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Black America Web
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Black America Web
Jenna Bush And Halle Berry Present Teyana Taylor With Gold And Platinum Plaques
Source: Paul Archuleta / Getty Teyana Taylor was delivered the surprise of a lifetime during her appearance on Today With Jenna & Friends on Wednesday, June 4. While chatting to host Jenna Bush and celebrity guest co-host Halle Berry about her new album, Escape Room , Taylor displayed a look of shock when the duo informed her that two of her past albums, K.T.S.E. and The Album , had earned the RIAA's historic Gold award—a benchmark of success for artists in the music industry. 'This is like…okay. This is crazy,' Taylor said, as producers brought out the star's two gold plaques and a platinum award earned by the Harlemite. Holding Taylor's hand, Jenna told the multi-talented star she hoped the award would remind her of her incredible talent and reignite her passion for music. Back in 2020, the mother of two announced her retirement, saying she felt 'underappreciated' in the industry. 'You were about to retire, so I hope these two pieces of your art remind you of your incredible talent,' Jenna told the 34-year-old celeb. Shortly after her appearance, Taylor took to Instagram to share the sweet moment, thanking fans and God for perseverance. 'Father God, I thank you and I praise you in the name of Jesus,' she wrote. 'Thank You for showing patience with me, your kindness, grace & mercy every day. Your mercies never cease. Father God, please continue to instruct and teach me as I continue my faith walk. Thank you for keeping my head high to keep my crown from falling. I love you.' She added, 'Thank you for reminding me the wait is not punishment, it was preparation. Thank you to everyone involved with helping me bring these albums and songs to life, I am filled with much gratitude! WE PLATINUM & GOLD YALL.' The major award win comes as Taylor prepares to make her long-awaited return to music with Escape Room , her first album in five years since the critically acclaimed The Album in 2020. Set for release in August, the project marks the end of her musical hiatus and the beginning of a bold new era. As a taste of what's to come, Taylor dropped her new single 'Long Time' on June 4, accompanied by a smoldering music video featuring LaKeith Stanfield and her rumored boyfriend, Aaron Pierre. With raw vulnerability and fierce energy, Teyana transforms heartbreak into empowerment, delivering the biting refrain, 'Shoulda been walked out this bi—h a long time,' locking up Stanfield in a cage, before sharing a passionate kiss with Pierre in another scene. No official word yet on the feature lineup for the album, but based on the cinematic flair of her latest music video, it's clear Taylor is stepping into a bold new chapter—one that fuses her music with her passion for film. It's a fitting move for the multihyphenate, who is the star of Tyler Perry's new Netflix film, Straw , starring alongside Taraji P. Henson. We love to see the good sis stepping into this new chapter! DON'T MISS… Teyana Taylor Said What She Said, Claps Back At Divorce Commentary Teyana Taylor's Fresh Face And Pixie Cut Oozes '90s Vibes SEE ALSO Jenna Bush And Halle Berry Present Teyana Taylor With Gold And Platinum Plaques was originally published on Black America Web Featured Video CLOSE
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A$AP Rocky Describes The Polar Opposite Personalities Of His And Rihanna's Children
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways Rihanna and A$AP Rocky's little ones may share the same DNA, but according to their dad, that's where the similarities stop. For Vogue's April cover, Rocky gave a peek into the life of their two sons, RZA and Riot, and how polar opposite they are. The Harlemite described their oldest as the calm, introspective type who enjoys keeping to himself and a good story. Meanwhile, baby Riot is pure chaos in the cutest way. According to the 'Pretty Flacko' rapper, their one-year-old likes to snatch things from his big brother, in hopes that RZA will come after him. 'The older one, he stays to himself—he likes his books,' Rocky spoke of RZA, while adding that Riot 'likes to take stuff from his brother so his brother can chase him.' Rocky also didn't hold back when it came to praising his leading lady. Describing his love for Rihanna, he called it 'internal, external, infinite—the past and the future.' And if that wasn't romantic enough, he took it a step further in an earlier interview with Mystery Fashion, delivering a dose of hood poetry: 'That's my dog, that's my ni**a, that's my bi**h, that's my wife, that's my everything.' Rihanna, in her recent Harper's BAZAAR cover story, shared that their sons are completely smitten with their dad—so much so that she often has to playfully remind them, 'Do you know who cooked you? Do you know who pushed you out?' Still, she admitted that nothing makes her happier than watching the love they have for him. As far as working on baby number three, Rihanna playfully told E! News during her 2023 FENTY x PUMA Creeper Phatty launch that the 'only thing she couldn't do' so far was, 'have daughters.' She then teased that she and Rocky were already thinking about their next child. 'I'm batting at 75 percent for a boy next time,' she said. 'So, we'll just keep our fingers crossed.' An addition to their growing family may be coming sooner than we think, as many have speculated that the Anti superstar may be expecting again. During a brand trip for her all-new Fenty X PUMA line in Barbados this year, influencers caught her on cam wearing loose clothing, and sporting what could be perceived as a growing baby bump. See below. Take a look at A$AP's sentiments about his children above. More from Sign up for Vibe's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The Guardian
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Love endures all, including slavery and the pandemic. I wanted to show how
In early 2020, I made up my mind that I wanted to write a love story. Separated from my family and friends during the height of the pandemic and emotionally raw from living alone, I wanted to write something where I already knew the ending from the beginning: the characters would win. How they got there would be the most difficult part. I was inspired by the oeuvres of Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez, and I wanted my fourth book to be vast in scope, rich in history and intertwined with familial lineages. But the work would demand plot development as well as historical research and I needed someone to help me. I began interviewing assistants and came across a fellow Black female Harlemite from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Immediately, we clicked over a video chat and soon after, she emailed me a document she said I just had to see. The attachment revealed a four-page, cursive letter that dated back to 4 February 1863. Gorgeously maintained and preserved, the letter was written by a woman named Maria who took dictation from an enslaved man named James Tate of West Point, Georgia. The recipient is Tate's wife, Olivia, who is enslaved on another plantation. James tells her that his master has urged him to move on and forget about Olivia, but he's assuring her that he will never do that. This is it, I said to myself. That letter would be the foundation for my next book. Despite James's master having a vested interest in James producing children so that his labor force would be maintained, James would not give up on Olivia. James's body may not have belonged to him, but his heart was his own – something that the plantocracy or the law could not reach. Letter-writing among African American families is a centuries-old tradition. James Tate existed in a pattern of enslaved people who tried to reach their beloveds because stability was a fleeting dream. Whether it was a wife in Texas expressing worry for her husband's military service for his bondsmen enslaver in 1862, or a Charleston-based daughter looking to reunite with her mother in 1867, the Black family has constantly been under threat, their unions neither protected nor acknowledged in a court of law. Nevertheless, they wrote during slavery and wrote some more to find their loved ones after the American civil war. I had done so much research on this delicate part of history that I didn't know how my imagination could recreate it for the book. Then randomly, as I was cleaning my home, I 'saw' him: a Black Union soldier riding gallantly through the fields of Mississippi back to one of the wealthiest slave ports in the US: Natchez. The image came to me so vividly. I imagined what would have been the humidity of that June in 1865 when the war was called, and felt my nose getting irritated from all the weeds that that horse would have had to navigate. I knew the soldier by name: Harrison. He was returning to his beloved, Tirzah, a literate, enslaved woman, because that was his one and only promise to her. But when he returns to the plantation where he once toiled, everyone is gone. The main house is rotting and nothing but the wind passes through the slave cabins. So begins the love story that endures, the zeal that serves as the undercurrent for the tale. As someone who's had a deep fondness for family history, I've often grown frustrated with archives. There's always a missing part: the second half to a document was burned in a fire, another's whereabouts are unknown. Maybe a key detail has been stolen or a line is grotesquely blotted out. A person disappears, a life reassigned to fabulism and hypotheses. I become obsessed with finding hard, definitive facts. My head becomes hot and tense with the dogged persistence that there has to be something there even if the path is circuitous. Every time this trial and error happens, I grieve for the only truth I can count on in my quest: in order for Black life to be animated in this historical research, Black life had to have been valued in the first place. The US is guilty of being an amnesiac herself, her institutions emerging and thriving due to the sacrifice and degradation of an entire race. But the beauty in my disappointment arises when I understand that resilience persists. Love persisted. If it didn't, how could that letter from Georgia have been preserved in a family for more than 150 years, and make its way to the largest repository for African diasporic information in Harlem, and then to me in my quaint apartment that bordered on Central Park? Who knows what kind of difficulties this one family had to withstand in order to not only keep this letter, but also to preserve it. I became inspired all over again once I remembered: I remembered that love had to have existed like this in my family, too, even if there were no letters. If they didn't, how was I even born, much less how did I have the capacity to write this novel? Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion Now that I am more than a week past the release of Zeal, a sprawling narrative that follows the intergenerational consequences of two enslaved lovers being separated beyond their control, I think about how much further American society has collapsed since last November. The Trump administration is targeting the Smithsonian Institution and Black history is being removed from federal agencies – an erasure from the public sphere. Our accomplishments are being flattened and distorted into rightwing discourse that promotes the idea that we never deserved or worked hard to achieve them. Worst of all, the legacy of slavery, the twists and turns of Black triumph under cruel white supremacy is being either sanitized or outright banned in multiple states. I am afraid that my book will get banned somewhere. I'm afraid of more archives being lost as federal funding gets re-allocated or slashed altogether. What will I do? What must we do as a nation? But then I recall that my body is a living, historical document. Someone was captured from the coasts of Africa, survived the horrific belly of a ship as it traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, labored under the blistering heat in the deep south and continued loving and expanding in the American north. I am here because someone, as the old folks used to say, kept on keeping on. Someone had to have been loved as Harrison or as James Tate had in my own family because that's what kept us alive. Their earnestness carries on throughout generations. For four years of my life, I kept on keeping on beyond the shock of the pandemic. I researched the civil war, reconstruction, the exoduster movement, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, Jim Crow and the Covid era and positioned them as the backdrops of American history as two lovers and their descendants bond, twist, separate and merge under the weight of these periods. I wanted to show how love continues in spite of unnecessary pain and difficulty, in spite of external forces that threatens to break them apart, in spite of everything. I wanted a happy ending because I've seen that love in my own family – I rose up in it. Now, I wanted to deliver that goodness to another reader, while taking them on an adventure. And those types of endings aren't just figments of my imagination. James Tate eventually reunited with Olivia. They are buried in the same cemetery. Side by side. Together. Morgan Jerkins is the author of Zeal: A Novel, available from HarperCollins
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Yahoo
NYPD nabs hit-run driver they say killed bicyclist while fleeing Harlem car stop
Cops have nabbed a speeding hit-and-run driver who fatally struck a Harlem bicyclist while fleeing an NYPD car stop in a stolen minivan four months ago, police said Thursday. Facial recognition technology helped police identify Enesin Delarosa, who was charged Wednesday with manslaughter, leaving the scene of a fatal crash, fleeing police and possession of stolen property for the Nov. 2 crash. Delarosa, 26, is accused of mowing down bicyclist Devon Hughley, 45, near W.155th St. and St. Nicholas Ave. while fleeing the car stop. He sped off when police tried to pull him over for a traffic infraction at W. 152nd St. and Broadway, cops said. Medics rushed the bicyclist to Harlem Hospital but he could not be saved. 'Devon's greatest joy in life was his family, especially his children, whom he loved beyond words,' an obituary for the victim says. The lifelong Harlemite leaves behind four children and a stepson, the obituary says. The victim as a child 'was seen in popping wheelies in his aunts wheelchair, which he'd later go on to do with motorcycles and four wheelers in countless videos,' his obituary says. 'He was definitely one of the best to do it in the streets of Harlem, his home town. Devon was always, unintentionally, the life of the party!' During their investigation, members of the NYPD's Collision Investigation Squad recovered surveillance video of the van driver. Using facial recognition technology, cops were able to get a tentative ID, which was confirmed by a police officer who had dealt with Delarosa previously, a police source said. After a Manhattan Grand Jury indicted him for the crash, cops arrested Delarosa at a court appearance for an unrelated crime. Delarsoa lives in the Bronx and has numerous prior arrests for grand larceny and stolen property, cops said. Records show he was paroled in June 2020 after serving seven months in state prison for a Bronx stolen property conviction. He was awaiting arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court Thursday. The minivan was stolen in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx about 10 days before the crash, police said. Cops later learned two people on a scooter were seen checking vehicles for unlocked doors before the minivan was stolen. Cops have not yet proven if Delarosa was one of the men on the scooter and so he is charged with possession of the stolen van but not with stealing it. In addition to being a devoted dad, Hughley had three dogs who 'were not just pets but beloved family members and companions through every season of life,' his obituary says. 'He always made sure his dogs felt cherished, protected and loved. They were his solace. They kept him grounded and sane in the midst of insanity that this world could sometimes display.' It wasn't clear if cops pursued Delarosa when he fled the Harlem car stop but the fatal crash renewed concerns that the NYPD, which in 2023 decreed it was done letting suspects routinely speed away from them, is too aggressive in pursuing suspects in vehicles. In January, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch revised that approach, limiting chases only to suspects who have committed a felony or violent misdemeanor.
