Latest news with #MTVVideoMusicAward
Express Tribune
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
She's no longer ‘HOT?': Trump pauses politics to throw shade at Taylor Swift
U.S. President Donald Trump reignited his feud with pop superstar Taylor Swift, suggesting in a post on his Truth Social platform that the singer has lost her appeal since he publicly denounced her. 'Has anyone noticed that, since I said 'I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,' she's no longer 'HOT?'' Trump wrote on Friday, without providing any further explanation. -TruthSocial. Trump's comment appears to be a continuation of his ongoing backlash against Swift, who endorsed former Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential race. Swift, who boasts a net worth of $1.6 billion according to Forbes, endorsed Harris following her debate victory over Trump in September. In her post, Swift described Harris as 'a steady-handed, gifted leader' and emphasized her commitment to causes that align with Swift's own values. Trump initially responded with a post stating 'I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!' days after Swift's endorsement. He later dismissed Swift's influence, suggesting during a Fox & Friends interview that her support for Harris would have financial consequences, claiming, 'She'll probably pay a price for it in the marketplace.' Swift has remained one of the most commercially successful artists in the world. Her record-breaking Eras Tour became the first concert tour in history to gross over $2 billion, and she holds multiple records for Grammy and MTV Video Music Award wins. In January 2025, her live vinyl release Lover (Live From Paris) sold out in under an hour. Previously, Trump had acknowledged Swift's talent and appearance, telling Variety co-editor Ramin Setoodeh that he found her 'very beautiful' and 'very talented,' though he also noted, 'She probably doesn't like Trump.' President Trump has previously also faced criticism for reposting an AI-generated image that falsely depicted Swift supporting him—a claim he dismissed as unimportant during an interview with Fox Business.
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lady Gaga Makes Surprising Admission About Filming Her Iconic Bad Romance Video
It's hard to argue with the impact of Lady Gaga's iconic Bad Romance music video. The 2009 clip earned Gaga a Grammy and MTV Video Music Award in their respective Video Of The Year categories, and was briefly the most-watched music video on YouTube, where it currently stands at almost two billion views. Bad Romance is famously set in a bathhouse, and takes place under glaring white lights. However, in a new video interview with W magazine (recorded entirely in whispers as the clip sees Gaga exploring ASMR), she admitted that she originally had a very different vision for Bad Romance. 'When I made the music video for Bad Romance, originally it was going to be much more dark,' she recalled. 'And then, 24 hours before we shot the video, my director, Francis Lawrence, said he wanted to shoot it in a white box. And I trusted him, because he's so amazing.' The 14-time Grammy winner added that she 'learned the choreography for Bad Romance at midnight, the night before we shot the video'. As for her original ideas for Bad Romance, Gaga added that she has since put them to use elsewhere – even if it did take more than a decade to do so. 'I like that we shot Bad Romance in a white box now,' she explained. 'But I had some visions for that video that stayed with me for over 15 years. And I brought them to life also in the Abracadabra video.' Abracadabra is the most recent single from Gaga's new album Mayhem, and is currently on track to reach a new peak of number two in the UK singles chart. Last month, Gaga opened up about some of the more subtle details that fans might have missed in the song's elaborate music video. Watch the Poker Face singer's interview with W magazine in full in the video below: This Is The Hidden Meaning Behind The Lyrics Of Lady Gaga's Incredible New Song Abracadabra Lady Gaga Says A Romantic Conversation With Her Fiancé Inspired This Stand-Out Mayhem Track Lady Gaga's Old Quotes About Her Own Music Come Back To Haunt Her During Hot Ones Interview
New York Times
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Voletta Wallace, Mother Who Shaped the Notorious B.I.G.'s Legacy, Dies at 78
Voletta Wallace, the mother of the Brooklyn rapper the Notorious B.I.G., whose stewardship of her son's career and legacy after he was killed in 1997 helped cement him as a hip-hop icon, died on Friday. She was 78. Ms. Wallace had been in hospice care at her residence in Stroudsburg, Penn., according to a news release from the Monroe County coroner, Thomas Yanac, who confirmed the death, citing natural causes. A middle-class immigrant and single mother from Jamaica, Ms. Wallace was forced into the hip-hop spotlight after the Notorious B.I.G., born Christopher Wallace and also known as Biggie Smalls, died at 24 in a Los Angeles drive-by shooting. Biggie's death came just six months after the Las Vegas slaying of the rapper Tupac Shakur, a onetime friend turned bitter rival, with the killings abruptly ending a formative and fruitful moment in mainstream gangster rap amid a tangled East Coast-West Coast beef that went far beyond music. For decades, both cases remained unsolved, fueling an ongoing ecosystem of true-crime books, documentaries, articles and more that have attempted to explain the possible links between the two killings, including the involvement of national gangs and crooked cops. (In 2023, prosecutors in Las Vegas charged Duane Keith Davis, a former gang leader known as Keffe D, with murder in the Shakur case; he is set to stand trial later this year.) Ms. Wallace, a preschool teacher, took on the mantle of her son's career almost immediately. Biggie's second album, 'Life After Death,' came out two weeks after he died; six months later, Ms. Wallace accepted the MTV Video Music Award for best rap video ('Hypnotize'), telling the New York crowd, 'I know if my son was here tonight, the first thing he would've done is say big up to Brooklyn.' Two years later, she appeared alongside Afeni Shakur, Tupac's mother, at the same awards show, urging unity and the preservation of their sons' legacies. Ms. Wallace would go on to work with other mothers of musicians who died young through her Christopher Wallace Memorial Foundation and its B.I.G. ('Books Instead of Guns') Night Out. 'All I want to do is put a book into a child's hand. Because books do not kill,' Ms. Wallace said in 2003. 'Books do not murder. But weapons do.' In 2002, Ms. Wallace and her son's widow, the singer Faith Evans, filed a wrongful-death suit against the city of Los Angeles, accusing the Los Angeles Police Department of covering up police involvement in the killing. A 2005 trial ended in a mistrial, with a judge ruling that the police had intentionally withheld evidence and ordering the city to pay the estate's legal fees. An amended version of the suit filed by Biggie's estate in 2007 estimated financial losses at $500 million. The case was dismissed in 2010 to avoid interfering with what the estate called a 'reinvigorated' criminal investigation. 'The family only wanted justice to be done,' a lawyer for the estate said at the time. Despite the lack of closure in the case, Ms. Wallace continued to spread the Notorious B.I.G.'s story across popular culture. She was credited as a producer — and played by Angela Bassett as 'a saint with a powerful tongue,' as one film review put it — in the 2009 biopic 'Notorious,' even coaching the actor, Jamal Woolard, who played her son. 'I felt like I sometimes intimidated him during the film,' Ms. Wallace said. 'I felt bad for that, but as a producer my job is to be there.' In a 2021 documentary, 'Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell,' Ms. Wallace recalled her musical influence on her once-shy son from their days in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where he was exposed to a mix of reggae, jazz and — her personal favorite — country music. 'Ever since I was a little girl I liked stories,' Ms. Wallace said. 'When he was a little boy and was growing up, I always had the radio on and tuned in to the country music station. I love my Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings. He listened to it all with me because he had no other choice.' Information on survivors to Ms. Wallace was not immediately available. For years, Ms. Wallace was a reliable presence alongside the music executive Sean Combs, known as Puff Daddy or Diddy, who helped discover Biggie and also shepherded his legacy after death. But she was unequivocal last year, as Mr. Combs was accused of widespread sexual abuse and indicted on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges. 'I hope that I see Sean one day and the only thing I want to do is slap the daylights out of him. And you can quote me on that,' Ms. Wallace told Rolling Stone. 'Because I liked him. I didn't want to believe all the awful things, but I'm so ashamed and embarrassed.'
Yahoo
04-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Opinion: Is Bianca Censori Crying Out For Attention—Or For Help?
Having watching rapper Kanye West and his wife Bianca Censori get kicked out of the Grammy Awards on Sunday night—though West, of course, denies this happened—the public should ask: Is Censori OK? And why in the world are we all watching West's erratic, problematic behavior and acting like it, or he, is acceptable? As West and Censori walked the red carpet, he was fully clothed, while she was in a long fur coat. While posing photographers, he appeared to order her to remove it, and she complied; underneath, she was almost entirely nude, her breasts and genitals fully exposed. It was far from the the first time a clothed West has appeared next to a nearly-nude Censori, though it did mark a new development in her barely-there attire. And there's nothing wrong with nudity or women showing their bodies. But the West-Censori dynamic doesn't feel like an empowered woman wearing what she wants; it feels uncomfortably like a man with very particular ideas about female sexuality parading his take on a 'tradwife' around in an act of domination and debauchery. That's in part because of how West and Censori behave. She's barely out of her 20s and moves through public spaces mute and dead-eyed, seemingly looking to him for direction and approval. He's nearing 50 and appears to tell her what to do. Her friends have voiced serious concerns about their relationship. It's also in part because West has a long history of degrading women, and seems to revel in publicly humiliating them. This misogyny exploded into public view when West interrupted Taylor Swift, who was then just 20 years old (West was in his 30s), as she received an MTV Video Music Award in 2009; West broke into her speech, grabbed the mic, and argued that Beyoncé should have won in her place. (Beyoncé was clearly angry and embarrassed by the stunt, and when she later took the stage to receive a different award, she invited Swift back up to give her speech.) Even though West was clearly in the wrong, the narrative of the event soon became complicated by race; Swift was often painted as a villain, a woman who used her whiteness as a shield—never mind that she didn't actually do anything to invite West's actions, and didn't do or say much in the aftermath, either. In 2016 he mused on a track that 'Me and Taylor might still have sex' because he 'made that bitch famous.' When she noted in her Grammy acceptance speech that year that ambitious women should know that 'people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments,' the press covered it as a 'diss' and her attempt to 'shame' West. To this day, news outlets refer to the West-Swift 'feud.' But a feud suggests two people engaged in a back-and-forth. What's actually going on is West engaging in a decades-long campaign of harassment. To wit: After the Grammys, West unfollowed everyone on Instagram—except for Swift. It's a move he surely knew would make headlines. Many of his previous relationships with women are also revealing. He has spent years disparaging his ex, Amber Rose, in incredibly crass and misogynistic terms. After he started dating Kim Kardashian, he threw away her clothes and notoriously dressed her up like his own personal Barbie. (Sounds familiar?!) After the couple split, he engaged in a series of deeply creepy public acts—and again, the press covered it all as some sort of interpersonal conflict, even though Kardashian did not engage publicly. His rebound girlfriend Julia Fox, whom West also styled in clickbait costumes, has said she felt treated like a 'pawn' and a 'show monkey' during their relationship. It's clear West has a clear pattern of bad behavior toward women—and Black women in particular. He does not give them the professional respect they've earned, or the personal space they ask for. He treats his wives and girlfriends like objects that exist for his pleasure; things to dress up and display, and that feed his fury if they act out—and act like human women. And that's before we even get into his broader racism, antisemitism and right-wing conspiracy theorizing. West has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and has spoken openly of his mental health struggles. It is sad to see someone with a serious illness acting out in public. But it's also not in any way clear that his serial mistreatment of women is wholly related to these issues. It seems, instead, to have a lot to do with simple misogyny. Whatever the cause, it's wildly irresponsible to keep this man in the public eye, let alone in the art and culture worlds' good graces. Whether he and Censori (who has of course not commented on the moment or ensuing media circus) were kicked out of the Grammys or not, one wonders why West remained a man of good-enough standing to nominate and invite in the first place. Of course people should be given the grace to own their mistakes, to apologize and correct them, but West doesn't seem to have done much of that—and keeps behaving in similarly abhorrent ways over and over again. In countless examples where famous men's mistreatment of their wives, girlfriends, female employees and women more broadly, has become public knowledge, the aghast, collective question is: Who knew? Of course, a lot of people likely did. But with West, we all do—certainly we all know enough. The full details of his relationship with Censori, and whether she's fully consenting to this or will, with some time and space, say she was coerced or abused, may not be entirely clear. But the scene at the Grammy Awards, with West acting like Censori was more his personal puppet than partner, made a lot of observers uncomfortable precisely because West's bad acts have not been well-hidden secrets; they've been out in the public eye for years now. The question now isn't 'what's happening?' It's 'what will we do with what we see in front of us?'
