on U.T.F.O's unreleased song 'Roxanne Roxanne', Which Shanté used as fuel freestyled from the woman in the song's perspective, to mock the group's manhood. 'Roxanne's Revenge' was released in 1984, reached #22 on Billboard, sold over 250,000 copies in New York, and sparked what's known as the 'Roxanne Wars', a battle resulting in over 30 response tracks. STAY INFORMED! CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER! This catapulted Shanté from local battle rapper to Juice Crew member, earning her recognition as one of hip-hop's best battle rappers. Roxanne was a rising star credited by Nas as an inspiration. But with fame came challenges, especially for a dark-skinned girl under 18. Beyond battling rappers, she faced physical and sexual abuse, foster care, colorism, and sexism. Decades later, women like Megan Thee Stallion, Latto, and GloRilla face similar backlash. Yet, like Shanté, they respond with bars that prove they can outrap men in the genre while facing systemic challenges. Source: Al Pereira / Getty Today, Roxanne Shanté's legacy lives on as a blueprint for authenticity in hip-hop. From lighting the Empire State Building during hip-hop's 50th anniversary to hosting on LL Cool J's Rock The Bells Radio, and receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2025 Grammy Ceremony, Shanté continues to champion the culture she helped define. Her journey from teenage battle rapper to respected pioneer has inspired generations of female MCs to speak their truth without apology. Source: ETIENNE LAURENT / Getty LIKE US ON FACEBOOK . FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM & TWITTER . SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE . STAY INFORMED! CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER! HEAD TO THE HOMEPAGE SEE ALSO
Time Magazine
an hour ago
- Time Magazine
Call Her Alex Isn't a Portrait of Alex Cooper—It's an Infomercial for Her Brand
In the breakout third episode of Call Her Daddy, the podcast's co-hosts, Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn, encouraged a male listener to track his crush's movements via Snapchat, advised a woman that there was no need to tell her boyfriend about her sugar daddy, and plotted to sell dirty Coachella shoes to foot fetishists. But the bit that really made 'Gluck Gluck 9000,' posted on Oct. 3, 2018, a classic was Cooper's lively and detailed description of the eponymous, supposedly game-changing oral sex technique. Six years and three days later, Cooper hosted an episode of the same podcast in which she posed to Kamala Harris, then the Vice President of the United States and Democratic candidate for President, questions about mental health, reproductive rights post- Roe, and the economic challenges facing young people. How did the Call Her Daddy that launched, not so long ago, as a chronicle of two 20-something Lower East Side roommates' X-rated exploits evolve into the ultra-mainstream Call Her Daddy of today? The short answer is that Cooper and Franklyn's cheerfully raunchy banter quickly attracted an audience of millions and just kept getting more popular, fueled by successive deals with the fratty platform Barstool Sports, then Spotify, and now a three-year Sirius XM contract reportedly worth $125 million. A more illuminating explanation for the show's expansion into a media empire would require an understanding of who Cooper—a solo act since Franklyn's departure in 2020—really is. The Hulu doc Call Her Alex presumably exists to offer such insight. But in just two scattered episodes (whose release as a series rather than a feature probably comes down to marketing), it's less a portrait of the podcaster than an infomercial for her brand. Directed by Ry Russo-Young (Nuclear Family, And Just Like That) and, crucially, produced by Cooper's company Unwell, Call Her Alex takes a form so typical of the authorized 21st century celebrity documentary, it's become a cliché. Behind-the-scenes footage of Cooper preparing for her first tour, which she's determined to make more exciting than the live tapings that comprise so many podcasters' events, is paired with a roughly chronological origin story. In the present, tension builds around troubled rehearsals of a program that includes musical numbers where Cooper is flanked by male dancers. The pressure to give her beloved listeners, known as the Daddy Gang, an unforgettable night seems insurmountable. An anxious Cooper seeks comfort from her unflappable husband and business partner, Matt Kaplan (a figure so adored by the Daddy Gang, some audience members carry giant cutouts of his face). Of course, as the trope dictates, last-minute disasters give way to an unequivocally triumphant opening night. The biographical portions can feel evasive—weirdly so, considering that messiness and candor are central to Cooper's brand—often swerving away from uncomfortable topics. She recalls escaping the pain of boys' bullying, as a skinny redhead, by bonding with other girls on the soccer field and making videos with friends. Then, suddenly, the awkward childhood photos are replaced by images of the perfectly proportioned and coiffed blonde she'd become by the time she matriculated at Boston University. There's no talk of how this glow-up might've affected her personal life or career, or the messages it might send to skinny redheads who worship Father Cooper, as she calls herself. The defining contradiction of Call Her Daddy, like Cosmo and the 'female chauvinist pigs' of Y2K pop culture, is its frequent implication that female empowerment requires catering to male desires. But Russo-Young never really interrogates Cooper's gluck-gluck feminism. Also conspicuously downplayed is the Cooper-Franklyn split, a perennial hot topic for the Daddy Gang. Talking heads who lived through it allude to a breakdown of the women's personal relationship as well as their professional partnership, as they renegotiated their initially meager Barstool contract—old news. Cooper doesn't have much to say about this. And while Barstool's controversial founder, Dave Portnoy, who also became a character in the contract drama, offers a few anodyne words of praise for Cooper in the doc, Franklyn is only glimpsed in archival footage. Anyone hoping to learn more about the end of the friendship, which isn't necessarily unreasonable for fans of a show premised on the intimacy of girl talk, will be disappointed. Still, Cooper is too savvy to put out a product entirely devoid of revelations. The morsel of news that started circulating in the days leading up to the series' release concerns the accusations of sexual harassment she levels in Call Her Alex against a since-retired BU soccer coach. Framed by Cooper's return to Boston for her tour, her story of a female coach who she says pried into her sex life and touched her inappropriately and used the students' scholarships to manipulate them—and of the university's alleged refusal to act on her scrupulously documented complaint—is infuriating. (Boston University has yet to comment on these allegations.) It also complicates Cooper's memories of soccer as a safe space and her choice to build a career around what is often euphemized as locker-room talk, though those aspects of the ordeal are barely explored. Instead, it's framed as yet another chance for Cooper to demonstrate her strength and tenacity. 'I was so determined,' she says in a voiceover that accompanies her stroll across an empty BU soccer field, 'to find a way where no one could ever silence me again.' Cooper is indeed a force—shrewd, ambitious, dynamic, hard-working. She knows her worth and fights for it. But that much has been obvious for years, to anyone with a casual awareness of her ascent to media-mogul status, as she's built an empire that now includes a media company (Trending), a podcast platform (Unwell Network), and an electrolyte drink (Unwell Hydration). The Daddy Gang certainly gets it. Which raises the question of who the audience for this documentary is supposed to be. Potential business partners, maybe? Watching Call Her Alex, at times, I felt as though I was being pitched a product: an empowered woman whose brand is female empowerment. All this marketing detracts from an element of Cooper's personality that is far more fascinating and rare and, I think, critical to her appeal than the stuff Russo-Young focuses on: she's great with people. The glimpses we do see of her interactions with fans are among the doc's highlights. When an audience member at one of her tour dates tearfully recounts how Call Her Daddy helped her cope with her father's death from cancer, Cooper calls her up to the stage, gets her a chair, sits at the young woman's feet, holds her hand, listens and reacts to every sentence of her story. Any performer could go through these same motions, but Cooper's care and curiosity—whether she's talking to a fan or a disgruntled employee or the most powerful woman in U.S. history—always come across as genuine. When she tells someone 'I f-cking love you,' which she often does, it sounds like she means it. This is probably why so many of her Gen Z listeners have likened her to a big sister. Yet she's something more complicated, too, a comforting but also aspirational figure, whose ugly-duckling-to-sex-goddess-swan transformation has left her with an unusual combination of empathy for the everygirl and the charisma to make that Daddy Gang diehard feel special. In a world that plays mean girls against mere mortals, she plays the part of the people's Regina George, her burn book replaced by an endless supply of sincere compliments.
