Aubrey O’Day is speaking out some more about the results of Sean “Diddy” Combs‘ trial.

In a lengthy message posted to her Instagram Story on Wednesday (July 2) — the same day a jury ruled that the disgraced mogul is guilty on transportation to engage in prostitution charges, but not the more serious sex-trafficking and racketeering crimes he was accused of — the singer summed up her feelings on the verdict

“I’m still unpacking the magnitude of it all,” she began. “The cultural weight of this decision is immeasurable. It is heartbreaking to witness how many lives have been impacted by their experiences with Sean Combs — only for those stories to fall short in the eyes of a jury. I can only hope those jurors never have to watch someone they love endure what so many survivors have described.”

“Let’s be clear: the courtroom operates by the law, but that DOES NOT mean it delivers justice,” O’Day continued. “The pattern of behavior Sean Combs has shown us over the decades is not a mystery. It’s a warning. And now, that pattern risks being reframed — and has now been legitimized by the system. That wasn’t Bonnie and Clyde — it was control, coercion, and abuse- and we have to stop rewriting history to excuse the behavior–no matter how powerful the person. That narrative is not just dishonest. It’s dangerous.”

The jury’s verdict capped off a seven-week trial, during which federal prosecutors attempted to convict Combs for running an alleged criminal enterprise built on sex-trafficking, abuse, drugs and coercion. The trial included days of testimony from the Bad Boy Records founder’s ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura.

“My heart is with Cassie,” O’Day wrote in her note. “A woman who could’ve had a life and career free of fear and control. A woman who told her truth in a courtroom, only to have the world dissect her credibility instead of her courage.”

“Women, nor men, nor ANY ARTIST are the property of those with the most wealth, fame and power,” she added. “We are not disposable. 12 people on a jury will not be deciding that for us.”

O’Day has been speaking out against Combs for years, having previously been a part of the girl group Danity Kane, which the hip-hop titan helped form on Making the Band 3 in 2005. O’Day was kicked out of the lineup in 2008, and she has alleged that Combs ejected her because she refused to comply with his non-music-related requests.

After Combs was arrested in September 2024 following Homeland Security raids on his homes in Los Angeles and Miami that year in March, O’Day called it a “win for women all over the world” and said she felt “validated.” But when the producer was partially acquitted, O’Day said that the verdict made her feel sick in posts shared shortly before her longer letter.

“Oh, this makes me physically ill,” she professed Wednesday in a video on her Instagram Story. “Cassie probably feels so horrible. I’m gonna vomit.”

When Adam Levine first started dating his now-wife, model Behati Prinsloo, he wanted to woo her with a special present. So, he enlisted the help of his The Voice costar, Blake Shelton — rookie mistake.

While serving as the guest on the Thursday (July 3) episode of Hot Ones, the Maroon 5 frontman revealed how the country star hilariously pranked him early on in his relationship with Prinsloo. “My now-wife, then brand-new girlfriend, she said she really wanted a teacup pig,” Levine told host Sean Evans.

“And I didn’t know what that was, but of course, the first person I would ask …,” he continued, referencing Shelton’s farming background. “So, I asked Blake, I’m like, ‘What’s a teacup pig?’ He’s like, ‘I’ll get you a teacup pig. Yeah, give me five grand.’”

Levine handed over the money, emphasizing to Shelton that he wanted a pig that would stay small and not grow to the size of a normal pig. Shelton returned with a piglet that the “Moves Like Jagger” singer then gifted to Prinsloo, but the setup “probably lasted like three weeks” before the couple got tired of the pig’s incessant squeals and gifted it to a little girl.

When that girl sent them photos of the pig six months later, revealing that it had grown to be “like, 400 pounds,” Levine says he realized that Shelton had knowingly given him a standard pig — not a “teacup” pig as he’d asked. “I’m just like, ‘Blake, bro, $5,000 for a pig that wasn’t a micro pig?’” Levine recalled, laughing.

“And he’s like, ‘You’re an idiot! There’s no such thing as f–king teacup pigs you dumba–!’” Levine continued. “So that was a pretty good prank that he played on me.”

The “God’s Country” singer and Levine served as coaches together on The Voice for 16 seasons, starting when the show first debuted in 2011, and pranked each other often on the NBC competition. Luckily, Shelton’s piggy prank didn’t impact Levine’s relationship; the Maroon 5 singer and Prinsloo would go on to tie the knot in 2014 and welcome three children together in the years after that.

As his kids are growing up, Levine — who will drop new album Love Is Like with his Maroon 5 bandmates in August — is now having fun coaching their youth basketball team. “My worst quality [as a coach] is I get hotheaded,” he told Evans. “And these kids are children. They’re eight years old. But when the refs are sleeping, man, I’m like, ‘Come on!’”

Speaking of being hotheaded, Levine definitely felt the heat on Hot Ones. He started by warning viewers that he gets “really deep sweat” under his eyes — “That’s going to be really attractive to share with everybody,” he quipped — many bites of chicken after which he started perspiring profusely from his lower lids, dabbing at them furiously with his napkin.

“Here it comes,” he said, gesturing to his face shortly after trying a bit of the absurdly spicy Da’ Bomb hot sauce.

Watch Levine’s full Hot Ones episode above.

Singer Connie Francis, 87, informed fans on Wednesday (July 2) that she had been rushed to the intensive care unit at a hospital in Florida. In a post on her official Facebook feed, Francis wrote, “I am back in hospital where I have been undergoing tests and checks to determine the cause(s) of the extreme pain I have been experiencing. I had hoped to take part in [radio broadcaster Cousin] Brucie’s show for Independence Day, having had to cancel a previous slot a few weeks ago when receiving treatment on my hip. Sadly, I had to let him know that I again had to withdraw.”

In a follow-up post a few hours later, Francis said that after a series of tests for the undisclosed ailment in the ICU she had been moved to a private room. “Thank you all for your kind thoughts, words and prayers. They mean so much!” wrote the singer who retired from the music industry in 2018.

According to People, the singer revealed in May that she was in a wheelchair due to a hip injury after a March FB post in which she said she was awaiting stem cell therapy to treat a “troublesome painful hip.” At press time no additional information was available about the cause of her hospitalization and a spokesperson for the singer had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment.

In 1960, Francis became the first woman to score a No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with her signature hit, “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.” Earlier this year, she topped TikTok’s Viral 50 and Top 50 when a slew of lip synch videos of people’s pets and kids — including ones from Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian — cued to her 1962 hit “Pretty Little Baby” blew up on the platform.

Best known for her 1958 Hot 100 No. 2 hit “My Happiness,” her other No. 1 on the chart, 1960’s “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own” and the 1959 No. 5 charting single “Lipstick On Your Collar,” Francis told Billboard in May that she hardly remembered the obscure, six-decade-old song.

“I had to listen to it to identify it,” she said of “Pretty Little Baby,” which has spawned more than three million TikTok videos to date. “Then, of course, I recognized the fact that I had done it in seven languages.”

While making their new album, the gentlemen of Zeds Dead put a whiteboard in the studio to jot ideas on while they worked, a go-to move for anyone in a creative swirl. What was unique about their notes however, is that they ultimately wrote just one: “F–k s–t up.”

“That was the only thing on the board,” says the duo’s Dylan Mamid.

However concise, the instruction contained the project’s foundational approach — “to sound like, kind of not clean,” says other half Zachary Rapp-Rovan, “just very glitchy and messed with, but cohesive, but kind of chaotic.”

You’re forgiven if these guidelines sound confusing to you. But with the Zeds Dead skillset, honed over a 16-year career that contains a debut LP, multiple mixtapes, hundreds of singles and remixes and countless shows, the duo made its excellent second album, Return to the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness. Released in March, the 14-track project does sound simultaneously disorderly and controlled, at once bursting at the seams and laced with moments of contemplative chill.

Meeting with Billboard at a studio in L.A., Mamid and Rapp-Rovan are both relaxed and thoughtful as they take a break from prepping a live show to talk about life, music and the evolution of a dubstep genre that they’re fairly sure they don’t actually exist within.

“We’re never really going for a genre,” says Rapp-Rovan. “Dubstep and all these bass genres are just kind of things we dabble in. We have our fans, more so than being a genre-affiliated artist.”

Roughly 40,000 of these fans are trekking to Red Rocks this week for Dead Rocks, Zeds Dead’s standing engagement at the Colorado amphitheater that’s happened every summer since 2014. (Although the 2020 event was cancelled due to the pandemic.) Today (July 3) is the second of Dead Rocks 2025’s two-night run, with the duo headlining each evening after a supporting lineup featuring 10 bass and bass-adjacent artists. (Zeds Dead will also play three shows in Denver on July 4 — two sets at Mission Ballroom and a preceding “Backyard Jamboree” at Civic Center Park where fans can enjoy music and a hot dog eating contest.)

Each Dead Rocks is surely special, but this year is especially so given that it’s the first time since 2016 that the duo — who’s built a sprawling fanbase with its hard, experimental and often heady bass music — has come to Dead Rocks with a new album to play. If some of it does sound familiar, however, you aren’t losing your mind.

“A lot of the things that ended up on the album started with our other pieces of music,” says Rapp-Rovan. “It almost became remixing something of ours again and again, until there would be different pieces from these old songs that ended up in the new ones.” In a process one could indeed reasonably call “f–king s–t up” the pair remixed this older material “until it was pretty far from the original idea.”

This process started two years ago, when the two “cleared the runway,” as Mamid puts it, of their other projects so they could focus on an LP. Often producing while on the road, the pair recorded in studios from Boise to San Francisco to Toronto to Los Angeles, then in early 2024 rented a work/live space in Joshua Tree, Calif. This remote desert location proves popular among musicians — Mamid says “isolation was the main draw.”

Along the way, they landed on a concept both beyond and complimentary to cohesive chaos. Return to the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness isn’t just a vibey mouthful of a title, but the name for the cosmic TV/radio station the album is meant to function as. As such, the project weaves in bits of cultural ephemera familiar to most ’80s and ’90s babies (both of the guys made their debut on Earth in ’88), including dialogue from Scarface (“what a bunch of f–kin a–holes” Al Pacino’s Tony Montana declares on “Bad Guy”), a vintage news report on the Big Bang and The NeverEnding Story, the 1984 kids fantasy film that bent the brains of a generation. (“Why is it so dark?” the movie’s hero Bastian asks in the first words heard on the album. “In the beginning,” The Childlike Empress responds, “it is always dark.”)

In this way, the album collapses the space-time continuum, functioning in the same way as one’s own brain by serving up seemingly random and disparate memories at once. The late Duke Ellington is heard in a 1965 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on “A Million Dreams,” a sample that “we almost had to cut,” says Rapp-Rovan. “That would have sucked, because we really felt like that was an important piece of the album.” The dialogue was fortunately cleared at the last minute after the song found its way to Ellington’s grandson, who liked it.

Meanwhile, George and Ira Gershwin are credited on “One of These Mornings,” which features a sample of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Summertime” from 1959’s Porgy & Bess. All of these bits and bobs live inside productions that balance bass wobble with kaleidoscopic synths with deep emotion and big ideas. The album’s cover, a picture of rainbow that Rapp-Rovan took in the middle of the night while on a 2017 mid-summer trip to Iceland, effectively summarizes the vibe in total.

On its surface, the album is a contribution to the bass/dubstep scene in which Zeds Dead has long existed. However, the reality of where they live in the spectrum of electronic music is arguably more nuanced. When the duo broke through in 2009, American and North American style dubstep was beginning its moment of ubiquity, as artists like Skrillex and Excison delivered sharp, heavy iterations of the U.K.-born sound and countless DJs became a drop jockeys trying to out-pummel the last.

“With dubstep, one of the things that happened was that somebody would come with a new sound that was even harder,” says Rapp-Rovan.

“There was a lot of one-upping, for sure,” says Mamid.

“Then suddenly, you’d notice that people wanted that,” says Rapp-Rovan. “More artists would be like, ‘Oh, this is what people want, so I’m going to make that,’ and then the music becomes homogeneous… And sometimes you can get addicted to the instant gratification in dance music — when you’re playing other people’s records, especially — and it’s like, ‘I can always play this one and people are gonna go crazy.”

“There have definitely been a lot of times when we’d be playing after somebody who was doing stuff that was really, really hard,” he continues. “And we’d be like, ‘I don’t want to try to one-up this guy,’ so we would just kind of bring it back down for a while and suffer… But if we took it down for a while, it would make songs that aren’t as crazy more impactful.”

Whatever they’re doing works. Over 15 years, the duo has been a more or less ubiquitous presence on the North American circuit and Dead Rocks has sold out every year for a decade. Between 2021 and 2024, it grossed $4.7 million and sold 76,300 tickets, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore. The two agree that touring so extensively over the years and “trying really hard and putting a lot of effort into our shows,” says Rapp-Rovan, has created a diehard fanbase, among which it’s common for people to have seen dozens of shows over the years.

“We’ve managed to build this incredibly loyal fanbase that cares what we do,” says Mamid. “They’ll follow us to shows, especially in North America. That’s been really great for us, and it’s allowed us to exist outside of the trends of the moment.”

As such, at least for the time being, they don’t see a reason to tour outside North America. “We sort of choose not to,” says Rapp-Rovan. “We consistently get a lot of offers in North America and we don’t want to be flying all around.”

“We’ve been doing this for 15 years, and we hit it pretty hard earlier in our career, and we’re getting older,” says Mamid, who also has other business to tend to as he recently bought a house and got engaged. And even eschewing long haul flights, the two have been plenty busy. Their 2025 shows thusfar have included Coachella, Electric Forest and many standalone sets, with shows at Elements, North Coast, Austin City Limits and Hulaween on the calendar through November — and a lot more f–king s–t up to do in preparation.

“I feel like that’s one of the reasons that our album took so long, because there’s so much energy put into the shows,” says Rapp-Rovan. “Each of those Red Rocks events over the years, that’s like an album’s worth of work.”

Four years ago, drag performer Scarlet Envy was asked a very simple question ahead of her appearance on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars season 6: Did she think that she would be considered the “villain” of the season?

“Is it me? Am I the drama? I don’t think I’m the drama … maybe I am,” she answered, clutching her proverbial pearls as a coy smirk crossed her face. “Am I the villain? I don’t think I’m the villain.”

Whether or not the queen was or was not “the drama” proved to be beside the point. In the weeks after the video dropped, Envy’s voice could be heard echoing across TikTok in thousands of videos, as fans, brands and celebrities — including everyone from Bridgerton‘s Nicola Coughlan to Lady Gaga herself — used the audio to ask themselves her introspective question. “It’s been a lesson to me on how you never know what the universe is going to throw at you,” Envy tells Billboard with a chuckle.

But even a mega-viral meme couldn’t have prepared Envy for what her off-hand comment would go on to inspire. Last week, after seven years of teasing fans about her follow-up to Invasion of Privacy, rap superstar Cardi B unveiled her sophomore album would finally be dropping on Sep. 19. And the title of the new project, Am I The Drama?, came directly from Envy’s open-ended question.

Envy explains to Billboard that Cardi’s team reached out to her “a week or two” before the album announcement dropped, priming her for an announcement that had something to do with her iconic moment. “I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on,” she says. But when the announcement finally did come, the star stopped what she was doing on New York’s Fire Island and felt her jaw drop.

“At first I thought, ‘Maybe it will be some small thing about drama or something,’ but when I saw the album cover, it was just word for word, Am I the Drama?” she says. “That was crazy. Even now, thinking about it, I’m not sure that’s sunk in yet.”

But the collaboration didn’t end there — along with giving Envy a tease of the album title, Cardi’s team also asked if she would be available to join the rapper on stage for her headlining set at LadyLand, the annual queer music festival held in Brooklyn by storied nightlife purveyor Ladyfag. “I go to Ladyland every year if I can, so I was planning to be there anyway,” she says with a chuckle.

Thus, at around 1:30 in the morning on the festival’s first night, Envy emerged to a peal of cheers at Under the K Bridge, where she introduced the rap sensation. “My name is Scarlet Envy, I’m the drama,” the drag star told the crowd . “I’m blessed to introduce this performer to you. She’s an icon, she a legend and she’s a hometown hero, b—h. Give it up for the one, the only, the drama, Cardi motherf–king B!”

Envy says she got to meet Cardi backstage, and thank her for using her meme as the album title. “She had Kulture [her daughter] with her, which was so sweet,” Envy says, still beaming. “But to be on stage while she performed was pretty sickening, too. To see her point of view and her perspective on on the crowd was amazing.”

It’s the kind of collaboration that gives performers like Envy some validation, especially in the political climate that we’re living under. Over the course of the last few years, right-wing lawmakers have gone out of their way to attempt to restrict drag performers’ rights to perform in public. While most of those efforts from politicians have been blocked by federal courts, many drag artists say that their ability to perform in public without fear of reprisal has been significantly hampered by the ongoing “culture war” around drag.

So, to have one of the most popular hip-hop artists in the world not only referencing drag culture, but collaborating with drag performers for her forthcoming album is a huge deal, Envy says. “It’s bridging a bigger gap in some way than when bubblegum pop girls reference drag queens,” she explains. “We are across genres. And I think it’s important, especially in the times we’re living in right now, to remember the power of the queer people behind drag. This didn’t become viral sensation because I had a wig on. It’s because of who I am and how I said this. So whether you have on eyelashes or not, queer people are powerful, and that’s not to be taken lightly.”

Envy also can’t help but grin as she thinks about all of the marvelous spectacle that could come out of a phrase she uttered years ago. “When artists like Cardi reference this, it also just gives power to being the drama,” she says. “It gives you the power to say, ‘I am the f–king drama, I’m gonna be who I am, and I’m gonna live my life the way I want to live it. Deal with it.’”

When it comes to her future with the project, Envy says that while there might be future projects she and Cardi work together on, eager fans looking for tea on the album should not come flooding into her DMs. “I’m just in the dark as much as everyone else is, I haven’t been able to hear the album,” she says, holding her hands up in surrender to the stans.

But when it comes to the future of her career as a drag performer, and the future of her fellow drag performers for that matter, Envy keeps it short and simple: “We’re not f–king going anywhere.”