Music

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The ‘Wrecking Ball’ hitmaker helps high school and college seniors celebrate their graduations remotely, while Oprah Winfrey shares her wisdom through a special message.
May 16, 2020
AceShowbiz – Miley Cyrus has helped the class of 2020 celebrate their graduations amid the coronavirus pandemic with a musical performance. Taking part in Facebook and Instagram’s #Graduation2020 virtual broadcast, the former “Hannah Montana” star delivered a rousing rendition of her 2009 hit song, “The Climb”, from her home.
Before her performance, the 27-year-old expressed her support for the 2020 graduates in a quick address. “Hello to all the graduates out there,” she greeted while standing behind a sparkling blue and gold podium. “I’m truly honored to celebrate each and every one of you high school and college seniors and all that you’ve accomplished.”
“As I was thinking about you, the class of 2020 and how you inspire me, I knew I wanted to share this song with you,” the ex-wife of actor Liam Hemsworth continued her short speech by introducing the ballad she was about to cover. “It feels full of a new meaning. Keep the faith, keep on moving, keep climbing, here’s ‘The Climb’.”

Miley was one of the stars participating in the multi-hour streaming event dubbed “#Graduation2020: Facebook and Instagram Celebrate the Class of 2020”. On the Friday, May 15 stream, Oprah Winfrey also popped up online to give an inspiring commencement speech to the graduates she described as “the pandemic class.”
“I know you may not feel like it, but you are indeed the chosen class for such a time as this – the class of 2020. You’re also a united class, the pandemic class that has the entire world striving to graduate with you,” the media mogul began her speech. “But even though there may not be pomp because of our circumstances, never has a graduating class been called to step into the future with more purpose, vision, passion, and energy and hope.”
The 66-year-old then challenged the graduates to use what they have learned to strive over COVID-19. “So can you use this disorder that COVID-19 has wrought? Can you treat it as an uninvited guest that’s come into our midst to reorder our way of being? Can you, the class of 2020, show us not how to put the pieces back together again, but how to create a new and more evolved normal, a world more just, kind, beautiful, tender, luminous, creative, whole?” she asked.

“We need you to do this, because the pandemic has illuminated the vast systemic inequities that have defined life for too many for too long,” she added. “You have the power to stand for, to fight for, and vote for healthier conditions that will create a healthier society. This moment is your invitation to use your education to begin to heal our afflictions by applying the best of what you’ve learned in your head, and felt in your heart.”

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The ‘School’s Out’ hitmaker is sending an uplifting message to his loyal fans with a brand new single inspired by the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic.
May 16, 2020
AceShowbiz – Alice Cooper has released a new single recorded during and inspired by the Covid-19 lockdown.
Cooper penned the new track, “Don’t Give Up”, from isolation at home, where he is recording his new album, before working with producer Bob Ezrin using remote technology to complete the record, which he debuted on Friday, May 15, 2020.
In a press release, Alice reveals he felt the need to address his fans directly from isolation using music.
“‘Don’t Give Up’ is out today! It’s a song about what we’ve all been going through right now and about keeping our heads up and fighting back together,” he explains. “And whatever you do – Don’t Give Up!”
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The “School’s Out” hitmaker also invited his fans to participate in the new video, with Cooper and his band members filming separately during quarantine. Over 20,000 responded, holding up signs and messages of unity featuring words from the lyrics.

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The ‘Bad Boy for Life’ actor has added his own verses to a tribute song originally recorded by Joyner Lucas as a thank you for the latter’s ‘creative’ homage.
May 16, 2020
AceShowbiz – Will Smith has made rapper Joyner Lucas’ music dreams come true by jumping on the remix of his tribute track.
Lucas originally paid homage to the superstar on the song “Will”, which dropped in March 2020 and featured the MC reenacting scenes from some of Smith’s biggest screen projects, including “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”, “Bad Boys”, “Men in Black”, and “The Pursuit of Happyness”, for its accompanying video.
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The promo was brought to the 51 year old’s attention by his actor/rapper son, Jaden Smith, prompting Will to share his gratitude to Lucas for the “creative” clip, which had left him “humbled and honored.”
Will subsequently connected with Lucas for an appearance on his Snapchat series “Will at Home” and now the veteran entertainer has added his own verses to the single for the “Will Remix”.
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Celebrating the collaboration’s release on Instagram on Friday, May 15, 2020, Lucas confessed the full circle moment had reduced him to tears.
“Last night I cried in the shower. I admit it. @willsmith,” he posted.

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The ‘American Gangster’ actor expresses his gratitude with a song for the nurses who are working on the frontline during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
May 16, 2020
AceShowbiz – Cuba Gooding Jr. has serenaded nurses in Orange County, California to thank them for working on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic.
The “Selma” star streamed the dedication to medical workers employed at facilities in the city of Anaheim from his home this week, offering up gratitude and words of encouragement before singing them a church song.
“I want to say to you 180 women who are in the Anaheim hospitals’ frontlines fighting this virus, just know that you’re in a wonderful city, community that supports you, that loves you … and that this community is of strong, and of faith, and of God (sic),” he shared on the virtual call.
Cuba spent much of his childhood in the Orange County region and said he often reflects on how much help he received when he was down on his luck there.
“(I think about moments of) survival there, and how the community rallied behind us to make sure we made it through the night with food (and) with shelter,” he recalled. “On a personal note, I used to live in Anaheim – I was homeless, I was living in a women’s abuse shelter just outside of (nearby city) Tustin. I went to Tustin High School, and I was exposed to the tight-knit community that Tustin and Anaheim make up.”

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The ‘Daisies’ singer hopes the summer songs in her upcoming studio album have an uplifting impact amidst the doom and gloom of the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
May 16, 2020
AceShowbiz – Katy Perry isn’t delaying her forthcoming fifth studio album because she plans on writing “a whole nother record” after giving birth this summer 2020.
The 35-year-old singer dropped the lead single from her new record, “Daisies”, on Friday, May 15, 2020, and confirmed an album is set to follow in the next few months.
“I have this body of work and there was a question of, do I wait until next year? And I was like, one thing is for certain, I’m having a child this summer,” the “Dark Horse” star said in an interview with New Music Daily on Apple Music.
“My whole life is about to change and I’m sure I will have a whole new access to different emotions I never had, and will be able to write from, so I’m going to write a whole nother record probably when that happens.”
Katy added, “I just think that this summer people want music, they want to dance. They might want some uplifting, inspirational anthems. And I like being associated with those.”
Katy is set to perform new song “Daisies” and she’ll also give fans a lesson on how to play the song acoustically, during the In The House livestream event via social video chat app Houseparty, which takes place this weekend.
Tune into the event, which also features stars including John Legend, Snoop Dogg, 2 Chainz, and Zooey Deschanel, here.

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Despite performing for more than a decade, and having seven solo albums to her name, the British folk singer-songwriter Laura Marling insists she’s not a natural entertainer. She calls herself the “subtle event” rather than the life of the party.Accordingly, instead of serenading her fans with concerts from her home in London, she has made the most of her lockdown by livestreaming weekly guitar tutorials on Instagram, @lauramarling. Since late March, Ms. Marling has posted more than a dozen 10-to-15-minute videos breaking down some of her most famous songs, garnering tens of thousands of viewsMs. Marling first learned how to play guitar as a child in Hampshire, England, by watching and playing alongside her father, who owned a recording studio and often strummed Joni Mitchell and Neil Young covers for fun. Both artists have heavily influenced Ms. Marling’s work, which, like Mitchell’s and Young’s, often relies on nonstandard tunings.Her tutorials are geared toward more inexpert guitarists. “I hope that people don’t know that much about the guitar, because I think knowing too much about music stifles your ability to try odd things,” Ms. Marling said in an interview. A basic knowledge of the instrument and tablature language could be useful, but isn’t necessary, she noted.She recommends that beginners start with the tutorial in which she discusses “The Suite.” The four tracks — “Take the Night Off,” “I Was an Eagle,” “You Know” and “Breathe” from her 2013 album, “Once I Was an Eagle” — were originally written as a single, longer song. “The Suite” requires DADDAD tuning and most of the chords use only two fingers. “It’s such a beautiful tuning and it’s really easy to get your head around,” she said.She cautions viewers to tune carefully. Turning the tuning keys gently and slowly while keeping your other hand on the strings, over the sound hole, helps prevent string breakage. (To help you nail the exact tunings Ms. Marling uses, there are plenty of free or low-cost guitar tuning apps, like Guitartuna.)Ms. Marling uses her own oeuvre as a jumping-off point, but she said her tutorials are “not about learning my songs, it’s about exploring the guitar.” Even as a successful musician she has sought out lessons from people she admires, like the producer and songwriter Blake Mills and the guitarist Peter Randall. But she hasn’t yet had the opportunity to learn from women artists she looks up to.“Learning from female guitarists by female guitarists is really important,” she said. “I wanted for so long a kind of female mentor or somebody to show me un-judgmentally how to grow in all forms of life.”Join Ms. Marling live every Sunday at 2 p.m. Eastern time from her home in London. More

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Ty, a British rapper known for a lyrically thoughtful, musically polyglot approach to hip-hop and for serving as a bridge between generations of British rap, died on May 7 in London. He was 47.His death was announced on a GoFundMe page that had been established by a family friend, Diane Laidlaw, while he was hospitalized with complications of the coronavirus. He was placed in a medically induced coma, woke from it and later died of pneumonia. In the late 1990s and 2000s, just before the early flickers of the rap-adjacent genre known as grime presaged a sound and scene with a firm British identity, Ty was among the most adventurous British M.C.s — a wordplay-focused scene-builder indebted to American movements like the Native Tongues and the New York underground. Though he received critical acclaim, including a nomination for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize in 2004, he often expressed his frustrations with how the more commercial strains of hip-hop tended to shut out unconventional voices.Ty didn’t fit neatly into any hip-hop archetypes, in England or anywhere else. “I hate the word alternative,” he told The Independent in 2008. “I hate the word off-key, I hate the word jazzy and I hate the word laid-back. I’m not a laid-back person.”But even though he was difficult to neatly categorize, Ty was widely respected for his relaxed but complex storytelling. Charlie Sloth, the British hip-hop D.J. and radio host, called him “a true foundation of UK rap” in a Twitter tribute.Ty was born Benedict Okwuchukwu Godwin Chijioke on Aug. 17, 1972, in London to parents who had emigrated from Nigeria. He was raised in the Brixton neighborhood, apart from a long spell during his younger years when his parents left him and his sister in private foster care with a white family in Jaywick, Essex, an experience that left lasting scars of identity confusion.“I learned, long way, to love who I am. To love my identity, my nationality. I learned with bloodied lips,” he told England’s Channel 4 News last year.In the 1990s, Ty worked as a sound engineer, and in 1995, he co-founded Ghetto Grammar, a London workshop series that functioned at the intersection of hip-hop and spoken word. He began recording music in the late 1990s alongside British hip-hop figures like Funky DL and Shortee Blitz. He also was a host of the Lyrical Lounge club night at the crucial venue Jazz Café.In 2001 he released his casually jaunty debut album, “Awkward,” which featured strong storytelling and had echoes of acid jazz and 1990s New York rap. His 2003 follow-up, “Upwards,” was more ambitious in its music and narrative on songs like “The Willing,” with its Afrobeat-influenced production, and “Rain,” a stark track about a nightclub shooting and the scourge of gun violence.The album was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, the annual British music award (now simply the Mercury Prize). His third album, “Closer,” was full of dreamy electro-adjacent production and featured his most overt engagement with American hip-hop, including collaborations with De La Soul, Speech of Arrested Development, Bahamadia and more.But Ty always remained interested in strengthening the ties between generations of British rappers, which became even more fragmented after the ascendance of grime — the breakthrough style that drew on jungle and garage to create a more rapid, pulsing, dystopian sound that set the table for an evolution in British rapping.He appeared on a remix of Bashy’s “Black Boys,” an influential 2007 protest song, alongside the future grime star Skepta and others. The grime MC Ghetts posted a tribute to Ty on Instagram, calling him “one of the first from the older generation to embrace me and show me love.”Ty continued releasing music into the late 2010s, including with Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets and the highly regarded jazz saxophonist Soweto Kinch. He was also part of Kingdem, a cross-generational supergroup of British rap elders, which also featured Rodney P (of London Posse) and Blak Twang.Jazz Re:freshed, the label that released Ty’s final solo album, “A Work of Heart,” in 2018, said in a statement, “He had a unique vision as to where he wanted to take his music, lyrically, sonically and aesthetically, whilst trailblazing for a whole generation. He knew his mind, followed it and walked his own path.”Ty’s survivors include his mother and his sister, Maria. More

The Canadian pop star earns backlash after he disputes Kehlani’s claim that her latest record ‘It Was Good Until It Wasn’t’ could be the first No. 1 R n B album in 2020.
May 16, 2020
AceShowbiz – The blur line of music genre has led Justin Bieber to make a debatable claim about the color of his latest record “Changes”. Having been widely recognized as a pop superstar, the Canadian singer has apparently tried to swift gear by saying that his 2020 studio album is an R&B album.
It all began as Kehlani, who recently released her new album “It Was Good Until It Wasn’t”, promoted the record on her Instagram post. The 25-year-old songstress urged her fans to stream the record as it could end up becoming the first R&B album to top the charts in 2020.
“IT WAS GOOD UNTIL IT WASNT. Link in bio. Last day to stream to get the first strictly RNB first week #! album in a long time,” she wrote in a now-deleted post. Further promoting R&B music, she continued, “our genre isn’t dead, our genre deserves! Link in bio! What’s your favorite lyric drop them comments boiiiiii and stream awayyy!”
Seeing Kehlani’s post, Justin decided to weigh in on it. He disputed her claim that “It Was Good Until It Wasn’t” could be the first R&B album to hit No. 1 in 2020, claiming that his album “Changes” is also of R&B genre and has placed first earlier this year. “Changes was rnb ;)” he wrote in the comment section.

Many of Kehlani’s fans clearly disagreed with Justin, with one trying to correct him, “I like Justin but that album is not what R&B fans consider to be R&B. Sorry to this man.” A second person kindly tried to explain to him, “I wouldn’t call his album R&B, more like a pop album with some songs having a trap beat.”
“It’s Justin Bieber, what else would it be besides Pop?” another person who doubted Justin’s claim chimed in. Reacting with a joke, someone suggested, “JB’s was rnb the way Post Malone’s was hip hop lol.”
Another fan of Kehlani said he/she was angry because of Justin’s claim, admitting, “This pissed me off.” Clearly not a fan of the “Sorry” hitmaker, another added, “He acted like a Damn cry baby when ‘Yummy’ wasn’t charting …have several seats…gotta give up that child star mentality.” Someone else also slammed him as writing, “He is so tone deaf it’s sad.”
Kehlani herself has not responded to Justin’s claim, while the husband of Hailey Baldwin has not attempted to clarify his remarks.
Nevertheless, Kehlani’s “It Was Good Until It Wasn’t” is poised to become one of the most successful R&B albums in history, with a fan page pointing out that if she hit number one, she would be the first female r&b artist to do so since Beyonce Knowles’ “Lemonade”.

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