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HITS Daily Double
BAD BUNNY PRESS PHOTO 2025
1/5/25
Rimas' Bad Bunny surprised fans on Sunday morning with an early release of his sixth LP, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. The 17-track set is an ode to Puerto Rico, infusing música jíbara (Puerto Rican folk music) across the entire production. The album is produced by longtime collaborators, reggaeton maestros La Paciencia, MAG and Tainy. Featured artists on the project include Puerto Rico's Chuwi, Dei V, Omar Courtz, Pleneros de la Cresta and RaiNao. “I’ve been dreaming about this album for years, and seeing it come to life has brought me immense happiness,” Bad Bunny said in a press release. “I’ve always been honest with my followers, and through this new production, they’ll continue to learn more about me as I, too, discover more about myself. I am Puerto Rican, I am Caribbean, and my music, my culture, my country's history run through my veins, from plena to reggaeton.” Managed by Noah Assad and repped by UTA, Bad Bunny's 2024 included the highest-grossing Latin tour of the year. DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS follows Bunny's 2023's #1 rap set Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana. 2020's El Último Tour del Mundo and 2022's Un Verano Sin Ti also posted #1 debuts. The latter is the most streamed album of all time on Spotify with 18b+ streams. Watch the video for "PIToRRO DE COCO" below and listen to the album here.
Kevin Shivers James Rubin
1/3/25
WME hip-hop division co-heads Kevin Shivers and James Rubin (pictured), along with partner Christina Baxter, are exiting the agency and are in talks to join Wasserman, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Per the report, the trio of agents were unable to come to terms on a new deal with WME when their contracts were up, and staffers were told of their exit yesterday (1/2) in a note signed by contemporary music co-heads Lucy Dickins and Kirk Sommer. Wasserman declined to comment on the developments. Shivers joined WME in 2008 and works with such artists as Tyler, the Creator, Kali Uchis, Snoop Dogg, Lil Baby, Kid Cudi, Summer Walker and Kevin Abstract. Rubin came to the agency in 2015 from the U.K.'s Agency Group and books acts such as Ice Spice, Travis Scott, Don Toliver, Yeat and Solange. A 13-year veteran of WME, Baxter became a partner in 2022 and has been involved with artists including Miley Cyrus and Carly Rae Jepsen. HITS will update this story as soon as we can afford to buy a new calendar and figure out what year this is.
CHART GIF 2025
1/3/25
The first #1 chart showing of the new year belongs to TDE/RCA’s SZA, whose deluxe edition of SOS, aka LANA (released on 12/20), notches a tidy 128k+ to land in the top spot on the HITS Top 50. Another late-year drop, Kendrick Lamar’s GNX (pgLang/Interscope) takes the #2 spot with nearly 70k. Island’s Sabrina Carpenter, the Wicked ST (Verve/Republic) and Taylor Swift’s THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT (Republic) round out the Top 5. Wham, by Quality Control/Motown rapper Lil Baby, is the key new release in the marketplace as of this writing, but RimasBad Bunny is due to arrive on Sunday (1/5), of all things. You may peruse the remainder of the chart here. Well, that’s one chart story down. Is 2025 over yet?
Antone
1/3/25
Antone's, on Sixth Street in Austin, Texas, has long been a sanctuary for the blues. Its 50-year mission to further the genre will be celebrated with a host of anniversary releases and events in 2025. They will include a boxed set, issued with New West Records, of live recordings spanning Antone's half-century in operation, out-of-print music from the Antone's Records imprint and new tracks by acts associated with the club, plus extended and updated editions of the 2005 documentary Antone's: Home of the Blues and the 1985 photo book Picture the Blues. Antone's will also be the subject of a panel during South by Southwest (3/7-15), followed by a party and 50th anniversary showcase at the club, and the annual Austin Blues Festival (4/26-27) will likewise toast the venue via all-star jams. Travelers traversing Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, meanwhile, will be able to enjoy live music at a satellite Antone's stocked with club artifacts, while a permanent blues museum will open on the upstairs level of the primary location with memorabilia donated by ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, Willie Dixon and Clifton Chenier. Antone's 50th birthday will be feted officially on 7/15. Other special events will transpire throughout the month. The club will even make its presence felt in New York, participating in Lincoln Center's Summer for the City series in June. In the meantime, HITS will be happy to perform a middling rendition of the Stevie Ray Vaughan song of your choice (by request only).
1/3/25
OK, procrastinators, this is your last warning: Final-round Grammy voting ends today, so get those ballots in! Ballots, by the way, can be found on the Recording Academy member dashboard. No one’s sure who’ll be taking home the hardware on 2/2, but it’s a safe bet that HITS won’t be getting a seat at any of the most coveted tables. Viewers can look for us in the cheap seats by tuning into CBS and Paramount+ at 8pm.
Lauren Davis 2-min
1/2/25
Lauren Davis has been promoted to associate chair at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, where she’s taught since 2006. In addition to serving as arts professor at NYU, Lauren is the director of professional development at CDI. In this capacity, she oversees Senior Year Professional Development courses and planning for CDI’s graduating students. She will collaborate with Chair Nick Sansano. Davis has 33 years of experience as an entertainment attorney. She focuses her classes on the legal and business aspects of the music business, including intellectual-property law. She has also lectured extensively on the topics of social entrepreneurship and advancing equity and inclusion in music. Davis said, "It’s been a privilege to teach and prepare the next generation of music-industry leaders for the past 18 years. I’m excited to roll up my sleeves, work with Nick and help steer the Clive Davis Institute’s growth and expansion in the years ahead." Lauren is, of course, the daughter of music-industry legend Mo Ostin.
Billie Eilish
1/2/25
Darkroom/Interscope's Billie Eilish soared into 2025 with Spotify’s most-streamed song of 2024—“BIRDS OF A FEATHER,” which racked up 1.77b globally. "BIRDS" got a boost from fan efforts, among them listening parties and viral hashtags like #StreamBirdsOfAFeather. It overtook Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” (Island) near the end of the year, opening a lead of 650k streams. “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” looks like it will maintain its hot streak going into next month’s Grammy Awards, for which it’s nominated for four trophies, including Song of the Year, Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance.
Jackie Hyde  copy
12/31/24
Sony U.K.’s Jackie Hyde has been awarded an MBE for her services to music and charity in the King’s New Year Honors List. The recognition comes as Hyde marks an incredible 46 years at Sony Music. “Receiving this recognition feels overwhelming and I never thought an honor such as this would be given to me,” Hyde said of her new title. “When I joined CBS Records/Sony Music back in 1979 I couldn’t have imagined that I would be in the industry 45 years later or that I would receive an MBE. It’s been an incredible and very happy career in the business, which I am very proud to be a part of, and a privilege to have worked with such brilliant artists, whom I so very much admire.” Hyde, VP of Artist Relations, has worked with such artists as George Michael, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Celine Dion, Sade, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Barbara Streisand, Bob Dylan and The Clash. In other U.K. news, we have been strongly cautioned to stay on our side of the pond.
ab67616d00001e02af26ecdf6459b3b3a45b5693
12/31/24
On the final day of the year, Morgan Wallen surprised fans with “Smile” (Big Loud/Mercury/ Republic). Co-written with Rocky Block, John Byron, ERNEST, Ryan Vojtesak and Luis Witkiewitz, the heartbreak track continues in the vein of such recent Wallen smashes as “Lies Lies Lies” and “Love Somebody” (the former, we hasten to note, hit #1 at Country). The video, meanwhile, finds a melancholy Wallen struggling to balance stardom and a relationship and confusing a New Year's Eve crowd with “Smile” instead of “Love Somebody” before his girlfriend leaves and he rings in 2025 alone. We can totally identify with these themes, except for the parts about having a career and a relationship. Meanwhile, Wallen has teased more new music on socials and will have his first chance at a Grammy thanks to his collab with Post Malone, “I Had Some Help” (Mercury/Republic). In a possibly related story, a "Smile" is the least likely response to news that we will continue publishing in 2025.
200w
12/30/24
With 2024 drawing to a close, we offer this retrospective gallery of our "Pic of the Week" feature, the original captions for which, though charmingly out of date, will help you relive the excitement of stuff that happened a few months ago.
Beyonce Bowl 2024
12/30/24
Beyoncé’s halftime performance during the Baltimore Ravens-Houston Texans Christmas Day game on Netflix drew an audience of 27m, surpassing the number of viewers for either game streamed by the platform on 12/25. A double-header, Netflix’s NFL debut opened with the Kansas City Chiefs’ stomping of the Pittsburgh Steelers. The gridiron clashes averaged an audience of 24m+, which made them the most-streamed NFL games ever, according to Nielsen data provided by Netflix. There’s big, and then there’s gargantuan: 123.7m viewers watched Super Bowl LVIII between the Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers on CBS in February. By comparison, the network’s Grammys telecast a week earlier drew 16.9m. The games kicked off Netflix’s three-season deal with the league. It will stream at least one game on Christmas 2025 and 2026. In related news, HITS editors are approaching new personal bests in streaming shows from their moth-eaten couches and are legendary for their consumption of holiday carbs.
Ole Obermann headshot 2024 [small]
12/30/24
There aren’t many things that the incoming Trump administration and the left-leaning music community agree on, but saving TikTok is probably near the top of that very short list. Back in April, Congress passed a law requiring TikTok’s Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance, to shut down the platform or sell it to a non-Chinese owner. For a music industry that has become reliant on, if not addicted to, TikTok and its 1 billion monthly active users to break new artists, lift back catalog and generate hit song after hit song, shuttering the app would wreak havoc on its bottom line. (TikTok’s global reach has grown to over 170 billion daily video views of licensed music.) Lawyers for TikTok challenged the government ruling in a legal filing, and the case could still end up in front of the Supreme Court, but the (shudders) results of Nov. 5 may have averted all that, as the president-elect has signaled a willingness, for reasons best left unparsed, to allow ByteDance to maintain its control of TikTok. Ole (pronounced OO-lah) Obermann, global head of Music Business Development for TikTok, tells HITS that he’s been way too busy over the past six months to let the company’s existential uncertainty weigh on him. Which is exactly what a polished C-suite executive is supposed to say, but Obermann has had his own fires to put out. In May, TikTok and Universal Music Group struck a deal to return UMG’s music to the platform after UMG had very publicly pulled its catalog in February. Then, in October, TikTok was accused of acting in bad faith when it chose not to renew its licensing deal with indie-label collective Merlin, opting instead to make deals directly with individual Merlin members. In a Zoom conversation, Obermann, who came to TikTok in 2019 after successful stints atop the digital departments of Warner Music Group and Sony Music, doesn’t shy away from discussing the tsuris wrought by such intense, high-profile negotiations, but he brightens perceptibly when signal-boosting his favorite creators (e.g., Trackstar), left-field success stories (Blood Orange’s “Champagne Coast”) and next-big-thing triumphs (Benson Boone, Gigi Perez). Give me your year in review. What's 2024 been like for TikTok? Oh, wow. I think a year in TikTok is like a dog year. It’s been pretty chaotic? Yeah. I'll talk about music specifically, because otherwise there's just too many things to talk about. As you know, we had a couple of big licensing challenges. Universal Music Group was a really big topic for us, for them, for the industry. I spent several months incredibly deep in that situation, but I'm really happy where it all landed. In the five-plus years I've been at TikTok, the relationship with Universal has never been better. We recently did massive campaigns for Billie Eilish, Post Malone and Sabrina Carpenter, among others. We've got some emerging artists that we're working on with them. There's just so much dialogue now, and I think we understand one another a little better than we did. And then obviously there’s the Merlin thing. It is a shame that it became us-against-Merlin in the press, because as I said a few times publicly, it really wasn't about us versus Merlin. We have the utmost respect for Merlin. It was just about us wanting to do direct deals with members of Merlin, because we think we can do a better job operationally working with those labels if we're in direct deals with them. We didn't renew some of the deals for the labels that we have identified as being consistently infringing or delivering fraudulent content, and we wanted the control to not be in business with those labels. You can imagine that TikTok—which is very user-generated, and there's lots of sped-up, slowed-down, mashed-up content, and all these kinds of super-interesting creative things happening—is also like a welcome sign for some bad actors who are, like, “Let me see if I can get away with delivering a catalog that doesn't belong to me, but it's sped up, and maybe I'll collect a bunch of money, and then they'll catch me in month two or three and shut me down.” We were battling that, and we decided the way to get around it was to just do the direct deals. With artists and songwriters JADE and Kamille at the inaugural TikTok for Songwriters event How many deals is that? Several hundred, and then obviously some of those are big aggregators where you have hundreds or even thousands of labels coming through them. Let's go back to the UMG negotiations. Was there a single issue that needed to be resolved for the deal to be reached, or was it more a multitude of issues? There was obviously a value conversation: What are the payments that are happening, and also how much marketing and promotion can we provide to help with the discovery of new music or new artists that are priorities for them? So that was one thing that we were wrestling over, and we ultimately got there. AI was a big one, too. At the beginning of the year, the conversation around it was so loud, it was all anybody was talking about, and there was this doomsday outlook: "AI is going to put the music industry out of business, and artistry and creativity are never going to be the same," and thank God, here we are almost a year later, and really, none of that has happened. During the time that we were working on the deal, I think both sides just didn't understand one another's positions well enough, and it was also such early days that both sides were very hesitant to commit to things around AI. Even just the handful of months that went by allowed both sides to cool off a little, and then come back to the table and say, "OK, we can be partners in making sure that AI evolves in a healthy way,” and so we got there on that. With regard to the UMG artist campaigns you spoke of earlier, can you drill down a little bit on one of them and describe what made it stand out? Let's take Sabrina Carpenter. For her, we created a dedicated Sabrina Carpenter #shortandsweet in-app experience that had all sorts of entry points to her music. We featured our “Add to music app” button, which is a really big focus for us, and we got 15 million people adding her songs to Spotify, Apple or Amazon from that landing page. We can't do a Sabrina Carpenter-type built-out bespoke product campaign for every artist, but on a few big ones we can do it, and everyone loves it: fans, the label, the artist, the manager. With TikTok Global Head of Music Publishing Licensing and Partnerships Jordan Lowy and erstwhile Global Head of Music OperationsPaul Hourican at the TikTok Pre-Grammy Event in 2023 (Photo: Joe Scarnic, Getty Images for TikTok) When was the "Add to music app" feature added to TikTok? It’s been around for about a half a year. We were testing it in very small numbers for months prior to that, and it’s now widely available almost everywhere. Is there any relationship between the “add to” feature and the shuttering of the TikTok Music streaming service? We launched “Add to” prior to TikTok Music being shut down. And since we publicly disclosed that we are not going to be in the premium music-streaming business ourselves, our label partners have opened their arms even more to us. Sabrina is a top Grammy nominee. Who are some of the other nominees for whom TikTok has played a key role in their ascent? Benson Boone is definitely a great TikTok story. Back in February, March, I started seeing it all over TikTok. Then, a week or two later, it was just everywhere. It’s an amazing song but also an artist who visually just worked so incredibly well on the platform. A friend of mine who produced a song of his and who's really into TikTok told me, "I think Benson Boone maybe understands TikTok better than any other artist I've worked with." What do you think that means? What does Benson Boone get about TikTok? I think he knows how to make an engaging video on TikTok that is still music-first. It's about his music, but it's also about him as an artist and a person, someone you're going to want to watch, to listen to, to follow, to see more content from. He really gets it. Look, that song was a hit no matter how you slice it, right? That's still what it's all about. But the speed with which he was able to get that song in front of people, I think TikTok played a huge role in that. Obermann and Nielsen Executive Chair David Kenny at the DLD24 conference in Munich There's a perception, fair or not, that TikTok can help generate hits but not long-term artist success. And perhaps being known as a “Tik Tok artist” can even be detrimental to creating a sustainable career. What's your response to that criticism? First, it's not our responsibility or our expertise to do long-term artist development. We would love to be a part of the journey, and we love to be there for album two, three, four, five and hit single 10, 20, 30. The deeper the relationship with that artist, the better. But one of the artists I definitely want to talk about is Charli xcx, because TikTok was a huge part of the whole “Brat” movement and all the different dimensions of Charli xcx that we saw. When I worked at Warner, Charli was already a priority, and this was eight, nine years ago. There were some hit songs, there were some hit singles, but she just hadn't become the global superstar she is now. TikTok wasn't the whole story, but it was a massive part of what drove her from 10 to 100 this year. While I wouldn't call that artist development per se, I would call it taking an artist from having a hit single to being a household name around the world. Is there an artist-development story newer than Benson Boone that you take particular pride in? Do you know “Sailor Song” by Gigi Perez? I'm still getting my head around that one. It kind of came out of nowhere, and it's beautiful, just her with her guitar, just playing it. That's the video that I keep seeing—there's not anything gimmicky. It's just an amazing, pure singer-songwriter song that's having its moment. What's the most common misconception artists and their teams have when approaching how best to use TikTok? Even though it's been a bunch of years since we morphed from Musical.ly to TikTok, there is still, in some communities, this misconception that the artist needs to get out there and do a dance to their song, and then it's going to go viral. There are times when that works, right? Because there's a fun, new dance, and the song's right for it, and the artist has some really engaging way that they perform the dance. But you can do so many different things with the music besides that. Do you know the artist Blood Orange and his song “Champagne Coast?” I know Blood Orange, not the song. It's an amazing song. It was released in 2011, and it's blowing up right now. People are posting that song along with beautiful landscapes on TikTok, and now it’s huge on Spotify and Apple Music. That has nothing to do with some novelty dance. It's a song with an amazing vibe that people are pairing with the right visual or video, and it’s gone massive on the back of that. Speaking of older songs AND dances, suddenly the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” is a hit again. In Southeast Asia, and Indonesia in particular, there were tons of creations of a dance that people were doing to “Maps,” or there was actually a dance to a sped-up version. When Karen O sings, "Wait," all these users were doing this movement where they put their hand out, and now the song has just exploded all over TikTok. With artist Sam Ryder Setting aside music for a moment: Given the uncertainty over the company’s future in the U.S., what’s the mood been like in the office? Are people pensive? Anxious? Is it sometimes hard to concentrate on the work at hand? You don't get a lot of that. For one thing, this has been going on for a little while, and so if you don't have some ability to tune it out, you're going to have a hard time working here. Shou Chew, who's our CEO based in Singapore, is very consistent with this message, which is, "Just keep executing better than anybody else. Just stay focused on doing the thing that you're in the company to do, whether that's running music, writing code, building out e-commerce or LIVE, or all the different things we have going on." I don't spend time thinking about it. For real? Yeah, I really don't. Today I'm thinking about it a little bit, because there’s an election happening [the interview took place on the morning of 11/5], but it's not like I wake up in the morning and think, "Oh my God. Are we going to get banned?" I just don't. I have to imagine you get calls from fearful label execs, no? Nah. Honestly, never. They call me, and they're, like, "Have you heard this new song?" When the legislation was signed in March, I got a couple of calls and texts where people were, like, "Is this a joke? Is this misinformation? Is this real?" Almost, like, "Come on. This can't really be happening.” I think everybody has a pretty healthy mindset on it. Is there a feeling from people you speak with that TikTok has become, in essence, too big to fail? That it's just too important to the American consumer for it to not exist? I want to be a little careful what I say here, but I definitely don't disagree with that. There are so many livelihoods, so many cultural moments, so much, frankly, education. So many things are happening across a really big user base that it is hard to imagine that you could just pull the plug on that.
ezgif.com-optimize
12/30/24
Remembering the people we lost in 2024. Steve Albini, born 1962Dave Allison (Anvil), 1956Ian “Tich” Amey (Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich), 1944Alfa Anderson, 1946Dick Asher, 1932Aston “Family Man” Barrett, 1946Jim Beard, 1960Dickey Betts, 1943Frankie Beverly, 1946BO$$ (Lichelle Laws), 1969Mike Brewer, 1944Bob Bryar (My Chemical Romance), 1979Marc Campbell, 1951Eric Carmen, 1947Jimmy Carter, 1924Tommy Cash, 1940Joe Chambers (The Chambers Brothers), 1943James Chance, 1953Kevin Chisholm, 1953W.C. Clark, 1939Chris Cross (Ultravox), 1952Sandra Crouch, 1942Sugar Pie DeSanto, 1935Dick Diamonde (The Easybeats), 1947Paul DiAnno, 1958Lou Donaldson, 1926Slim Dunlap, 1951Duane Eddy, 1938Joe Egan, 1946Frank Farian, 1941Vic Flick (James Bond), 1937Julio Foolio, 1998Jerry Fuller, 1938Lee Gabler, 1940Bennie Golson, 1929Julie Gordon, 1959Nick Gravenites, 1938Francoise Hardy, 1944Steve Harley, 1951Will Cullen Hart, 1971Roy Haynes, 1925Clarence “Frogman” Henry, 1937Cissy Houston, 1933Zakir Hussain, 1951Tito Jackson, 1953Ella Jenkins, 1924Jack Jones, 1938Quincy Jones, 1933Ka (Kaseem Ryan), 1972Randy Kabrich, 1956Toby Keith, 1961DJ Clark Kent, 1966Greg Kihn, 1949Martin Kirkup, 1948“Spider” John Koerner, 1938James Kottak, 1962Wayne Kramer (The MC5), 1948Kris Kristofferson, 1936Linda LaFlamme, 1939Steve Lawrence, 1935Keith LeBlanc, 1954Phil Lesh, 1940Dave Loggins, 1947John Lowe (The Quarrymen), 1942OG Maco (Benedict Chiajulam Ihesiba Jr.), 1992Russell Malone, 1963John Mayall, 1933Willie Mays, 1931Melanie, 1947Les McCann, 1935Angela McCluskey (The Wild Colonials), 1960Sérgio Mendes, 1941Jerry Miller, 1943Mister Cee, 1966Zoot Money, 1942Martin Mull, 1943Tyka Nelson, 1960Mojo Nixon, 1957Ken Page, 1954Andy Paley, 1952Richard Parsons, 1946Liam Payne, 1993Richard Perry, 1942Martin Phillipps, 1963Mike Pinera, 1948Jack Ponti, 1958Rich Homie Quan, 1990Paul Roper, 1979Eddie Rosenblatt, 1934Jack Russell, 1960Freddie Salem, 1954David Sanborn, 1945Marvin Schlachter, 1934Carl Scott, 1938Shifty Shellshock, 1974Pete Sinfield, 1943Nell Smith, 2007Maxie Solters, 1987Jo-El Sonnier, 1947JD Souther, 1945Gale Sparrow, 1950Rob Stone, 1968Ralan Styles, 2002Damo Suzuki (can), 1950Shel Talmy, 1927Dennis Thompson (The MC5), 1948Libby Titus, 1947Brit Turner (Blackberry Smoke), 1966Larry Vallon, 1947Rico Wade, 1972Karl Wallinger, 1957Dick Waterman, 1935Mary Weiss, 1948Billy Edd Wheeler, 1932Maurice Williams, 1938Erv Woolsey, 1944
sheeranMug1
12/30/24
Ed Sheeran’s +–=÷× (Tour Collection) (Asylum) looks like it’ll reach #1 on the Official Albums chart for the first time this week, despite the fact that the compilation has been out since September. It would be the pop star’s eighth chart-topper. Sheeran’s most potent competitor is the ever-present Sabrina Carpenter, with Short n’ Sweet (Island). Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (Island) could return to the Top 3, while SZA’s SOS (RCA) and Charli xcx’s BRAT (Atlantic) will likely hold serve in the Top 5. On the singles side, Gracie Abrams’ “That’s So True” (Interscope) is trending toward a return to #1, having spent five weeks on top before being dethroned by WHAM!’s “Last Christmas.” She faces challenges from ROSÉ & Bruno Mars’ “APT.” (Atlantic) and Lola Young’s “Messy” (Island).
1413-GGG-Steely-Dan-Cover-IMage-WEB
1/2/25
When Steely Dan was nominated for Album of the Year in 2000 for its LP Two Against Nature, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker weren’t strangers to the Grammys, but they weren’t exactly Recording Academy darlings, either. They’d received just one AOTY nom from their string of near-perfect 1970s LPs. Aja lost out to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours in 1977 and the duo lost in that category again in 1981, when Gaucho was topped by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy. Two Against Nature, their first album in 20 years, did respectably well on the charts and with critics as the band’s cynical-yet-smooth approach still resonated with baby boomers. Steely Dan may now be seen as timeless, but at the 2001 Grammys, it was clearly not of the time; its competition for AOTY included three era-defining albums—Beck’s Midnite Vultures, Radiohead’s Kid A and Eminem’s transgressive juggernaut, The Marshall Mathers LP—plus Paul Simon’s You’re the One. Earlier that evening, Em had been joined by Elton John for an indelible Grammy performance of “Stan” and had won three trophies in rap categories. It felt like AOTY was his to lose. So at the end of the night, when Bette Midler and Stevie Wonder announced that Two Against Nature had in fact earned Album of the Year, it wasn’t that Steely Dan wasn’t worthy of such an honor, but rather that, in typical Grammy fashion, the award came some two decades too late. “They gave us plenty of time to work on our speeches,” Fagen cracked backstage. For hip-hop artists and fans, getting snubbed for AOTY would be something they’d need to get used to.
Wicked-1-crp pc Sophy-Holland-for-Universal-Pictures
12/29/24
Universal’s Wicked has become the biggest stage-musical adaptation of all time, besting the company's own Mamma Mia! The film, which stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, has pulled in an estimated $634.4m globally as of Sunday (12/29), with $424.4m amassed by U.S. viewers. The Jon M. Chu-directed movie is also the top stage musical adaptation to date in 46 of 81 markets. It had already become the biggest Broadway adaptation domestically. The top five overseas markets are the U.K. ($67m), Australia ($24.8m), South Korea ($14.2m), Germany ($11.8m) and Mexico ($9.9m). The film will hit Japan on 3/7. A sequel, Wicked: For Good, will premiere on 11/21/25. Now, if you'll excuse us, we have to put our fat pants back on after polishing off the mashed potatoes.
carter
12/29/24
Jimmy Carter, who served as our 39th president and went on to spend decades as an activist for social justice, died Sunday (12/29) at the age of 100. According to a statement issued by the Carter Center, he was “surrounded by family” in his final moments. Carter rose from modest means as a farmer in Plains, Georgia, to become governor of that state, a prelude to his taking the White House in 1976. As president, he was hailed for brokering a peace deal between Egypt and Israel, spending two weeks at the bargaining table with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. The end of his term was marred by Iran's taking 52 Americans hostage and holding them for over a year, which ultimately led to Carter's losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan. The former nuclear engineer stepped away from electoral politics thereafter but remained committed to public service, founding the housing-relief organization Habitat for Humanity in 1976. Since its establishment, the nonprofit has helped 29 million people put a roof over their heads, building scores of new homes and offering funds to refurbish existing ones. President Joe Biden said, “Over six decades, we had the honor of calling Jimmy Carter a dear friend. What’s extraordinary about him, though, is that millions of people throughout America and the world who never met him thought of him as a dear friend as well.” Vice President Kamala Harris also issued a statement, remarking, “President Jimmy Carter was guided by a deep and abiding faith—in God, in America and in humanity. He reminded our nation and the world that there is strength in decency and compassion. Our world is a better place because of President Carter.” Carter was also known as a friend to the music industry through his well-publicized relationships with Bob Dylan, The Allman Brothers, who performed at his fundraisers and regularly visited him at the White House, and Aretha Franklin, who made her first appearance at a presidential inaugural when she sang “God Bless America” for him in 1977. The erstwhile commander in chief was also a media fixture, writing 32 books and recording multiple albums. He earned 10 Grammy nominations and three wins in the Best Spoken Word album category, for Faith: A Journey for All (2018), A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (2015) and Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005). Carter is nominated for a 2025 Grammy for Best Audio Book, Narration & Storytelling Recording, for Last Sundays in Plains: A Centennial Celebration (Virgin Music), which blends the final Sunday school lessons Carter gave at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains with recordings by Jon Batiste, LeAnn Rimes and Darius Rucker, among others.