Catalan pop star uses Spanish words in Milionària, her first single in the local language
The Catalan pop star Rosalía has upset language purists with her first single recorded in Catalan, by using “Spanishisms” that critics say dilute the language.
In Milionària, which received 2m views on YouTube in its first 24 hours, the 25-year-old singer uses the word cumpleanys – a corruption of the Spanish cumpleaños – to mean birthday, instead of the Catalan aniversari.
Continue reading...R&B singer expected to be taken from Chicago to New York to face charges relating to child pornography and obstruction of justice
R&B singer R Kelly has been arrested on sex trafficking charges, according to American law officials.
The 52-year old was arrested in Chicago on Thursday night on 13 federal sex crime charges, and was expected to be taken to New York, according to officials.
Continue reading...Nike’s famous ‘Moon Shoe’ and limited-edition trainers produced by Kanye West, Air Jordan and Adidas will be sold
Sotheby’s in New York has announced its first-ever auction dedicated to sneakers.
The auction house will sell 100 pairs of the rarest sneakers ever produced, including a sample of one of the first Nike running shoes with a pre-sale high estimate of $160,000.
Continue reading...The singer has reportedly earned $185m in the last year in Forbes’ annual list of highest-paid stars, followed closely by Kylie Jenner and Kanye West
Singer Taylor Swift was named the world’s highest-paid entertainer on Wednesday but was closely followed by two members of the wider Kardashian clan – reality star turned cosmetics queen Kylie Jenner and rapper Kanye West.
The annual Forbes Celebrity 100 list also saw soccer stars Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar among the top 10, along with British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran and 1970s soft rock band the Eagles, who embarked on a new tour in 2018.
Continue reading...Star of a string of 60s classics fell foul of Hollywood because of his temper but found a fresh lease of life in comedy, from TV’s Larry Sanders Show to the Men in Black films
Rip Torn, America’s celebrated wildman actor, has died aged 88. Torn, who had been a constant presence on stage and screen since the mid-1950s, was arguably better known for his eccentric, and occasionally violent, antics when the cameras weren’t rolling – and on one notorious occasion, when they were.
His publicist Rick Miramontez confirmed Torn died Tuesday afternoon at his home with his wife, actor Amy Wright, and daughters Katie Torn and Angelica Page by his side. No cause of death was given.
Continue reading...Bossa nova legend, 88, earns warm tributes – but not from president Jair Bolsonaro
Brazil is mourning the death of João Gilberto, one of the country’s greatest musicians and composers, a reclusive genius in a nation of extroverts whose work recalled happier, more optimistic times for a deeply divided nation.
Related: João Gilberto obituary
Continue reading...A rare concert in 1998 was a chance to see the great musical pioneer emerge from hiding – and why his glorious talent lifted him beyond pop fads
In 1998, I had the rare experience of seeing bossa nova pioneer João Gilberto live in concert in San Francisco. Gilberto, who died on Saturday at age 88, was a famous recluse known both for his magical music-making as well as his stage fright. If you had the chance to watch him perform live, you seized the opportunity because it might never happen again. This is my account of that memorable evening.
Related: Brazilian musician João Gilberto dies aged 88
Continue reading...She had been a top model, then sang with the Velvet Underground, and in 1981 Nico moved to Manchester. Her friends there share their touching, alarming memories of ‘a true bohemian’
An imperious blond German ex-model with a voice once described as like “a body falling through a window”, Nico was already extraordinary by the time she leant her vocals to songs including Femme Fatale and All Tomorrow’s Parties on the Velvet Underground’s classic first album, produced by Andy Warhol.
Soon after that, she embarked on a solo career, and made records, such as The Marble Index, that were even darker, with despairing lyrics and a wheezing harmonium accompanying Nico’s Teutonic tones. By this time, she was no longer blond – she disdained her traffic-stopping looks – and was addicted to heroin.
Continue reading...Singer says authorities did not believe she would not be playing a public show
The British singer Joss Stone says she has been deported from Iran, claiming the authorities believed she would play an unsanctioned concert in the country, where there are strict restrictions on female musicians performing in public.
In a video posted on Instagram, the 32-year-old said: “We got detained and then we got deported,” while dressed in a white headscarf, adding that she was on a “blacklist” and that the authorities “don’t believe we wouldn’t be playing a public show” on what would have been the final leg of her world tour.
Continue reading...Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is a powerful symbol of love, humanitarianism and European unity. The Brexit party’s rejection of the EU anthem shuns our shared history
Yesterday, Brexit party MEPs led by Nigel Farage turned their backs while the anthem of the European Union played at a ceremony to mark the opening of the European Parliament. Their behaviour has been met with disdain by many, with #notinmyname trending on Twitter. This was an emotionally provocative act at a time of political sensitivity, and there is something about the shunning of the anthem itself, an instrumental arrangement of the Ode to Joy from the final movement of Beethoven’s iconic Ninth Symphony, that makes the demonstration particularly inflammatory.
The symphony has a long and chequered history: it has been a symbol of both dark and light. A favourite work of Hitler’s (he liked to hear it on birthdays), the Ninth was also used in Nazi propaganda films, and the closing choral section was performed at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was also chosen as the national anthem of the Republic of Rhodesia under the racist administration of Ian Smith. This darkness has been appropriated in film soundtracks: the symphony is associated with extreme violence in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and is a recurring motif representing Alan Rickman’s cultured villain Hans Gruber in Die Hard.
Continue reading...Taylor Swift on Sunday lamented the sale of her catalogue to the manager and mogul Scooter Braun, writing in a scathing Tumblr post that she was sad and grossed out that her music now belongs to a man she accuses of subjecting her to years of incessant and manipulative bullying.
Related: Pop super-manager Scooter Braun: 'I was not going to let Justin Bieber die'
Continue reading...David Attenborough and the climate crisis take centre stage, while single-use plastic is banned for the first time. But have the festival’s environmental efforts gone far enough?
Twelve years ago, Sheryl Crow was laughed at for suggesting that green-minded people should use only a single square of toilet paper every time they go to the loo (or two to three sheets for “pesky situations”). Well, we’re not laughing now, are we?
On the day before the hottest day of the year so far (temperatures at Glastonbury hit 30C, elsewhere in the UK 35C), Crow knocks out hit after hit on the Pyramid stage under a giant globe, Glastonbury’s reminder that we’ve only got one planet, and dedicates Soak Up the Sun to Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist and school striker. Thunberg’s spirit is embedded in Worthy Farm this year. There are murals of her face with the slogan: “What would Greta do?”
Continue reading...Festival shuts down showers and offers extra shady areas, while sales of ice-cream soar
Long queues at taps and shower closures were seen across the Glastonbury site as the festival dealt with its hottest day as temperatures rose to 30C on Saturday.
Showers were closed across the site as a precautionary measure to preserve water as temperatures soared and the festival’s management coped with the demands of 200,000 people requiring drinking water in challenging conditions.
Continue reading...Club complains of ‘social cleansing’ after being given three months to wind up
One of London’s biggest gay nightclubs is facing closure to make way for a £1.3bn apartment, hotel and office development, in a move that the club’s founder say amounts to “social cleansing”.
XXL is believed to be the last “bear” club in London, and DJ Fat Tony, a close friend of Elton John, regularly performs to 2,000 people a night. This week, developers backed by investors from Malaysia and Singapore gave the club three months to wind up after its owners lost a court appeal. The club has been operating for 19 years and 40 jobs will go.
Continue reading...As his band gear up for Glastonbury, the singer talks about his Jewish politics and how there are musicians far more privileged than him
If you have never been to Glastonbury, you will always get people telling you that “it’s just got a different vibe to other festivals, man”. Even platinum-selling musicians. “It’s like being in some weird medieval village,” says Ezra Koenig, frontman of Vampire Weekend, who had played Glastonbury three times with the band before going as a punter in 2014, when it finally clicked. “I stayed up all night and understood: this is very special. I can’t think of many festivals where there are old hippies who do their thing and keep to themselves, and keep that spirit of the 60s alive with arts and crafts. And there’s all the secret stuff you find in the woods, the various raves, little mini pubs everywhere ... Everybody’s walking through the mud and there’s a real communal energy to it. Probably a lot of them are on drugs, too.”
His band are playing their biggest-ever slot at this year’s festival, Sunday night on the Pyramid stage just before the Cure’s headline performance. They released their fourth – and best – album Father of the Bride in May, and like the previous two, it went to No 1 in the US and Top 3 in the UK. It came six years after the last one, Modern Vampires of the City, with Koenig having taken creative control after fellow songwriter Rostam Batmanglij left the band.
Continue reading...Emily Eavis says there are male execs in music industry who insist on speaking to her father
The Glastonbury festival organiser, Emily Eavis, has said some men in the music industry still refuse to deal with her despite her taking over responsibility from her father for overseeing the lineup.
Speaking days before the start of this year’s event, Eavis, 40, who has been booking acts at Glastonbury for half her life, said she was often the only woman in meetings with music moguls.
Continue reading...The musician’s latest show, in which he sings, takes questions and talks about losing his son, left our writer astonished
‘Freewheeling adventures in intimacy where anything can happen.” So say the words on the seat as we wait for Nick Cave to come on stage and sit in it. Who could resist? The man is here to play songs but also to answer questions. “You can ask me anything,” he promises on his Red Hand Files website, which offers one-to-one correspondence with fans. “There will be no moderator. This will be between you and me. Let’s see what happens.”
The resulting tour is “a work in progress” that has grown from the blog, which had become a series of love letters, meditations on loss, and poetry. Cave is “acting on the intuition that something of value” can come from doing it live. He was worried about something he wrote: that social media undermines “both nuance and connectivity”. Here he is trying to deepen the connection, a word he returns to again and again. He comes on suited and booted, immaculate, the knowing elder statesman, the ex-junkie, the writer of murder ballads and the tenderest love songs, the storm-bringer who will somehow shelter us and reassure us that there can be, in that quaint old-fashioned way, “a dialogue”.
Continue reading...She is the go-to soprano for world leaders, royals and Broadway directors – and she even sang in elf language for Lord of the Rings. The great barrier-buster relives her biggest breaks
She sang at the inauguration of Barack Obama and at the diamond jubilee concert thrown for the Queen. She also performed at senator John McCain’s funeral and at Prince Charles’s 70th-birthday bash. Yet here’s Renée Fleming today, sitting in a dowdy London studio, eating salad from a cardboard box and feeling somewhat daunted.
“It is terrifying,” she says, of her part in the Tony-winning musical The Light in the Piazza. “There’s so much dialogue, which is not a skill I’ve practised much. But I’ve always had a voracious love of musical adventure.” Fortunately, her friend John Malkovich has given her some advice. “He told me, ‘You just have to put in the hours.’ That made me feel better.”
Continue reading...The designer’s SS20 collection once again proved her talent for making a splash; elsewhere, Dolce & Gabbana put the leopard into leopard print
From one 90s superstar to another … Donatella Versace dedicated her spring/summer 2020 menswear show to the Progidy’s Keith Flint in Milan at the weekend. The designer described the musician, who died in March this year, as “my friend, and a disruptor of this world”.
Homage was paid through the pounding soundtrack of the band’s monster hit, Firestarter, and models bearing his distinctive double mohawk and tinted bug-eye sunglasses. Although the revelation that Flint and Versace were friends may have come as a surprise, it’s not an incongruous pairing; Versace has been something of a disruptor herself. Picking up the mantle of the family business her brother, Gianni, established in 1978, she embraced full-blown sex appeal in her collections from day one, and has admitted in the past to not knowing how to do things quietly. Last year, she surprised the world when she announced that she sold her family company to Capri Holdings – formerly known as Michael Kors Holdings.
Continue reading...Prior to the victory over the Golden State Warriors, many had fallen victim to the music star’s reputation for bringing bad luck
His repeated interactions with athletes before critical games – and their subsequent losses – have earned Drake the unfortunate reputation of bringing bad fortune to teams. But one historic basketball game may have broken the curse.
High-profile victims of the so-called “Drake curse” include Arsenal forward Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, whose team lost to Everton three days after meeting the Canadian rapper in London, and Paris Saint-Germain, who had their biggest loss in almost two decades after defender Layvin Kurzawa posed for a picture with him.
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