Music

Since 2016, Jessie Reyez, a Canadian songwriter whose parents came from Colombia, has built a fervent audience for songs that delve into loyalty and betrayal, ambition and obstacles, heartbreak and vengeance — songs that map the messy, volatile mood swings of 21st-century romance. The 2016 single that brought her international attention, “Figures,” is a ballad built on doo-wop guitar picking that veers between anger and tears; it has been streamed more than 63 million times on YouTube alone.From the beginning, Reyez, 28, has come across with palpable sincerity and a sense of emotional transparency. “I’ve always made it a point to be authentic,” she said via FaceTime from her home in Toronto, wearing a nondesigner T-shirt with a cartoon montage of movie gangsters. Her luxuriant long black hair was gathered on her head in two asymmetrical poofs. Reyez doesn’t strike simplistic pop poses; she doesn’t present herself as an inspirational superwoman or a sexual dynamo, a creature of pure affection or of long-suffering self-pity. Ambivalent impulses flicker constantly through her lyrics and flaunt themselves in her voice, which can be sweet or raspy, childishly innocent or acidly scornful. Her music, though it’s categorized as R&B, pulls together the impulses of folky singer-songwriters and syllable-spitting rappers as well as pop melody and hip-hop impact.The fans who eagerly sing along at Reyez’s concerts see their own growing pains in hers. That reaction can still surprise her. “I never really made music for other people,” she said. “I always made it selfishly. I always made it in my bedroom by myself.” But seeing people connect with tracks she made to soothe herself has changed her outlook: “It helps me feel like I’m doing something right, you know?”“Gatekeeper,” which appeared on her 2017 EP “Kiddo,” bluntly describes her music business #MeToo encounter with a producer who claimed to be interested in her voice: “30 million people want a shot/How much would it take for you to spread those legs apart?” she sang. She not only made a music video of the song itself, but also a 13-minute film dramatizing the incident.Reyez wrote “Far Away,” released in 2019, about a faithful long-distance romance, only to realize after she finished writing the song that certain lines jumped out at her: “You’re still waiting for your papers/Been feeling like the government wants us to break up.” The song’s video showed wrenching images of an immigration raid and family separations. “I felt motivated to want to make something that would act as a conduit for empathy, as a window for anybody who’d never been through it,” she said.Reyez released her EPs in 2017 and 2018; the second, “Being Human in Public,” was nominated for a Grammy for best urban contemporary album. She also had guest spots on songs by hitmakers like Romeo Santos (singing in Spanish), Calvin Harris and Eminem, who returned the favor by appearing on the new album as the seething but still attached boyfriend in “Coffin,” a lovers’ quarrel infused with mortality that imagines a coffin “handmade for two.” A picture of it appears on the album cover.Eminem, who discovered Reyez singing “Gatekeeper” on late-night television, said he admires both her directness and her craftsmanship. “She sings from her heart,” he said by phone from Detroit. “She’s writing about [expletive] that she’s been through and stuff like that. But it’s not easy to do what she does, and she makes it look so easy.”He added, “She doesn’t sound like anybody. Her style of singing, the way she enunciates her words and everything, she’s just naturally dope. It seems like she’s not even trying, and she’s that good. Her voice and her cadences don’t sound like anybody I had ever heard before.”This year, Reyez was all geared up to release her full-length debut album, “Before Love Came to Kill Us,” which arrives on Friday. She was treating the album, unlike the songs collected on her EPs, “as a project to be taken in as a whole,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Let me put my phone on airplane mode, let me sage the room, let me grab a bottle of wine or a bottle of whiskey and let me sink into this.’”In years of songwriting, Reyez had reserved some of her darker, more probing songs for this moment. Her fall 2019 headlining tour introduced a devotional, elegiac ballad, “Love in the Dark”; she followed it with “Ankles,” which sneers at a cheating boyfriend’s dalliances over a blend of choirlike vocals and ratcheting drum-machine beats. (Reyez gives a songwriting credit on “Ankles” to her mother, who consoled her after a breakup with a saying in Spanish that other girls “don’t come up to your ankles.”) The plan was to release the LP while she was touring arenas, opening for the teenage superstar Billie Eilish. While rehearsing her new songs for the stage, she decided to overhaul the album, swapping in songs and punching up mixes, giving the music more jolts — and forcing her label and streaming services to scramble with new files.“When I was building the album, I remember hearing from multiple people that it needs to be cohesive, cohesive, cohesive, and I kind of let that get to my head,” Reyez said. “But my entire time as an artist, I’ve always been a child of polarities.” Contrast, she said, is part of who she is. “It’s innately in me to want to yell and love at the same time. I haven’t been compromising this whole time as an artist. Why would I start with my album?”The tour got underway; Reyez was on the road with Eilish in early March when the coronavirus brought nearly all the pop machinery to a halt. Instead of singing in arenas over the coming weeks, now Reyez is at home trying to improve her piano playing.“I feel weird promoting in these times,” she said. “It feels like music is kind of minuscule in comparison to what’s going on.”Facing the prospect of the pandemic, Reyez started having second thoughts about releasing an album called “Before Love Came to Kill Us.” “The whole premise of the album was to motivate people to think about their mortality,” she said. “Now that it’s coming out, at this time, either I’m insensitive or I’m tuned in.”She added: “It messed me up because I was like, ‘I don’t want to seem insensitive, but this has been my reality for a long time.’ Because that’s just the way I’ve grown up. I’ve grown up thinking about death as something that could easily happen tomorrow. But I know that for everybody else, there’s a lot of fear right now.”Reyez put the question to fans on Instagram: Should she postpone the album? The response, she said, was overwhelming. “It was like 3 percent or 4 percent of people saying yes, and everybody else saying ‘[expletive] no! Because the music helps me in these times.”The album plunges into tangled relationships: vituperative and clingy, flippant and desperate, awash in second thoughts. Gentle bossa nova chords accompany Reyez as she sings about murderous jealousy in “Intruders”; “Deaf” is a revenge taunt set to skidding, sliding, disorienting electronics. “Kill Us” moves from a 1950s slow-dance kiss-off to tremulous thoughts of a second chance.There’s also a song in Spanish: “La Memoria,” a mournful reproach to a lover who mistreated her, and a reminder of Reyez’s Latin heritage. “It’s in my face, it’s in my blood, it’s in my dark hair, it’s in my brown skin,” she said. “It’s in the way that my soul lifts up when I hear Colombia. It’s in the way that I hug my mom. My parents purposely kept me connected to our roots, our blood.”Reyez still has misgivings about releasing the album now — not for its music, but for the state of the world. “I’m conflicted,” she said, gazing earnestly in the FaceTime camera and then shrugging. “But I’ve decided I’m putting it out, because indecision never did anything for anybody.” More

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While feeling that it is the responsible thing to do in the midst of the global pandemic, the ‘Havana’ hitmaker can’t help but be truly heartbroken having to disappoint her fans.
Mar 25, 2020
AceShowbiz – Camila Cabello has issued a heartfelt apology to fans after making the decision to postpone her “The Romance Tour” amid the global coronavirus pandemic.
The “Havana” star had been due to hit the road in Europe in May, before continuing across North America throughout the summer. However, the ongoing crisis surrounding Covid-19 has led to Camila joining the long list of musicians either cancelling or postponing live dates, as she explained to her fans in a lengthy post on Instagram on Tuesday, March 24.
“I’m truly heartbroken to say that we’ve decided we need to postpone our tour…” she wrote. “We can’t start rehearsals without putting people at risk and with so much up in the air with no real and definitive end in sight, I feel this is the responsible thing to do. We will do our very best to reschedule as soon as we are about to, expect more info in the near future. I’m so so sorry you guys. I’m so sad at the thought of disappointing you.”
“I was so excited to see you and hug you in person and sing these songs with you. We’ve been working on something really magical and special and I keep picturing your faces and I just wanted to bring you guys the dreamiest experience possible. I promise I’ll see you and cuddle your faces off when it’s safe and all this passes. One positive thing is the opportunity to create and keep making music that I’m also excited to share with you. Thank you for being there for me and caring about me always, I love and care about all of you so much too.”
Concluding her post, the former Fifth Harmony singer finished with a message of hope.

“To all of you going through a difficult time right now, I’m sending you lots of love and light your way, remember to be gentle and loving and kind to yourself, let’s be compassionate and take care of ourselves and each other,” she wrote. “When the danger passes, all this love that we are putting into the world will heal us.”

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OAKLAND, Calif. — In a few hours, Stephen Bruner, the singer and bassist professionally known as Thundercat, had a sold-out show to play at the Fox Theater, a former 1920s movie palace on Telegraph Avenue. Somewhere inside the Fox, there was a dressing room with his name on it. But Bruner’s plan for the afternoon was to stay on the bus, where he feels at home.“I’m a road dog,” Bruner said, then corrected himself. “Cat. Road cat.”He was half-prone on a couch in the bus’s back corner, in skinny black jeans and a T-shirt proclaiming, in bumper-stickerish terms, his love of a particular excretory function; his nails were painted eggplant purple. A screen near the bus’s ceiling displayed a game of Mario Kart, on pause. Every so often, to keep from losing his place in the game, Bruner would stretch out a silver-socked toe and wake the console from sleep mode by nudging the stick of his controller, which lay at the far end of the couch, next to an Aldi shopping bag overflowing with crumpled laundry, including a silver Lurex cargo vest designed by Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton.Anything else he could have needed in this moment was close at hand — water, plastic-sleeved X-Men comics, a reference book on an obscure genus of Pokémon, or a Pikachu-shaped backpack with a miniature Pikachu hanging from the zipper and a Pikachu-yellow sweatshirt inside.Bruner, 35, cheerfully acknowledges never having put aside his childhood obsessions. Instead, he’s become the kind of artist who invites listeners into a private and eccentric world. Since 2011, he’s made four solo albums, always in collaboration with the Los Angeles producer Steven Ellison, better known as Flying Lotus. (The latest, “It Is What It Is,” is out April 3.) His catalog posits an alternate universe where smooth ’70s FM stalwarts like Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald (who both appeared on his third album, “Drunk,” in 2018) stand shoulder to shoulder with jazz icons like John Coltrane and the Weather Report bassist Jaco Pastorius — and where music built on those juxtapositions somehow resonates as pop.McDonald, who got his big break as a backup singer on Steely Dan’s “Katy Lied,” suggests that Bruner is pulling off something similar to what Walter Becker and Donald Fagen accomplished with their band decades ago. “From the ’70s to the ’80s, those guys were Top 40 radio darlings,” McDonald said. “And I’m going, How did that happen? Their songs are so strange, and so sophisticated. It just goes to show you — there’s that audience out there, that’s waiting for something really good.”On record, Bruner’s songs split the difference between thumping pop-funk, emotive swells of melody and jazz fusion’s heady cosmic undertow. Live at the Fox that March night, he and his touring band — the keyboardist Dennis Hamm and the drummer Justin Brown — would surrender to that undertow, turning once-concise tunes into pretexts for extended, stormy jams. But they also played “A Fan’s Mail (Tron Song Suite II),” a song about Bruner’s cat, with most of the audience providing meow-along backup vocals on the hook. No matter how interstellar Bruner’s music gets, his goofy sense of humor always anchors it in the day-to-day.“He’s the coolest bass player that ever walked the Earth, period, point blank,” said the singer and guitarist Steve Lacy, who’s featured on one of the new album’s singles, “Black Qualls.”Lacy, 21, said that Bruner and Ellison “are the reason I’m doing this — they just opened my mind up to all the possibilities in music. Even though my music sounds nothing like theirs — they inspired me to try.”Bruner grew up in Compton and other regions of Los Angeles. His mother, Pam Bruner, plays flute and percussion. His father, Ronald Bruner Sr., is a drummer who’s played and recorded with Diana Ross, Gladys Knight and the Temptations. Bruner remembers accompanying him to performances as a child and dozing off during his father’s drum solos.At Locke High School in Watts, Bruner played in the Multi-School Jazz Band, run by a music teacher named Reggie Andrews. Andrews, who taught at Locke on and off for 40 years, is probably best known for co-writing the Dazz Band’s immortal “Let It Whip.” In the course of his tenure at Locke, he nurtured artists like Patrice Rushen, Tyrese Gibson, members of the Pharcyde, the jazz drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. — Bruner’s older brother — and Bruner himself, who refers to Andrews as his “second dad.”Through Andrews and the Jazz Band, Bruner reconnected with a tenor saxophonist named Kamasi Washington, who’d grown up in nearby Inglewood but attended Alexander Hamilton High School in West Los Angeles. Washington and Bruner had met as children, when their fathers played together in what Washington called a “gospel-fusion band.”“Stephen was always who he is, way before it was cool to be that way,” Washington said. “He’s always been a completely unique individual. I’ll never forget, we had a gig one time, and we were supposed to wear all black. I came to pick him up, and he was like, ‘Man, I don’t think I have any black pants.’ I was like, ‘You’ve got to have a pair of black pants.’ He went in his closet. Purple, green, orange, canary yellow, but no black.”Bruner’s parents were strict about curfews, but being musicians, they saw Washington as a positive influence, Bruner said. “They didn’t have to worry if we were out trolling and being idiots,” Bruner said. “They almost didn’t have to worry about chicks — because we were nerds.”Although they were underage — and Bruner is four years younger than Washington — they’d sneak into jazz clubs and other concert venues, first as spectators and then as performers. Eventually Washington acquired a 1982 Ford Mustang; the hatchback didn’t close, and parts of the interior were held together with duct tape. But it allowed Bruner, Washington and their compatriots to play anywhere in Los Angeles that would have them.“It was insanely horrible,” Bruner said. “Sardine can. It was hilarious — we’d try to fit all my brother’s drums and my bass amp in this two-seater.”Between gigs, Bruner, Washington and a small circle of like-minded young jazz musicians would jam in Washington’s father’s Leimert Park garage, which became known as “The Shack.” Bruner, Washington and the fellow Locke alum Terrace Martin — along with Flying Lotus — would one day contribute extensively to Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” on which Bruner’s bass is often as prominent a lead instrument as Lamar’s vocals.By the early 2000s Bruner was touring the world as a sideman, first as a member of what he called “a little German-signed multicultural pop group” called No Curfew, which released one album on Polydor in 2001; the following year, Bruner joined the L.A. thrash-punk stalwarts Suicidal Tendencies, where his breakneck-speed bass playing was put to better use.Not every employer whose road band Bruner passed through was interested in the full Thundercat experience. Snoop Dogg — whose nickname for the fresh-faced Bruner was “Baby Bass”— once cut short a Bruner bass solo during a show, grumbling, “Ain’t nobody tell you to play all that.”“Raphael Saadiq once told me, ‘Man, play the record,’” Bruner said, laughing. “Nobody wants to hear what you have to say. Play the record.”It was good advice to give a bass player; Bruner said he didn’t begin to think of himself as something more than that until the mid-2000s. He became close to the hip-hop production unit Sa-Ra Creative Partners; at their Silver Lake studio/clubhouse, he’d meet artists like Ty Dolla Sign and J Dilla, as well as Erykah Badu, who took him on tour.“Erykah was the one that genuinely cultivated me as an artist,” Bruner said, gathering his bleached dreads into a Gucci hair clip. “She taught me what it means to be Thundercat, and what that entailed for me as an artist. More than playing bass in her band — she would hold my hand through stuff. She would make me stand out in front and sing with her.”Badu may have given Bruner the courage to step forward as a frontman, but according to Ellison, he’d always been Thundercat, whether he knew it or not.“He was always the craziest-dressed person in the room,” Ellison said. “That ain’t nothing new. Somewhere in there was a latent superstar.”“All I ever wanted to be was funky and funny. That’s it,” Bruner said. He never imagined he’d be a lead vocalist, let alone the kind of artist who processes painful experiences in song. But like his 2013 album “Apocalypse” — informed by the drug-related death of a close friend, the jazz pianist Austin Peralta — “It Is What It Is” finds Bruner once again working through personal loss. It’s funky and funny, but its funk and fun feel more hard-won than ever — the title, Bruner said, refers less to resignation than to acceptance.In September 2018, the rapper Mac Miller died of an accidental drug overdose. “That was my ace, my best friend,” Bruner said. His voice became quiet; the bus’s air conditioning seemed suddenly loud.Miller’s death was the first of a string of difficult losses and transitions, Bruner said. He was in a serious relationship — “I was on the edge of getting married”— which went south not long after Miller died. There was also the death of the rapper Nipsey Hussle, who was shot and killed in South Los Angeles, not far from where Bruner’s family lives.But it’s Miller who haunts “It Is What It Is,” which begins with a song about being metaphorically lost in space and ends with Bruner calling out “Hey, Mac” into the void.“It’s like, he’s not really here anymore,” Bruner said. “He’s not going to pull up and park wrong in front of my spot, get a ticket and show up and knock at the door.” (That was Miller’s signature parking style, Bruner said: “He’d just park on the wrong side of the street, and get out of the car and some girl would faint.”)Miller, Bruner said, was the person in his life “who I would call when stuff got weird. Talk to Mac.” After he died, Bruner said, he found it difficult to write music, or even to pick up a video-game controller. He quit drinking for a while.“I had to sit with it,” he said. “I had to let the pain in. I had to cry, a lot.”Then he made “It Is What It Is,” an album that’s ultimately less about overcoming uncertainty, fear, decay and heartbreak as it is about learning to live with those things as constants — conditions of staying alive. It’s the kind of cultural product that will inevitably feel eerily right-on-time when it drops amid the chaos unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic. On March 12, almost a week after the Oakland show, Bruner tweeted the title phrase; the following day, he canceled the remaining dates of his North American tour.“I think the existential dread set in when Mac disappeared,” Bruner said. “Things became a bit realer to me. I was faced with a choice — to either follow suit or figure it out. And I guess this is me trying to figure it out.” More

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The ‘Built for This’ rapper isn’t necessarily taking a jab at Jeezy with his response but it’s no secret that they had friction when Gibbs left CTE World in 2012 after signing in the year before.
Mar 25, 2020
AceShowbiz – Freddie Gibbs won’t let anyone take credit for his accomplishment in his career. When someone alluded that his former colleague Young Jeezy was responsible for his career, the Gary rapper was quick to set the record straight.
“The greatest thing Jeezy ever did was thug motivation 101. The second greatest thing he ever did was give us @FreddieGibbs,” the fan wrote on his Twitter account on Tuesday, March 24. Gibbs caught wind of the tweet and simply responded, “I gave us @FreddieGibbs.”
He wasn’t necessarily taking a jab at Jeezy with his response but it was no secret that they had friction when Gibbs left CTE World in 2012 after signing in the year before. Gibbs, however, shut down beef rumors as he claimed that it was merely a business and branding decision.
While Jeezy might have introduced the “Bandana” MC to a wider audience, the latter was already getting his name out even before that. That was proven with him being featured on the same XXL Freshmen Cover with the likes of Wiz Khalifa, Big Sean, J. Cole and Jay Rock among other in 2010 following his critically-acclaimed mixtapes.
Jeezy, meanwhile, previously addressed his role in others’ journey in the rap game. During a conversation with Charlamagne tha God, Jeezy explained how he helped jump-start a lot of careers though he didn’t get much in return. “I’ve tried to put people on, but everybody that was a part of my first project, they on,” Jeezy said. “[DJ] Drama, he might beg to differ but that Gangsta Grillz wasn’t in the hood till Young [Jeezy] was on that thing. Trap or Die was monumental.”
He also shared that he helped build YG’s talent early in addition to assisting in putting together the Compton rapper’s debut album “My Krazy Life”.

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Though believing that art can provide joy and healing, the ‘Born This Way’ singer says that ‘it just doesn’t feel right to me to release this album with all that is going on’ during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mar 25, 2020
AceShowbiz – Lady GaGa is delaying the release of her new album after the coronavirus pandemic scuppered plans to promote “Chromatica” with a secret set at California’s Coachella festival.
The pop superstar had previously hoped to unleash her new material on 10 April and make a surprise return to the stage at Coachella to celebrate its launch, but now the festival has been postponed until October, GaGa has had to rethink her whole marketing plan.
In a lengthy note posted on social media on Tuesday, March 24, GaGa explains, “I wanted to tell you, that after a lot of deliberation, I’ve made the incredibly tough decision to postpone the release of Chromatica. I will announce a new 2020 release date soon.”
“This is such a hectic and scary time for all of us, and while I believe art is one of the strongest things we have to provide joy and healing to each other during times like this, it just doesn’t feel right to me to release this album with all that is going on during this global pandemic.”
“I had so many fun things planned for us to celebrate together…,” she continues. “I had a secret Coachella set lined up, and a lot of other fun surprises, some of which I’m still planning to share with all of you very soon!”
And while GaGa’s Las Vegas residency shows for 30 April to 11 May were recently put on hold, the singer hopes the current health crisis will have subsided by late May, allowing for her other gigs – as well as her Chromatica Ball summer tour – to go ahead as scheduled.
The “Born This Way” hitmaker concludes the message by insisting Chromatica is “still very much on the way,” adding, “To my fans, I love you. I know you are disappointed. Probably angry and sad… I hope you can see that when the album does come out, I want us to be able to dance together, sweat together, hug and kiss each other, and make it the most bombastic (sic) celebration of all time And until that time comes, LET’S ALL STAY HOME!”

GaGa is the latest artist to push back album release plans after Alicia Keys and HAIM also hit the pause button on the launch of their projects.

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Katy Perry Sends Supportive Words to ‘American Idol’ Hopeful Suffering Seizure

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Manu Dibango, a saxophonist from Cameroon whose 1972 single “Soul Makossa” made modern African music a clear presence on Western pop charts, died on Tuesday in a hospital in France. He was 86.His Facebook page said the cause was Covid-19 but did not say where in France he died. Mr. Dibango had lived in France for some time.Although “Soul Makossa” was named after makossa, a Cameroonian style of music, and its lyrics were in the Douala language of Cameroon, Mr. Dibango’s worldwide hit was an internationalist piece of funk.With his terse, dryly insistent saxophone lines answering his own chanted vocals, a tricky stop-start beat and a scrubbing rhythm guitar, “Soul Makossa” arrived at the dawn of the disco era and made its way to dance floors and R&B radio stations across the United States, Europe and Africa.Michael Jackson would later quote its refrain in “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” a track on his 1983 album, “Thriller,” one of the best-selling records of all time; that song was in turn sampled by Rihanna for her 2007 “Don’t Stop the Music.” Mr. Dibango sued them both in 2009; Mr. Jackson’s estate settled out of court. The song has also been widely sampled in hip-hop.Although Mr. Dibango was best known for “Soul Makossa” and a 1984 hit, “Abele Dance,” there was much more to his career. He recorded and toured prolifically, appearing worldwide and collaborating with musicians including Herbie Hancock, Fela Kuti, Peter Gabriel, Angélique Kidjo, Youssou N’Dour, the Fania All-Stars and Sinead O’Connor. In a 2017 interview with the BBC, Mr. Dibango took pride in the eclecticism of his music.“You’re not a musician because you’re African,” he said. “You’re a musician because you are musician. Coming from Africa, but first, musician.”Emmanuel N’Djoké Dibango was born on Feb. 10, 1934, in Douala, the largest city in Cameroon. His father was a civil servant; his mother was a dressmaker. He grew up listening to Protestant church music, local traditional music and Westernized pop.At 15 he was sent to Europe to study classical piano and music theory in Paris and Brussels. But he was drawn to jazz, and he began playing saxophone in the early l950s.When he started performing in cabarets and jazz clubs in 1956, his family cut off his allowance. In Belgium, he began working with musicians from the Belgian Congo (which would be renamed Zaire after gaining independence in 1960 and then the Democratic Republic of Congo). He worked with African Jazz, the group led by Le Grand Kalle (Joseph Kabasele), in Leopoldville (later renamed Kinshasa) in the early 1960s before returning to France. By the late 1960s he was leading his own band in Paris.“Soul Makossa” was originally the B-side of a single celebrating Cameroon’s national soccer team. According to “Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco” (2005), by Peter Shapiro, the New York City disc jockey David Mancuso found a copy in a West Indian record store and played it at the Loft, a pioneering disco space, and the influential radio host Frankie Crocker put the song in heavy rotation on WBLS. Soon there were more than a dozen cover versions, as the imported original disc sold out. Atlantic Records licensed Mr. Dibango’s original, which reached the American pop Top 40 in 1973.The song opened a worldwide touring and recording circuit for Mr. Dibango. He collaborated widely: with the reggae producers Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare in Jamaica, with Serge Gainsbourg in Paris, with the bassist and producer Bill Laswell in the group Deadline in the United States. In 1992 he recorded “Wakafrica,” an album of African hits with guest appearances by King Sunny Ade, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Salif Keita, Papa Wemba, N’dour, Ms. Kidjo and others.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Dibango’s extensive catalog includes film scores, jazz standards, reggae, pop and hip-hop. In 2017 he released “M & M,” a collaboration with a jazz saxophonist from Mozambique, Moreira Chonquiça, and in 2018 he released “Cubafrica,” a collaboration with the Cuban group Cuarteto Patria. Many of his other albums fused jazz, funk, African instruments, and dance beats — electronic or hand-played — behind his terse melodic lines.“Sound is a magma. You have to give it a form. It’s never the same,” Mr. Dibango said in a 1991 interview with UNESCO Courier magazine. “In music there is neither past nor future, only the present. I must compose the music of my time, not yesterday’s music.” More

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The ‘In da Club’ spitter reminds fellow rap stars that prosecutors can use rap lyrics as evidence in court against artists as he shines light on Drakeo the Ruler’s legal battle.
Mar 24, 2020
AceShowbiz – 50 Cent wants other rappers to learn from Drakeo the Ruler’s criminal case. Using his 2003 song “Heat” from debut album “Get Rich or Die Tryin’ “, the “In da Club” hitmaker warned fellow rap stars through an Instagram post that their gang-related lyrics could be used as evidence in court against them.
On Monday, March 23, the 44-year-old MC shared a screenshot of The Conversation’s article that shines light on the usage of rap lyrics to incriminate Drakeo. In the caption, he quoted his song lyrics, “i told you in 03/ i do what i gotta do/ i don’t care if i get caught/ the DA can play this mother f*****g tape in court/ i’ll kill you HEAT.”
The Kanan Stark of “Power” went on to share with his followers, “(This is not new) if you say crazy s**t on these records they are gonna use it. if you in a gang on the song then you in the gang when the indictment come fool. LOL.”

The article from The Conversation itself carried a headline that read, “Prosecutors are increasingly – and – misleadingly – using rap lyrics as evidence in court.” It discussed about Drakeo’s on-going case in which investigators used his “Flex Freestyle” lyrics from his 2017’s “So Cold I Do Em” album to prove his guilt in the allegation of him shooting from a motor vehicle.
In a recent interview, Drakeo expressed his frustration over his case that forced him to face a second life sentence. “This s**t has been going on forever, bro,” he confided with Genius. “It’s not the way that people think, where it’s like, ‘Oh! If he said this in the rap, he’s gonna do it.’ The rap game is not as gangster as people think it is. This shit is for entertainment.”
“When I said, ‘RJ was tied up in the back of a car,’ was RJ actually tied up in the back of the car? They take this s**t too literally. It’s not that serious,” the rapper, whose real name is Darrell Caldwell, went on. “When these n****s are shooting up schools and smashing cars, I bet you they’re not listening to rap music when they’re doing that shit.”

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Having raised $63 million for famine relief with the USA for Africa song, the ‘American Idol’ judge believes that the message in its lyrics is still relevant to what is going on in the world today.
Mar 24, 2020
AceShowbiz – Lionel Richie is planning to revive the star-studded aid anthem, “We Are the World”, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The USA For Africa hit, which Richie co-wrote with Michael Jackson, raised $63 million for famine relief, and now the “American Idol” judge thinks it’s time to revamp the tune after celebrating the song’s 35th anniversary earlier this month.
“Two weeks ago, we said we didn’t want to do too much (for the anniversary) because this is not the time to sell an anniversary,” Richie told People. “But the message is so clear.”
And he admits that as he attempts to pen an updated version of the song, he realises the lyrics still hold up today.
“Every time I try and write another message, I write those same words,” he says. “What happened in China, in Europe, it came here. So if we don’t save our brothers there, it’s going to come home. It’s all of us. All of us are in this together.”
An updated version of the tune was released in 2010 to help raise funds for earthquake relief in Haiti.

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