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Starring Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson in the lead role By Jazz Monroe A new trailer for the beleaguered Michael Jackson  biopic Michael is here. Watch it below. Directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jaafar Jackson as his own uncle, the movie is set for release on April 24 after being beset by delays and reshoots— reportedly due to legal issues around the question of how to deal with the pedophilia allegations that first came to light in the 1990s. Reports that this installment will cut off in the 1980s—with a possible sequel to follow—are unconfirmed, but the synopsis, trailer and studio messaging  suggest the film will not look beyond Jackson’s early solo career. Michael  is approved by the late singer’s estate, which has been handling—or, by some accounts, mishandling —the legal rights of Jackson’s accusers in relation to the story. In 2023, Leaving Neverland  director Dan Reed wrote in an op-ed for The Observer that the biopic will “glorify a man who raped children,” noting that it is “completely uncontested” that “Jackson spent innumerable nights alone in bed with young boys.” In 2024, Reed told Variety  that he had read a “startlingly disingenuous” draft of the screenplay that tried to discredit the allegations of Leaving Neverland contributors Wade Robson and James Safechuck. “Jackson is only ever seen caring for children with childhood cancer, or dancing with a little girl in a wheelchair, or tucking up multiple little boys, mostly his nephews, at sleepovers,” Reed said. The film also stars Miles Teller as Jackson’s attorney and adviser John Branca, Colman Domingo and Nia Long as his parents, Larenz Tate as Berry Gordy and Kat Graham as Diana Ross. The first trailer  arrived late last year.

The Romantic  is the singer's first solo effort since 24K Magic By Alex Suskind Bruno Mars ’ music is so ubiquitous it’s easy to forget he hasn’t released a new solo effort in 10 years. That changes next month when The Romantic , the singer’s fourth studio album, drops February 27. The currently untitled lead single premieres Friday, January 9. Mars has kept busy since his 2016 Album of the Year-winning project 24K Magic . In addition to a rolling Las Vegas residency, he spent 2024 dominating radio play with his Lady Gaga collab “Die With a Smile,” which topped the charts in more than 30 countries. Not to be outdone, he later debuted “APT,” his duet with Blackpink’s Rosé, which topped the charts in more than 50 countries. In 2021, he released his first and only collaborative album, An Evening With Silk Sonic , alongside Anderson .Paak.

Mariah Carey’s holiday classic achieved a record-breaking 20th week at the top By Walden Green Mariah Carey ’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is now the longest-running No. 1 song in U.S. chart history. The 1994 modern Christmas classic has spent a cumulative 20 weeks atop the Billboard  Hot 100, breaking the previous record of 19 weeks shared by Shaboozey ’s “ A Bar Song (Tipsy) ” and Lil Nas X  and Billy Ray Cyrus’ “ Old Town Road .” First appearing on Carey’s Merry Christmas album, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was originally ineligible for the Hot 100 because it was not released as a commercial single. Following a rule change, the song made its debut on the singles chart in 2000. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” first hit No. 1  for two weeks in 2019—the longest a song had ever taken to do so—and has consistently topped the chart every year since. For more than two decades, Carey’s Boyz II Men duet “One Sweet Day,” from her 1995 album Daydream , held the longest run atop the Billboard Hot 100. Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” remix, featuring Justin Bieber, tied the record in 2017 and “Old Town Road” finally surpassed it in 2019. Carey shared her latest album, Here for It All , earlier this year. She received the Video Vanguard Award at the 2025 MTV VMAs  and is set to be honored as MusiCares’ 2026 Person of the Year with a tribute concert at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Friday, January 30—two days before next year’s Grammy Awards . Carey will also perform  at the opening ceremony for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy.

“They were both so free in their discussions,” filmmaker Steven Soderbergh said. by Kory Grow The last interview John Lennon and Yoko Ono gave on the day of Lennon’s 1980 death will be the focus of filmmaker Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming, yet-untitled documentary. “I’m not looking to re-invent the form [of documentary],” Soderbergh said of his aim with the film, according to Variety . “I’m just hoping to create a film that gets as many people as possible to hear what John and Yoko had to say on that afternoon before he was killed.” At the time of his death, Lennon and Ono were promoting Double Fantasy , Lennon’s first recording in five years since he took a hiatus to raise his son Sean. It had come out in November, but Lennon was still doing press in December, including a nine-hour chat with Rolling Stone on Dec. 5, 1980. On the afternoon of his death, Dec. 8, RKO Radio’s Laurie Kaye and Dave Sholin spoke with the couple; Kaye recently wrote a book about the experience in her memoir, Confessions of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Name-Dropper . RKO aired the interview, which has circulated among fans  ever since. Speaking at the Doha Film Festival in Qatar where he’s promoting The Christophers , Soderbergh expressed his enthusiasm for the project. “They were both so free in their discussions,” he said, according to Variety . “As someone who has been interviewed many times, I was surprised at how open and excited they were to talk. You would think they had never been interviewed before.” He added that he felt the subjects they discussed in the interview, including his views on politics, feminism, and positive thinking, were relevant now, the same way they were 45 years ago. “It’s even more relevant in terms or relationships, politics, how we treat each other,” he said. “How systems work on the individual and above all on the importance of love in our daily life and our world.” The film will be Soderbergh’s first documentary since his Spalding Gray profile, And Everything Is Going Fine , in 2010.

Kendrick Lamar With the exit of Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “luther,” the top 40 of the Hot 100 breaks a decades-spanning streak. For the first time since 1990, there are no rap songs in the top 40 of Billboard 's Hot 100 chart. Kendrick Lamar  and SZA 's hit "luther," which spent 13 weeks at No. 1, left this week's most recent chart entirely after logging at No. 38 the previous week. In total, the song spent a whopping 46 weeks in total on the Hot 100. The departure of "luther" is the result of new rule changes in how songs are deemed eligible for the Hot 100. Songs that have been on the chart for extended periods of time and fall below a certain chart position are deemed "recurrent" and removed. One of the thresholds for removal is if a song has spent 26 weeks on the chart and falls below No. 25 — making "luther" a prime candidate to be taken down, despite its ongoing popularity. The last Hot 100 chart to be released without any rap in its Top 40 came out on February 2, 1990. Back then, Biz Markie's "Just A Friend"  bubbled under at No. 41. The following week, the track would rank No. 29 on the Hot 100. Billboard writes that the rap-less top 40 is an indication "of a recent dip in rap’s commercial dominance," from 30% of market share in 2020 to 24% in 2025 so far.

Swift’s new album surpasses Adele’s 25  with 3.5 million equivalent unit sales and breaks the record for actual copies sold. By Jazz Monroe Taylor Swift Taylor Swift  has broken the first-week, equivalent-unit sales record long held by Adele  for her 2015 album 25 , making The Life of a Showgirl  the fastest-selling-and-streaming album of the modern era, Billboard  reports . Since its release on Friday, October 3, Showgirl  has already hit 3.5 million equivalent unit sales—some 20,000 more than 25 amassed in its first week—according to initial reports from the data tracking firm Luminate. Swift also breaks the record for actual albums sold, a metric that includes physical and digital sales but not streams. The Life of a Showgirl ’s mammoth numbers include 1.2 million vinyl copies sold, a record of its own, surpassing the 859,000 tally achieved by The Tortured Poets Department . Billboard and Luminate calculate equivalent unit sales by adding streaming figures—in this case amounting to some 300,000 unit sales—to the traditional sales figures. As is customary for Taylor Swift albums, The Life of a Showgirl was available from her webstore in multiple limited-edition and limited-time variants, encouraging superfans to buy multiple copies.

R.E.M. never printed lyrics in their liner notes, which has led to plenty of misreadings of their 1987 classic. Michael Stipe At long last, Michael Stipe is offering answers to questions that have long plagued R.E.M. fans: What is he actually saying on “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” ? The single from R.E.M.’s 1987 album Document   is a masterpiece of rock & roll stream-of-consciousness with Stipe striking that perfect balance of cheery and apocalyptic as he unloads a torrent of pop culture references. Certain parts of the song were always easy to distinguish — “Leonard Bernstein!” — but the sheer volume of Stipe’s volubility has led to plenty of lyrical misreadings over the years, exacerbated by R.E.M.’s decision not to print song lyrics in their album liner notes. But last week, Stipe started to clear up some of the more mysterious lines from the song. (The exercise was inspired by, of all things, a Simpsons meme , and not even the actual scene with an R.E.M. guest appearance and Homer belting out obviously-wrong lines like, “Leonard, what’s-his-name, Herman Munster, motorcade, birthday party, Cheetos.”) The first two he clarified were, “ Left of west  and coming in a hurry with the Furies breathing down your neck”; and “ Team by team  reporters, baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped, look at that low playing, fine, then.” He also addressed the futility of trying to discern other R.E.M. lyrics, especially off their early albums Chronic Town, Murmur , and Reckoning . To those looking to sing along or cover those tunes, Stipe advised : “Just form vowels and syllables, and mean it.”

A New Chapter for DEVO The band is also releasing high-definition restorations of its numerous music videos. by Jaeden Pinder Devo Amid their long-running farewell tour, DEVO has exciting news. Their new documentary has been acquired by Netflix , with a release date set for August 19th. The film, simply titled DEVO , first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024. Directed by Chris Smith, the documentary explores the origins of DEVO. The band, consisting of Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh, Gerald and Bob Casale, and Alan Myers, crafted their ideology of “de-evolution” after witnessing the tragic 1970 Kent State shootings. This event, where four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard during a protest against the Vietnam War, deeply influenced their music and message. DEVO also chronicles the band's meteoric rise after the release of their hit song “Whip It.” The film features rare archival footage and interviews with the band’s members and other key figures. High-Definition Restorations In the lead-up to the documentary’s premiere, DEVO will roll out high-definition restorations of their classic music videos. This will occur on a bi-weekly basis as part of a series called Devolutionary Times . The series kicks off with the short film “The Truth About De-Evolution.” Following that, on July 18th, fans can look forward to the release of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” “The films and videos are newly restored to pristine quality, ready to jump off your laptops or mobile devices! Get ready for a Cornucopia of DEVO!!!!” said Gerald Casale. Devolutionary Times will be released twice a week on YouTube through November 10th. “The Truth About De-Evolution” is a 10-minute short film directed by Chuck Statler, written by Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh. It features surrealist visuals and the songs “Secret Agent Man” and “Jocko Homo.” The Farewell Tour Later this year, DEVO will embark on their farewell “Cosmic De-Evolution Tour” alongside the B-52s. This tour includes 11 dates, where the band will perform for fans in cities like Los Angeles, Toronto, and Austin. Additionally, DEVO will open for My Chemical Romance at their Chicago show this August. Get tickets here . The Legacy of DEVO DEVO formed in 1973 and released their debut album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! in 1978. Over the years, DEVO has been nominated for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction several times. However, they have yet to receive official recognition from the institution. As DEVO prepares for this new chapter, fans can expect a blend of nostalgia and innovation. The documentary and the restored videos promise to offer a fresh perspective on the band's influential legacy. A Cultural Impact DEVO's impact on music and culture cannot be overstated. Their unique sound and visual style have inspired countless artists across various genres. The concept of "de-evolution" resonates even today, making their work relevant in contemporary discussions about society and art. Looking Ahead As the farewell tour approaches, fans are encouraged to celebrate DEVO's contributions to music. The documentary and music video restorations provide an opportunity to reflect on the band's journey. With their innovative spirit, DEVO continues to challenge norms and inspire future generations. In conclusion, DEVO's upcoming documentary and high-definition music video restorations mark a significant moment in their storied career. Fans should prepare for an exciting experience as they celebrate the band's legacy and the ideology of "de-evolution."

A Glimpse into Taylor Swift's Latest Project Taylor Swift Taylor Swift has unveiled a new vinyl cover for her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl , which is set to be released on October 3. Fans were treated to a cryptic countdown on her website before the announcement of the limited edition vinyl pressing. The Life of a Showgirl: The Shiny Bug Vinyl Collection will be available for preorder on Swift's website. The Exciting Reveal Just days before the vinyl cover reveal, Swift shared the track list and original album artwork for her upcoming project. The album’s title hints at a burlesque theme, which Swift has embraced in her recent looks. Feathered boas, opulent headpieces, and scalloped diamonds evoke the glamour of a burlesque dancer. With the help of luxury fashion houses like Area , The Blonds , and Rene Caovilla , Swift’s Showgirl era emphasizes that more is more . A true Vegas showgirl always embraces excess. The Album Cover For the album cover of The Life of a Showgirl , Swift donned an intricate, crystal-embellished minidress featuring a balconette-style bra and scalloped cutouts designed by Area. This stunning garment is part of the brand’s spring 2022 collection and pays homage to what Vogue describes as “ the glitz of an off-duty Vegas dancer. ” Art Deco Glamour Art Deco-inspired glamour appears to be the central theme of Swift’s recently unveiled Showgirl era. Among her featured album artwork ensembles is a rhinestone-encrusted, deep red one-piece with a corseted bodice and pointed accents from The Blonds' fall-winter 2024 collection. Swift completed this striking look with matching opera gloves and knee-high boots, along with her signature fishnet tights. Extravagant Fashion Choices Swift’s voluminous ostrich feather Showgirl look is also from The Blonds' fall 2025 collection. Fashion critic Sarah Chappelle, who focuses on Swift's style, notes that the brand’s designers have described their muse for this specific collection as a “model, showgirl, it-girl, or an actress.” These descriptors perfectly align with Swift’s Deco-coded sartorial era. The False God hitmaker paired the extravagant, light pink ensemble with a crystal headpiece and chandelier wrap-around sandals by Rene Caovilla. The Inspiration Behind the Album While appearing on Travis and Jason Kelce’s podcast, New Heights , Swift revealed the inspiration behind The Life of a Showgirl era. She aimed to dramatize the realities of life on the road. Over 21 months, Swift visited 21 countries during the Eras Tour, which began in March 2023 and concluded in December 2024. With 149 shows across five continents, it became the highest-grossing tour of all time. “My day ends with me in a bathtub, not usually in a bedazzled dress. … I wanted to sort of, like, glamorize all the aspects of how the tour felt,” Swift shared on the podcast. “The reason I wanted to have an offstage moment as the main album cover is because this album isn’t really about what happened to me onstage. It’s about what I was going through offstage.” The Showgirl Era: A New Chapter The Showgirl era marks a significant evolution in Swift's artistic journey. It reflects her desire to explore the complexities of fame and the contrasting realities of her life. As she embraces this new aesthetic, fans can expect a blend of theatricality and authenticity. The Anticipation Builds As the release date approaches, excitement continues to build among fans. The combination of stunning visuals and compelling storytelling promises to make The Life of a Showgirl a memorable addition to Swift's discography. Conclusion Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl is not just an album; it's a celebration of the multifaceted nature of her life as an artist. With its glamorous visuals and heartfelt narratives, it invites listeners to experience the highs and lows of her journey. Be sure to mark your calendars for October 3 and prepare for a musical experience that promises to dazzle and inspire. For more updates, keep an eye on Swift's official website and social media channels.

By Andy Greene Kiss, Sylvester Stallone & George Strait President Donald J. Trump has announced  the first Kennedy Center Honors recipients since he took over earlier this year as the chair  of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. President Trump selected country musician George Strait , rock band Kiss , disco icon Gloria Gaynor , British actor Michael Crawford and American film star Sylvester Stallone. The president has said that he plans to host the annual Kennedy Center Honors ceremony in December. Gaynor is best known for “I Will Survive,” the 1978 single that is considered an anthem of the gay rights movement. Her selection comes as the Trump administration enacts policies  that have endangered transgender people and limited resources for LGBTQ people. When announcing Gaynor’s selection, Trump called  “I Will Survive” an “unbelievable song.” Kiss is fronted by a longtime  Trump supporter in Gene Simmons. The musician also appeared on Trump’s reality series, The Apprentice , in 2008. Sylvester Stallone has also shown his support  for Donald Trump.

The highly anticipated mockumentary sequel reunites Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer with director Rob Reiner… and some very special guests ! By Madison Bloom Michael McKean as David St. Hubbins, Harry Shearer as Derek Smalls, and Christopher Guest as Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues Three years ago, the world learned that a sequel to This Is Spinal Tap  was finally in the works . Now, Bleecker Street has unveiled the first trailer for the film which reunites Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer with director Rob Reiner… and some very special guests . The teaser for Spinal Tap II: The End Continues features appearances from Paul McCartney, Elton John, Questlove, and others, while Reiner reprises his role as director Martin “Marty” Di Bergi, and Guest, McKean, and Shearer slip into aging versions of their original characters Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls, respectively. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues  hits theaters on Friday, September 12—41 years after the original film was released. The sequel follows Spinal Tap members—all of whom are white-haired and languishing in small-time bands—as they attempt to join forces for one more gig. Di Bergi captures the rockers as they seek out a 12th drummer (their 11th drummer sneezed himself to death), reckon with their past, and prepare for the ultimate farewell concert. What could go wrong? The new film was written by Reiner, McKean, Guest, and Shearer. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues also marks the first narrative feature film that Reiner has directed since 2017. Reiner produced the movie alongside Michele Reiner and Matthew George.

The Disney+ film Beatles ’64  captures the Fab Four’s iconic first visit to the United States By Eric Torres The Beatles  are getting a new documentary. Beatles ’64 , produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by David Tedeschi, will premier November 29 on Disney+. The film features never-before-seen footage by documentarians Albert and David Maysles and will focus on the band’s first trip to the United States in February 1964 when they appeared on The   Ed Sullivan Show  and performed at the Washington Coliseum. Beatles ’64 , which is co-produced by Paul McCartney & Ringo Starr, is also being released alongside The Beatles: 1964 U.S. Albums in Mono , a box set of seven Beatles album reissues analog cut from their original mono master tapes, including Meet the Beatles! ;  The Beatles’ Second Album ;  A Hard Day’s Night (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) ;  Something New ;  The Beatles’ Story  (2xLP);  Beatles ’65 ; and  The Early Beatles . The new film follows The   Beatles: Get Back , Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series on the making of Let It Be .  Earlier this year, it was announced that each member of the Beatles will be the subject of his own biopic in a new tetralogy directed by Sam Mendes and set for release in 2027.