The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued instructions to cruise companies Wednesday for conducting test cruises — a key precursor to restarting revenue cruises from the U.S. If … Click to Continue »
Willow Smith pulled off a top-secret Mother’s Day surprise for Jada Pinkett Smith by getting her mom’s metal band back together to perform on the latest Red Table Talk episode.
On Wednesday’s (May 5) episode, which arrived around the third anniversary of the Facebook Watch series. Willow recalled accompanying her mother on tour with her metal band Wicked Wisdom with old home videos, including one where she and her brother Jaden Smith cleaned the outside of the tour bus.
“This is the music that I grew up around. My mother was Superwoman, she was a rock star, she was a warrior and a nurturer, all in one. So unapologetically badass. … I was my mom’s biggest fan,” said Willow, who recently took a pop-punk turn on her new single “Transparent Soul,” featuring Travis Barker.
To pay homage to the woman who showed her “what womaning up really is about,” the 20-year-old star followed in her mother’s legendary footsteps and performed one of her favorite Wicked Wisdom songs, “Bleed All Over Me,” with Jada’s original bandmates, including guitarist Pocket Honore and keyboardist Taylor Graves.
Willow brought Jada out from the living room, where the notorious Red Table resides, and escorted her to the driveway where the performance was held. The Girls Trip actress shed a few tears before lip-syncing to her own lyrics being sung by her daughter and rocking out alongside her mom and fellow RTT co-host Adrienne Banfield-Norris. Willow and Jada shared a tearful embrace for the touching closer.
Watch Red Table Talk’s Mother’s Day special, including Willow’s surprise Wicked Wisdom reunion performance starting at around the 33-minute marker, here.
Zach Williams earns his fourth No. 1 on Billboard’s Christian Airplay chart (dated May 8) as “Less Like Me” rises from No. 3 to the top spot. In the tracking week ending May 2, the single increased by 11% to 9.7 million audience impressions, according to MRC Data.
Williams wrote the song with Hank Bentley and Mia Fieldes.
“This song was written to remind me of how imperfect we are as humans, and how all of our victories need to be pointed back to Him,” Williams tells Billboard. “So, with this No. 1, I will embrace the imperfection and point this win right back to God.”
As “Less Like Me” hits No. 1 in its 17th frame, it wraps Williams’ fastest trip to the Christian Airplay penthouse. “There Was Jesus,” with Dolly Parton, led for five weeks following its coronation in its 19th frame, on the chart dated Sept. 12, 2020; “Old Church Choir” reigned for 20 weeks after reaching the apex in its 18th week in August 2017; and his debut entry, “Chain Breaker,” led for 15 weeks after reaching the pinnacle in its 22nd week in November 2016.
Williams has banked his four Christian Airplay No. 1s among eight top 10s. His first top 10 this year, his version of the Yuletide standard “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” climbed to No. 3 in January.
As “Less Like Me” hits No. 1 in its 17th frame, it wraps Williams’ fastest trip to the Christian Airplay penthouse. “There Was Jesus,” with Dolly Parton, led for five weeks following its coronation in its 19th frame, on the chart dated Sept. 12, 2020; “Old Church Choir” reigned for 20 weeks after reaching the apex in its 18th week in August 2017; and his debut entry, “Chain Breaker,” led for 15 weeks after reaching the pinnacle in its 22nd week in November 2016.
Williams has banked his four Christian Airplay No. 1s among eight top 10s. His first top 10 this year, his version of the Yuletide standard “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” climbed to No. 3 in January.
Speaking of the holidays, Williams is working on a seasonal set due later this year. Before that, a deluxe version of Rescue Story, his second full-length, which debuted and peaked at No. 2 on Top Christian Albums in October 2019, is due, with six new songs, July 9.
Selena Gomez has never shied away from the opportunity to tap the mic and speak up about mental health.
The 28-year-old award-winning singer and outspoken mental health advocate has spoken with distinguished individuals, such as current Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama’s surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy, about the topic and how it’s affecting young and old people alike. Gomez’s latest campaign with her beauty brand Rare Beauty, Mental Health 101, states “7 out of 10 Gen Zers were most likely to report experiencing common symptoms of depression — with pre-teens and teens having the the highest rate of suicide ideations as compared to other age groups.” Additionally, one in five adults experience some kind of mental illness each year, a number which could very well increase once the COVID-19 pandemic is over.
From magazine covers to multiple groundbreaking initiatives, the “Vulnerable” singer uses every stage she can to bring awareness to mental health issues and allocate appropriate resources for different communities while opening up about the personal battles she’s faced with anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder.
Since May is Mental Health Awareness Month, Billboard has compiled 10 pivotal moments when Gomez stressed the importance of mental health awareness.
April 2021: Launch of “Mental Health 101″ with Rare Beauty
Timed with 2021 Mental Health Awareness Month, Gomez launched a new Mental Health 101 educational campaign with her mission-driven makeup brand Rare Beauty. The initiative is “dedicated to supporting mental health education and encouraging financial support for more mental health services in educational services,” according to her Instagram. One post contained a set of slides that began by listing mental health as its own school subject next to math, science, history and P.E. and contained shocking statistics about mental health, a petition calling on the philanthropy community to support mental health services in schools, and a fundraiser for the Rare Impact Fund that she launched on her 28th birthday last summer (more on that later).
December 2020: Keynote Speech at 2020 Teen Vogue Summit About Vulnerability
Serving as the 2020 Teen Vogue Summit keynote speaker, Gomez spoke about the theme of her Billboard 200 No. 1 album Rare, and how it echoes throughout her beliefs in normalizing open conversations about mental health. “The whole theme of my last album was a lot of self-discovery, a lot of being OK, being alone and being vulnerable, being OK with not looking like everything else, not looking like everyone else,” Gomez told then-Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner, who serves on the Rare Beauty Mental Health Council. “My journey personally has been all about my timing; when I felt like it was working, and that’s when I suddenly became so obsessed with making sure that everybody I knew understood that sharing your emotions were great. How I’m a huge advocate for therapy. How I feel like there are support groups for everybody, and it’s OK… there’s no way that people aren’t feeling a certain way, whether they’re figuring that out on their own or not, we all need each other.”
October 2020: Instagram Live Chat with Vice President Kamala Harris About Mental Health Nationwide
The singer-actress hopped on a video call with none other than VP Kamala Harris, who was the Democratic candidate at the time, to discuss several issues plaguing the United States, including mental health. “I just read too much about how deep this country is being affected mentally. I’ve had so many dreams about creating places that people could go to. I think there’s a part of me that wishes we had some sort of place that felt like, OK, maybe you just need to get help,” Gomez explained.
October 2020: IG Live Chat With Dr. Vivek Murthy About Depression
Gomez spoke with Dr. Vivek Murthy in an Instagram Live discussion hosted by Rare Beauty’s account about how she struggled with depression at the beginning of the pandemic. “In the beginning, I couldn’t deal with it that well. I kind of went into a bit of a depression,” she told Dr. Murthy, who served as the surgeon general under former President Obama. “My job is a lot of travel, connecting with people, making people happy, and that makes me happy, so it has been a struggle.”
The Rare Beauty founder found excitement in the Rare Impact Fund and in being able to go to the studio again, which helped ground her. “I would say right now, I’m fully coming out again and I just think I had to handle it the way I needed to handle it, and got through it with the right people and doing the right things and doing the right steps to not make me go crazy.”
July 2020: Announcement of Rare Beauty’s $100 Million Rare Impact Fund for Mental Health Services
On her 28th birthday, the makeup mogul’s Rare Beauty launched the Rare Impact Fund in hopes of raising $100 million over the next 10 years to provide mental health services to underserved communities. With 1% of annual sales on Rare Beauty products in addition to money raised by partners benefiting the fund, the Rare Impact Fund will become one of the largest known funds supporting mental health from a corporate entity once it reaches its goal. Gomez founded Rare Beauty in February 2020 with the self-affirming mission that “being rare is about being comfortable with yourself.” Rare Beauty also created the Rare Beauty Mental Health Council, which brings mental health experts from universities, organizations and companies together to guide the company’s strategy.
April 2020: IG Live Chat With Miley Cyrus About Bipolar Diagnosis
Gomez discussed her bipolar diagnosis for the first time with fellow Disney Channel child star Miley Cyrus on the latter’s Bright Minded Instagram Live series. During their candid conversation about mental health, Gomez recalled her trip to McLean Hospital, a psychiatric hospital outside of Boston. “I discussed that after years of going through a lot of different things, I realized that I was bipolar,” she told Cyrus. “And so when I got to know more information, it actually helps me. It doesn’t scare me once I know it…. I just feel like when I finally said what I was going to say, I wanted to know everything about it. And it took the fear away.” Watch Miley and Selena’s chat starting at the 32:20 mark below.
September 2019: McLean Award for Mental Health Advocacy Acceptance Speech
The “Kill Em With Kindness” artist accepted the 2019 McLean Award for Mental Health Advocacy at the McLean Hospital. Upon accepting the award, she delivered a powerful speech about how her personal struggles with depression and anxiety only makes her human. “For me, it feels right to share that I have personally felt the effects of both depression and anxiety — but it isn’t easy,” Gomez said. “I have feared being misunderstood and judged. I know that I have been given experiences and people and opportunities that have made my life exceptionally beautiful and sweet, and yet I struggle with my own thoughts and feelings at times. But this doesn’t make me faulty. This does not make me weak. This does not make me less than. This makes me human. We need help, and we need each other.”
July 2019: Deletion of Instagram App From Her Phone
Gomez, who was at one point the most-followed person on Instagram with more than 150 million followers, told Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest on their show that she had deleted the app from her phone because of the way it affected her mind and body. “I think it’s just become really unhealthy for young people, including myself, to spend all of their time fixating on all of these comments and it was affecting me,” Gomez said during the interview. “It would make me depressed, it would make me feel not good about myself and look at my body differently.”
August 2017: InStyle Cover About Treatment Experience
For her InStyle cover, the singer discussed entering into a 90-day treatment center for depression and anxiety in Tennessee (more on that later) and how going away for that period of time “was the best thing that I ever could’ve done.” “Everything I cared about, I stopped caring about. I came out, and it felt like, ‘OK, I can only go forward,’” she recalled while mentioning the best parts about stepping away from the spotlight. “I was in the countryside and never did my hair; I took part in equine therapy, which is so beautiful. And it was hard, obviously. But I knew what my heart was saying, and I thought, ‘OK, I think this has helped me become stronger for other people.’”
March 2017: Vogue Cover About Feeling Lonely While Touring
For her first American Vogue cover, Gomez opened up about how touring was a mentally draining practice for her as a musician, after she abruptly entered the 90-day treatment center and canceled the rest of her 2016 Revival Tour. She revealed she had been diagnosed with lupus and undergone chemotherapy during her 2015 Billboard cover story, which led her to receive treatment from at an outpatient facility that cut her 2014 Stars Dance Tour short.
“I’ve cried onstage more times than I can count, and I’m not a cute crier,” she told Vogue. “Tours are a really lonely place for me. My self-esteem was shot. I was depressed, anxious. I started to have panic attacks right before getting onstage, or right after leaving the stage. Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable. I felt I wasn’t giving my fans anything, and they could see it — which, I think, was a complete distortion. I was so used to performing for kids. At concerts I used to make the entire crowd raise up their pinkies and make a pinky promise never to allow anybody to make them feel that they weren’t good enough. Suddenly I have kids smoking and drinking at my shows, people in their 20s, 30s, and I’m looking into their eyes, and I don’t know what to say. I couldn’t say, ‘Everybody, let’s pinky-promise that you’re beautiful!’ It doesn’t work that way, and I know it because I’m dealing with the same sh– they’re dealing with.”
While detailing the 90-day program, which included individual therapy, group therapy and equine therapy, Gomez also touched on Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), an evidence-based treatment developed to treat borderline personality disorder. “DBT has completely changed my life,” she says. “I wish more people would talk about therapy. We girls, we’re taught to be almost too resilient, to be strong and sexy and cool and laid-back, the girl who’s down. We also need to feel allowed to fall apart.”
[Spoiler alert: This story contains the identity of the eliminated contestant on Wednesday night’s (May 5) The Masked Singer.]
The competition is heating up on The Masked Singer, as Wednesday night’s (May 5) Spicy 6 episode ended with a surprising elimination. Robopine was sent packing, but not without making one last impression with his performance of Boyz II Men’s “Water Runs Dry.”
The prickly machine wowed the judges and audience early on with his soulful voice and performances of classic R&B songs like “Never Too Much” by Luther Vandross, “Killing Me Softly” by Roberta Flack and “Let’s Get It On” by Marvin Gaye.
In Week 3, his performance of “All of Me” by John Legend brought judge Nicole Scherzinger to tears, and it soon became evident that the man under the half-robot half-porcupine costume was an actual singer. Guest panelist Chrissy Metz and Scherzinger were able to combine their hunches based on the clue packages and correctly guess that Robopine was singer/songwriter/actor Tyrese.
“It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve done all year that I couldn’t post about,” he says. “I had to definitely practice restraint, because I love posting. I love talking about things and inspiring people and addressing politics, police brutality and whatever is going on in the world.”
Billboard spoke to Tyrese about why he pretended to be 60 years old and how it felt being compared to Jamie Foxx.
How did you end up on the show?
Well, I have to give my daughter credit for that, my 13-year-old Shayla. During the COVID pandemic, we’re all at home, and of course my daughter’s on Netflix and Hulu and she’s binge-watching all these seasons of everything. She started watching all the seasons of The Masked Singer, and it’s like full blast. She’s like, “Dad, you should do this show. I know you would win this.” I appreciated her vote of confidence, but I was like, “Shayla, I don’t be wearing no masks. I don’t really know if this is something that makes sense for me.” Then all of a sudden, I got a phone call that I got an offer to come and do the show! And after I booked [it], I couldn’t even tell my daughter, and I was like, “Well, why not?!” So I would just leave the house every day and tell my daughter I’m going somewhere to do something and could not tell her that I was doing The Masked Singer. She’s the one who told me about this, so it became a very unique experience, to say the least.
Why Robopine?
Robopine was one of the costumes that they presented to me, and because I’m a creative and I love to collaborate, I said, “I want to add a red eye to Robo. I want to add a red fingertip on Robo.” I wanted to really kind of hand this all up. I said to them, “I want to add a whole lot of muscles [but] please don’t make it unbearable for me to walk around.” It took two to three people to get me in and out of my costume every day. It was just really interesting, everything about the whole process.
You also made a lot of references to being 60 years old — what was that about?
I did that because my fans and supporters who’ve been rocking with me from day one, they all know everything about my life. I’m kind of known in my own little way as like a motivational speaker person, and you can’t motivate anybody if you’re not willing to share and unpack. I had to tell [the judges] 60 years old, grandfather, two grandkids because I just wanted to throw them completely off. Because if [I told] them my actual story, they think that people aren’t going to be smart enough to put two and three and four together. So every episode, “It’s Eddie Levert! It’s Jamie Foxx!” They were always hinting at people that were a little older than me. And I’m 42, so I was like, “Well, let me throw people off.” So every time they were guessing someone older than me, I was like, “Now we’re talking. Maybe I’ll be able to get through a few more episodes if they actually believe I’m 60.”
Some of the judges were adamant on you being Jamie Foxx. What did you think of that comparison?
I love that, because Jamie Foxx is truly one of the most giftedly talented people out there. He was just at my house a couple of days ago. He won his second Oscar and all that happened in my living room. [Editor’s note: Foxx starred in best animated feature winner Soul, but that award goes to the producers of the Disney/Pixar film, not the cast.]
Oh really?
Yeah, I posted it on my Instagram, and the crazy thing is we’ve never even done music together. He’s in Atlanta right now just like me, and we live like five minutes from each other, so when I uploaded that video of him celebrating his Oscar win in my living room, even that threw people off. Like, “Wait, how is Tyrese and Jamie Foxx in the same room? I don’t think they would do that if either one of them was on The Masked Singer.”
You performed a lot of classics. Walk me through those song choices.
I’m an R&B soul singer, so I haven’t really tapped into what a lot of the younger artists are doing and singing these days. When I listen to music, I pull from the things that inspire me, how I sing and do background. I don’t listen to anything that’s happening right now. I tend to listen to stuff from that era. And that’s no disrespect to the new artists, I just think the music and the culture of music has shifted. It’s a lot of Auto-Tune and this is what radio is playing, this is what they’re used to. So I didn’t really want to get on there and play this game of make believe that I’m 17 and I’m gonna get out there trying to dance and be something that I’m not. I was like, let me sing the records that I know I can sing and go about it in a confident way.
Considering you’re an actual singer and this is a singing competition, did you think you were going to win?
I didn’t think I would make it to as many episodes as I did. Literally I was like, “All right, well this will be my last episode,” and then they voted somebody else off and voted somebody else. It’s just such a world, you know? And then I was asking questions about other stars that’s been on the show in the past, how far they made it, this and that. And I was like, “Wait, such-and-such got voted off?! She sold more records than me or he’s won Grammys. Sh–, I might not make it to the end.” I started feeling like, “Let’s not think you got this thing in the bank, you know? Ain’t no guarantee you’re going to go all the way to the end.” They kept the competition thick.
Over the past decade, Britney Spears has scored hit singles, released chart-topping albums and headlined a must-see Las Vegas residency — among other achievements for one of the most influential pop artists of the past quarter-century. Yet these accomplishments have arrived as Spears remains under a conservatorship, with her father controlling her finances and fans across the globe advocating for that level of control to cease.
Why is Britney Spears still under a conservatorship? And how did her fans turn her freedom into a worldwide movement?
In the latest episode of Billboard Explains, Billboard dives deep into Spears’ 13-year conservatorship under her father, Jamie Spears, and what caused fans to speak out in recent years. Hear what Spears herself has had to say on the matter, and how the circumstances of her conservatorship may eventually evolve.
After the video, catch up on more Billboard Explains clips and learn about the rise of K-pop in the U.S., why Taylor Swift is re-recording her first six albums, the boom of hit all-female collaborations, how Grammy nominees and winners are chosen, why songwriters are selling their publishing catalogs, how the Super Bowl halftime show is booked and why Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License” was able to shoot to No. 1 on the Hot 100.
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