Month: November 2022

Nick Cannon is getting ready to add baby No. 11 to his brood. On Thursday (Nov. 4), model Alyssa Scott announced she and the television host are expecting their second child together.

“This is a MIRACLE & a BLESSING,” she wrote on Instagram alongside a sultry photo baring her growing baby bump. In the snap, Scott stands fully nude in the bathtub with her body in profile as Cannon gazes up at her from below.

As it turns out, Scott loved the photo so much, she even had it turned into a painting, writing, “Thank you to my beautiful & talented friend @glorydayyys for recreating and recapturing this very special moment. This will forever be my favorite piece of artwork” on a separate post showing off the art. In a third post, Cannon is pictured sweetly kissing Scott’s bump while she has her hair wrapped in a fluffy white towel.

Neither Scott nor Cannon have yet to share an official due date for their coming bundle of joy, but the baby will be the couple’s first child since the tragic death of their firstborn Zen, who died last December at just 5 months old due to an aggressive form of brain cancer.

Since Zen’s death, his famous dad — who practices “consensual non-monogamy” — has also welcomed son Legendary Love with Bre Tiesi, daughter Onyx Ice with Lanisha Cole, and 10th child Rise Messiah with Brittany Bell, all in the span of a few months.

Check out Cannon and Scott’s pregnancy announcement here, here and here.

Selena Gomez has been very open about her mental health struggles and feelings of despair as a child, and then young woman, growing up in front of the cameras. But in a new Rolling Stone cover story the Only Murders in the Building star opens up about the depths of her battle against depression and bipolar disorder, subjects she takes on with her signature no-BS style in the new Apple TV+ documentary, Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me (Nov. 4).

According to the piece, just minutes into the series, we see Gomez cancelling her 2016 Revival tour early in order to tearfully check-in to a treatment facility, as well scenes in which she is, “unable to get out of bed, scenes of her lashing out at friends, scenes of her roaming her house aimlessly [and] scenes of her coming apart in the middle of a press tour.” In fact, it was so real that up until a few weeks ago Gomez said she considered pulling the plug on the doc.

“Because I have the platform I have, it’s kind of like I’m sacrificing myself a little bit for a greater purpose,” she told the magazine. “I don’t want that to sound dramatic, but I almost wasn’t going to put this out. God’s honest truth, a few weeks ago, I wasn’t sure I could do it.”

But, she tells RS, sharing the story was important, which might explain why she also revealed some of the most difficult struggles she’s faced in her life off-camera. “I’m going to be very open with everybody about this: I’ve been to four treatment centers,” Gomez said. “I think when I started hitting my early twenties is when it started to get really dark, when I started to feel like I was not in control of what I was feeling, whether that was really great or really bad.”

Those high and low periods sometimes found her not sleeping for days, or convinced that she should buy everyone she knows a car and that she had a gift she wanted to share with the world. That mania, however, would then give way to the lowest lows, which she said would begin with depression and then tip into scary isolation. “Then it just was me not being able to move from my bed. I didn’t want anyone to talk to me,” she said. “My friends would bring me food because they love me, but none of us knew what it was. Sometimes it was weeks I’d be in bed, to where even walking downstairs would get me out of breath.”

And though she said she never attempted suicide, Gomez told RS she spent several years contemplating it. “I thought the world would be better if I wasn’t there,” she said. Between her mental health struggles and a diagnosis of the autoimmune disease lupus that required a 2017 kidney transplant which triggered a potentially fatal complication, Gomez said she worried that the life she’d once dreamt of was not in the cards.

“I grew up thinking I would be married at 25,” she said. “It wrecked me that I was nowhere near that — couldn’t be farther from it. It was so stupid, but I really thought my world was over.” A year after the surgery, Gomez said she began hearing voices, which eventually triggered an episode of psychosis. Though her memories of the period are hazy now, the RS piece describes her ending up in a treatment center and spending “several months in paranoia, unable to trust anyone, thinking they were all out to get her.”

That led to her bipolar diagnosis, which helped her make sense of what had just happened, but also meant she was so heavily medicated that she began to lose her essential self. “It was just that I was gone,” she said of the drugs’ effect on her. “There was no part of me that was there anymore.” A psychiatrist scaled back all but two of the meds and as Gomez began to detox she said she had to “learn how to remember certain words. I would forget where I was when we were talking. It took a lot of hard work for me to (a) accept that I was bipolar, but (b) learn how to deal with it because it wasn’t going to go away.”

Aware that the psychosis could return and that her bipolar diagnosis will have to be managed for the rest of her life, Gomez said after her initial concerns she felt the AppleTV+ doc was a part of her story she wanted to share. “I know it has a big message, but am I the right person to bring it to light? I don’t know,” she recalled wondering. “I wanted someone to say, ‘Selena, this is too intense.’ But everyone was like, ‘I’m really moved, but are you ready to do this? And are you comfortable?’”

She couldn’t bring herself to watch the doc at an Apple+ screening, but she did keep an eye on the audience and immediately sensed the right answer. “I was like, ‘OK, if I can just do that for one person, imagine what it could do,’” she recalled thinking. “Eventually I just kind of went for it. I just said, ‘Yes.’”

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.

It’s only rock n’ roll, but the Grammy Museum likes it.

The Rolling Stones’ 1972 tour of the U.S. and Canada, which coincided with the band’s classic album Exile on Main St., is legendary. The Grammy Museum at L.A. Live in Los Angeles is paying tribute to that tour with “The Rolling Stones 1972: Photographs by Jim Marshall,” which opens on Saturday, Nov. 5, and is scheduled to run through June 2023.

The exhibit showcases backstage scenes and performance stills from the California leg of the tour as well as the band’s visits to Sunset Sound recording studios in Los Angeles.

“Once Jim was in, he was another Stone,” Keith Richards said in the foreword of 50th anniversary edition of The Rolling Stones 1972. “He caught us with our trousers down and got the ups and downs. I love his work, which must have been frustrating to do at times, but that is what happens on gigs like this. Wonderful work, and a great guy. He had a way with the shutter and an amazing way with the eye!”

“Jim’s masterful eye and unlimited access captured the Stones in the iconic rockstar way we now visualize the band,” said Kelsey Goelz, associate curator at the Grammy Museum. “This exhibit will transport you to an era of wild rock n’ roll energy at its best.”

There is an irony here: Grammy voters were resistant to The Stones — and to rock in general — in the 1960s and well into the ’70s. Incredibly, the Stones didn’t receive a single Grammy nomination until 1978, when Some Girls received an album of the year nod.

But the Academy has long sought to make amends. The Stones received a lifetime achievement award from the Academy in 1986. Eight years later, they won their first competitive Grammys – best rock album for Voodoo Lounge and best music video, short form for “Love Is Strong.” Five years ago, they won their third Grammy in competition, best traditional blues album for Blue & Lonesome.

The band’s albums Beggars Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971), and Exile on Main St., along with the classic singles “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (1965), “Paint It Black” (1966) and “Honky Tonk Women” (1969) have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. The Hall is meant “to honor musical recordings of lasting qualitative or historical significance,” but it sometimes functions as a second chance for the Grammys to do right by recordings they might have undervalued when they were current.

Marshall, too, has been honored by the Academy. In 2014, he became the first (and remains the only) photographer to be presented with the Trustees Award, an honorary award presented to individuals for nonperformance contributions to the music industry. He was saluted that year alongside film composer Ennio Morricone, and producer Rick Hall.

In 2013 the Grammy Museum hosted a screening of the then-new documentary, Charlie Is My Darling, which was filmed during the band’s 1965 tour of Ireland.

RIP, good boy. Travis Barker mourned the death of his family’s dog Blue on social media Wednesday (Nov. 3).

“I’ll miss you Blue,” the Blink-182 rocker wrote in a heartbreaking Instagram Story of the French bulldog. “You were the best dog. I was always waiting for you to say something. Love you 4ever boy.”

He also tagged daughter Alabama Barker in the video, who posted her own heartfelt tribute to the pup on her Instagram account, even changing her bio to read “Forever blue.” “I love you blue,” she wrote, “you will never understand how much you helped me on my darkest days, you slept next to me, the way I would throw your ball and you would run with excitement, or the eyes you had that just touched everybody, I’ll never forget you my baby, I know you’ll have the most amazing time up in doggy heaven, until we meet again my love.”

Prior to Blue’s passing, the elder Barker’s social media as of late had consisted mainly of posts with wife Kourtney Kardashian, including a trio of snaps of the reality star posing in the bathtub while her hubby fawned over her “angel feet.”

In October, the drummer and Mark Hoppus reunited with their Blink-182 bandmate Tom DeLonge to drop “Edging,” their first new single together since 2014. The rock band will also embark on an international tour starting in March with stops headlining Lollapalooza Chile, Brazil and Argentina, as well as When We Were Young 2023.

Watch Barker and his daughter’s tributes to Blue here and here before they expire.

The ASCAP Foundation recognized playwright, composer and lyricist Michael R. Jackson, creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop, with The ASCAP Foundation Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award.

The award was presented to Jackson by ASCAP Foundation president Paul Williams, composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, The Prince of Egypt) and composer/lyricist Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza) at a private luncheon in New York City. Also on hand to honor Jackson were Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen, La La Land) and ASCAP chief executive officer Elizabeth Matthews.

The annual award is given to encourage promising young ASCAP composers of musical theater and is funded by Mary Rodgers and the Rodgers Family Foundation. Previous recipients include Lin-Manuel Miranda; Pasek & Paul; and David Hein & Irene Sankoff (Come From Away).

“Michael R. Jackson is a fearless storyteller whose stellar work is a gift to audiences and the creative community,” Williams said in a statement. “We love having him as part of our ASCAP family and are excited for him to receive this well-deserved award.”

“In a cultural climate when so many have confused activism and/or being a savvy businessperson with artistry, it has been a brutal, lonely time to believe in making art for art’s sake,” Jackson said in a statement. “And yet, making art for art’s sake is the one life raft I’ve had since 23-year-old me first put pen to paper to begin writing A Strange Loop. Receiving the Richard Rodgers Award from ASCAP is deeply meaningful to me and gives me a much needed second wind to keep paddling the stormy high seas,” said Jackson.

A Strange Loop, which was billed as “the big, Black, and queer Great American Musical for all,” received 11 Tony nominations and won two – best musical and best book of a musical for Jackson.

In 2020, Jackson joined The ASCAP Experience for “The Making of a Groundbreaking Black Queer Musical.” The discussion about the creation of A Strange Loop with Kobalt Music’s Sue Drew is available on demand on @ASCAP YouTube.

Founded in 1975, The ASCAP Foundation is a charitable organization dedicated to supporting American music creators and encouraging their development through music education, talent development and humanitarian programs.