B.G., a founding member of the popular ’90s rap group Hot Boys, was released from prison Tuesday (Sept. 6) after serving 12 years for gun possession and witness tampering, a Cash Money rep confirmed to Billboard.
Cash Money founder Birdman was on Instagram Live when he greeted his New Orleans comrade with a big hug, welcoming him home. He also came bearing gifts, and B.G. was overwhelmed with emotions upon his release.
Related
Rapper B.G. Indicted on Gun, Conspiracy Charges
In 2009, B.G. was arrested during a traffic stop where cops discovered three guns inside his vehicle, with two of them stolen. Two years later, he entered a guilty plea deal for two counts of firearm possession and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. He received a 14-year federal prison sentence.
This past weekend, B.G. celebrated his 43rd birthday on Instagram, signaling his upcoming status as a free man. “After 12 winters and 13 summers, I see the end zone. It’s my last #Birthday being buried alive. This year I’m celebrating the whole Virgo cycle, matter of fact, from this year forward I’m living and celebrating like everyday is #MyBIRTHDAY,” he wrote.
“The main focus, is to stay focused,” the post continued. “I’m not letting nobody rob me of my productivity, prosperity, positivity and peace of mind. My dreams then got bigger and my vision is clearer. 13 years was more then enough time for me to change the reckless path I was on.”
B.G. helped construct The Hot Boys in the late ’90s, which featured Lil Wayne, Juvenile and Turk. The crew enjoyed success with their 1999 platinum album Guerrilla Warfare, which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and spawned the breakout hits “I Need a Hot Girl” and “We on Fire.” B.G.’s biggest win came from his fourth album, 1999’s Chopper City in the Ghetto, which birthed the phrase “Bling Bling” in the song of the same name, a No. 36 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.
There is a chance for the Ozarks to have some severe weather Tuesday night.
The National Weather Service in Springfield says there is a chance that we could have strong to severe thunderstorms late this afternoon into tonight as a cold front will pass through the Ozarks.
These storms could bring quarter sized hail and wind gusts of 60 miles per hour.
Heavy humidity will continue through the afternoon.
The Jonas Brothers singer filed a petition for dissolution of marriage on Tuesday (Sept. 5) that stated “the marriage between the parties is irretrievably broken.”
Related
Jonas Brothers Kick Off Tour With 67-Song Setlist & Surprise Jimmy Fallon Appearance
The news comes amid a firestorm of rumors alleging a breakup, but both Jonas’ and Turner’s social media activity seemed to indicate that there was no merit to the divorce reports. On Monday, Jonas posted a photo that not-so-subtly flaunted his wedding ring days after divorce rumors reached a fever pitch. As for Turner, her most recent Instagram post, dated Aug. 14, celebrated Jonas and his brothers’ latest world tour. On Aug. 12, the Grammy-nominated trio kicked off their massive “Five Albums. One Night. The World Tour” trek at Yankee Stadium in The Bronx, New York.
Nonetheless, the court documents, which were filed in Miami-Dade County, Florida, reveal a different story. Jonas’ petition states that the couple’s two children have been residing with him in Miami and other U.S. locations but that “it is in the best interests of the minor children that the parties have shared parental responsibility.” Moreover, his petition indicates some kind of prenuptial agreement between the couple.
Billboard has reached out to reps for both Jonas and Turner, as well as Jonas’ lawyer.
Jonas and Turner first met in 2016. They were engaged the following year and married in 2019. The couple legally married in Las Vegas in May 2019, a month before having a full ceremony with friends and family at Chateau de Tourreau in the south of France. Jonas and Turner share two children: daughter Willa and a second daughter who arrived in July and whose name is yet to be revealed.
The Jonas Brothers have amassed six top 10 albums on the Billboard 200, including three No. 1s. The sibling band has also scored three top 10 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, including the 2019 No. 1 hit “Sucker.”
Joe Jonas’ band DNCE has charted a pair of projects on the Billboard 200. Their self-titled debut studio album topped out at No. 17 and spawned the Hot 100 top 10 hit “Cake by the Ocean.” As a soloist, Jonas reached No. 15 on the Billboard 200 with his debut album and No. 9 on the Hot 100 with the Camp Rock soundtrack single “This Is Me” (with Demi Lovato).
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development is accusing a Springfield based development company and its property manager of discrimination on the basis of sex.
According to the report, the HOD says Second Bell Trust and the manager, Jimmie Bell, discriminated against a female tenant on the basis of her gender.
Officials say Bell requested sexual favors from the woman in exchange for her rent, made unwanted sexual advances on her and touched her inappropriately.
The HUD is accusing Second Bell Trust and Bell of violating the Fair Housing Act.
The case will be overseen by a United States Administrative Law Judge.
Olivia Rodrigo is taking the lessons she learned from Sour with her as she gears up to release Guts, her sophomore album arriving Friday (Sept. 8). And yes, that includes how she handles her past and present relationships in scenarios where her songs spark public intrigue in her personal life, i.e., the response that erupted over her rumored ex-boyfriend Joshua Bassett a couple years ago.
Related
Olivia Rodrigo Reacts to Theories That ‘Vampire’ Is About Taylor Swift
Speaking to Phoebe Bridgers in a candid piece with Interview magazine published Tuesday (Sept. 5), the 20-year-old star revealed she now feels a “responsibility” to send her songs to their subjects before releasing them to the world, touching on the “overwhelming” public response to “Drivers License” in 2021. In that case, fans were quick back then to pin Bassett — Rodrigo’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series costar — as the unfavorable ex-boyfriend she describes in her heartbroken lyrics.
“I feel like last time, there was so much weird media s–t and I had no idea how to deal with any of it,” she reflected. “Literally, it was the first song out of the gate and all of that s–t happened. I felt so ill-equipped.”
Bassett has since been open about feeling blindsided by the song as well as the hate he received from listeners, at one point revealing he was hospitalized due to a near-fatal case of septic shock caused by stress following the release of “Drivers License.” Sabrina Carpenter, whom fans also targeted after connecting her to the song, has also been vocal in her music about the backlash she received due to speculation that she “stole” Bassett from Rodrigo.
“That was an overwhelming experience, but now I definitely feel a responsibility [to give a heads up],” Rodrigo added to Bridgers. “I just try not to think about it during the writing process.”
The revelation follows the release of two singles from Guts — “Vampire” and “Bad Idea Right?” — both of which have already been examined by fans wondering which of Rodrigo’s rumored ex-boyfriends might’ve inspired the tracks. The trend is sure to follow come Friday, when the rest ofGuts‘ 12 tracks are unveiled.
The “Deja Vu” singer also congratulated Bridgers on finishing her run as an opener on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, calling Swift’s global trek “the tour of all tours.” The compliment comes amid fan speculation that Rodrigo has fallen out with Swift following some past crediting drama over the former’s single “Deja Vu,” something Rodrigo has seemed to avoid addressing in other recent interviews.
In this week’s batch of new country music, bluegrass luminaries Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle team up for a sterling collaboration, while Brian Kelley, Carter Faith, Larry Fleet, Jobi Riccio, and more also offer new tunes.
Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle, “Listen to the Radio”
Two of bluegrass music’s greatest forces team up on this tender cover of a Nanci Griffith classic. Tuttle takes the lead here, her sweet vocals capturing hints of Griffith’s vocal stylings, with Strings offering plaintive harmonies as they sing of a young girl who chases the strains of Loretta Lynn and Merle Haggard flowing from her radio. Shimmering, virtuosic mandolin and guitar wrap around this dreamy outing. Both Strings and Tuttle (the latter with her Golden Highway band) are nominated for International Bluegrass Music Association’s top honors this year.
Brian Kelley, “Dirt Cheap”
Written by Andy Sheridan, Seth Ennis and Wyatt McCubbin, with production by Dann Huff, Kelley’s latest solo effort finds him veering toward a vocal with heavier twang, backed by plenty of banjo and steel guitar.
On “Dirt Cheap,” he contemplates trading the hustle of city life for more time spent on a porch swing or by the pond, in a rural community and celebrating life with those he loves. Though lyrically, the song falls squarely in line with a plethora of other songs on country radio that celebrate rural living, this song marks a welcome change from his hip-hop-flecked FGL days, but Kelley’s vocal feels more relaxed and right at home on this radio-friendly track.
Tyler Braden, “Friends”
Braden follows his breakthrough songs — including “Try Losing One” and “Little Red Wine” — with “Friends,” written by Brent Anderson, Randy Montana and Lynn Hutton. The song finds Braden unfurling his true hurt and skepticism when an ex-lover wants to continue being friends, and act as though their deeper relationship never happened. Braden’s dusty, acid-fueled rendering conveys all the sarcasm, pain and bewilderment of the song’s essence, furthered heightened by rock-propelled production.
Carter Faith, “Carolina Burns”
“I still wear a grudge like a f–ked up crown,” Faith sings, offering a sharp-witted elegy for a past relationship — one still seared into her memory, even as her ex-lover has long since left the emotional ashes behind. Faith wrote this track with Lauren Hungate and Tofer Brown, with Brown also handling the song’s dreamy, soft-focus production. Faith’s lilting, summery vocals soothe her bone-deep observations, in a convergence of country, pop and Americana elements that’s uniquely her own.
Larry Fleet, Earned It EP
Fleet issues his third studio project, with 21 tracks of smooth, ’80s and ’90s country-influenced songs that touch on spirituality, loss, love, barrooms, youthful revelries and hard-earned wisdom and gratitude. He takes saw-dusted romantic chances in “There’s a Waylon,” laces a fiddle-and-piano jam-band vibe around late-night vibes in “Taking the Long Way,” and recalls midnights spent covertly soaking in soul-saving classic rock in “Devil Music.” Fleet is a writer on nearly every track on the project, further cementing his imposing talents as both songcrafter and vocalist, with a style that delves into blues, rock and retro-country with ease.
Jobi Riccio, “Sweet”
Riccio, the winner of the 2023 John Prine Songwriter Fellowship at Newport Folk, releases a new album, Whiplash, this month via Yep Roc Records. On “Sweet,” Riccio dabbles with a “Sweet Home Alabama” groove, but vocally inhabits an insouciance towards changing personality traits or personal preferences to please a lover — or anyone else, for that matter.
Bryan Martin, “We Ride”
Martin’s “We Ride,” which he wrote with Vernon Brown (with production from Nick Gibbens), currently resides just outside the top 40 on the Hot Country Songs chart, and is included on Martin’s 2023 album Poets and Old Souls. Here, his grizzly vocal soars over lyrics that pair perspective on everyday struggles on lines including “Hard to make a living while the gas is so high,” with a rock-seared, ramblin’-man sense of defiance and honesty — all elements that are finding popularity within the ever-expanding country music genre, in songs from artists including HARDY, Jelly Roll and Oliver Anthony.
Taylor Swift tends to have a deep impact on her fans. You could see if in the sea of Eras-inspired outfits during the singer’s epic Eras Tour this summer, not to mention the river of joyful tears that would often accompany each night’s secret song segment.
Related
Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ Is Headed to Theaters: How to Get Tickets
But in an essay for The New Yorker, writer Joe Garcia muses on the surprisingly deep connection he developed to Swift’s music while serving a life sentence for murder in some of California’s most unforgiving prisons.
Writing about anxiously awaiting the release of 2012’s Red album, Garcia said that he was immediately obsessed with “All Too Well” — dubbing her recent 10-minute Taylor’s Version “even better” — putting the song on repeat when he played his CD copy. “As Swift sang about love’s magical moments, how they are found and lost again, I thought about a time before my incarceration, when I briefly broke up with the woman I loved,” he recalled in a story straight out of a Swiftian saga. “She came to my house to return one of my T-shirts. When she hung it on the doorknob and walked away, I was on the other side. I sensed that someone was there, but, by the time I opened the door, she was gone.”
Garcia, an avowed Prince fan, wrote that the first time he became aware of Swift’s music was when he was in the Los Angeles County jail awaiting a transfer to prison on a murder charge. He recalled copies of the Los Angeles Times getting passed around from prisoner-to-prisoner in lock-up and gazing at the singer’s “wide-eyed face” in the Calendar section as he took in the gang fights and race riots around him, thinking her rocket ride to teenage stardom was an “injustice.”
Surrounded by young men of color who were writing and performing their own hip-hop songs about chasing paper and fame, Garcia focused in on Swift, “actually getting rich and famous. How fearless could any little blonde fluff like that really be?” he wondered. Once he was transferred to the unforgiving Calipatria State Prison in 2009 to serve a life sentence after six years in county jail, he was afforded the “small luxury” of a TV, where he would catch glimpses of Swift’s performances on The Tonight Show and Ellen. He said he was surprised by “how intently she discussed her songwriting,” never daring to tell any of his fellow inmates that he was impressed by Tay’s talent.
Garcia charts his fandom throughout his various transfers to other prisons, recalling how he got a security level bump-down for good behavior in 2013, which led to a move to Solano state prison, where he was forced to rely on a borrowed pocket radio to catch Taylor’s songs after his CD player and TV were lost in transit. “At night, we’d crank up the volume and lay the earbuds on the desk in our cell. Those tiny speakers radiated crickety renditions of Top Forty hits,” he wrote.
He would hear Swift songs almost every hour, at which point he realized he was kind of digging them, including “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” which reminded him of the woman he’d lived with for seven years before prison and how they never used the word “never” when they dreamed about getting back together.
“When I heard ‘Everything Has Changed,’ I had to fight back tears of exaltation and grief,” he wrote about thinking back on their first date while listening to the lyrics: “All I knew this morning when I woke/ Is I know something now/ Know something now I didn’t before.”
Alas, he had to leave his copy of Red behind after yet another transfer, which forced him to listen to a country radio station that played a wide variety of Swift’s music, from the twangy “Tim McGraw” to the full pop explosion of “I Knew You Were Trouble.”
“There was, in her voice, something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good, something that implies happiness or at least the possibility of happiness,” he wrote of Swift. “When I listened to her music, I felt that I was still part of the world I had left behind.”
The essay takes Garcia through several other transfers, chronicling the ups-and-downs of coming out as a Swiftie in the prison yard and learning that he wasn’t the only one bumping her tunes behind bars. By the time he was sent to San Quentin prison — around when Swift dropped Lover in 2019 — Garcia says he had accumulated nearly every Taylor song there was.
Whether on radios, boomboxes, TVs, MP3s or CDs, Garcia’s time in prison has been marked by the quest to acquire the latest Swift album. That includes during a harrowing COVID-19 lockdown in June 2020 when he was sent to an isolation cell where, between shivering and sweating through a brain fog for two weeks, he passed the time by making a playlist of the singer’s most uplifting songs. “Listening for the happiness in her voice,” he wrote.
In 2020, the then-53-year-old Garcia learned that he would be eligible for parole in 2024 due to a new California law, an unimaginable ray of light that once again made him think of the lyrics to “Daylight” from Lover: “I’ve been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night,” Swift sings. “And now I see daylight.”
He was, of course, psyched to hear about the Midnights album in Oct. 2022, and overjoyed when a volunteer slipped him a copy of it for his birthday a short time later, a kind gesture that nearly brought him to tears. Swift is now 33, the same age Garcia was when he was arrested and he wrote that he wonders if her music would have resonated with him at that age.
“I wonder whether I would have reacted to the words ‘I’m the problem, it’s me,’” from “Anti-Hero,” he wrote of the Midnights single. “Hers must be champagne problems compared with mine, but I still see myself in them. ‘I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror,’” she sings on the single. “I think of the three-by-five-inch plastic mirrors that are available inside. For years out there, I viewed myself as the antihero in my own warped self-narrative. Do I want to see myself clearly?”
In a few months, the California Parole Board will ask him questions about his time behind bars, which made Garcia think of the “Karma” lyrics: “Ask me what I learned from all those years/ Ask me what I earned from all those tears.” So, with Taylor’s help, he thinks about what he’s learned and as those questions dog him at night when he’s not sleeping, he said he’ll keep listening to Midnights on repeat.
TOMORROW X TOGETHER and Anitta are combining K-pop and Latin pop in their new collaborative single “Back for More,” the artists announced on Tuesday (Sept. 5). What’s more, they will debut the track with a performance at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sept. 12, days ahead of its Sept. 15 release.
Related
TOMORROW X TOGETHER Announce New Album ‘The Name Chapter: FREEFALL’
“Back for More” is slated to be TXT’s pre-release track, and will arrive ahead of the group’s third studio album, The Name Chapter: FREEFALL. The album — which follows previous release in the Name series, The Name Chapter: TEMPTATION — will drop on Oct. 13.
The track will have several versions released throughout the month. A performance version of the song arrives the same day as its official drop, while “Back for More (TXT Ver.),” a house remix and Afrobeats remix will be released on Sept. 18.
The press release describes “Back for More” as “a disco track with a groovy baseline and playful whistling sounds, adorned with the colorful hues of trendy Latin pop.” Thematically, the lyrics explore how “enchanting miracles can be woven into the ordinary moments of our lives.”
TXT is nominated for VMAs in four different categories: song of summer, group of the year, push performance of the year and best K-pop (both for “Sugar Rush Ride”). Anitta scored one nomination for best Latin (“Funk Rave”).
The 2023 VMAs will take place at the Prudential Center in New Jersey, and will air on MTV at 8 p.m. ET on Sept. 12.
Are you still listening?
59351543
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)
(@new_bghollyhood)
