Just days after as estimated five million people turned up at 2,100 “No Kings” protest across the U.S. to decry the current administration’s divisive policies, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus singer Ronnie Winter cordially invited Donald Trump supporters to stay away from his band’s shows.

“I actually follow what Jesus says. If you’re a Christian and you’re watching this and you voted for Donald Trump, shame on you. You are not allowed to come to my shows. I don’t want you there,” said the vocalist for the Florida-bred hardcore band in an Instagram video. “Don’t come to my shows. It’s awesome that you love ‘Face Down.’ It’s not for you. It’s not your song. It is not your song.”

While it was unclear what spurred the post, Winter — who has long criticized Trump and his supporters, especially after the singer was slammed for being “woke” for encouraging the band’s fans to get vaccinated and wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic — was unequivocal in his message to MAGA fans.

“I thought I was pretty clear about all this stuff in 2020. As you notice on my Instagram, I did not remove any of that stuff from the Stay Woke campaign. I guess you guys are calling it from 2020,” he said in the video. “Look, man, the thing about being woke is you’re awake. And once you’re awake, you can never go to sleep. And not only has nothing changed, but everything they said was going to happen, the woke people has happened. You have done nothing but prove them right.”

And, in case his message titled “If you call yourself a Christian please watch” gets interpreted incorrectly, Winter offered refunds to MAGA followers who have purchased tickets to RJA shows, but noted that his stay-away request isn’t valid for just the next three-plus years of Trump’s second term.

“If you voted for Donald Trump, do not come to my shows or ever, not just these four years. Don’t come to my shows because you’re going to hear a lot of woke propaganda, and you’re going to hear the actual words of Jesus,” he said. “You’re going to see a lot of acceptance from all areas of life and races, and you’re just going to see a lot of harmony. That’s not what you’re about. Don’t come. Refunds are available. Forever, don’t come. Goodbye.”

Check out Winter’s video below.

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Beyoncé closed out the final night of her Cowboy Carter tour’s six-show run at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Monday (June 16) with a heartfelt message to fans and a tribute to one of England’s most iconic songwriters.

“Thank you, Sir Paul McCartney, for writing one of the best songs ever made. Every time I sing it, I feel so honored. And it is a full circle moment to wear your beautiful daughter’s design,” Beyoncé wrote in an Instagram post, referencing her Cowboy Carter rendition of the Beatles’ 1968 classic “Blackbird.”

“Thank you, London, for creating unforgettable memories for me and my family,” she continued. “Holla at ‘ya when I come on tour again!”

Her version of the song, stylized as “Blackbiird,” reimagines the original with string flourishes and vocal contributions from four rising Black female country artists: Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Reyna Roberts and Tiera Kennedy. The cover is one of two reinterpretations featured on Cowboy Carter, alongside her take on Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.”

McCartney praised Beyoncé’s version earlier this year, calling it a “magnificent” interpretation that reinforces the civil rights message that inspired him to write it. “I think Beyoncé has done a fab version and would urge anyone who has not heard it yet to check it out,” he wrote on Instagram. “You are going to love it.”

The Beatles’ “Blackbird” was originally written in response to the Little Rock Nine, a group of Black students who faced violent resistance while integrating an Arkansas high school in 1957. McCartney has said the song was written as a message of hope and encouragement to Black women facing injustice.

McCartney, whose original master recording is used in Beyoncé’s version, according to Variety, also revealed that he had the chance to speak with the pop icon about her take on “Blackbird.”

“I spoke to her on FaceTime and she thanked me for writing it and letting her do it,” wrote McCartney, who attended Beyoncé’s record-breaking Renaissance World Tour last year. “I told her the pleasure was all mine and I thought she had done a killer version of the song. When I saw the footage on the television in the early 60s of the black girls being turned away from school, I found it shocking and I can’t believe that still in these days there are places where this kind of thing is happening right now. Anything my song and Beyoncé’s fabulous version can do to ease racial tension would be a great thing and makes me very proud.”

Released in March 2024, Cowboy Carter debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and made Beyoncé the first Black woman to top the Top Country Albums chart. The project also won her the Grammy for best country album earlier this year.

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Lenny Kravitz is heading Down Under for his first run of Australian dates in over a decade.

Announced on Monday (June 16), the Australian leg of the four-time Grammy winner’s Blue Electric Light Tour will launch in November 2025, with a six-date run of shows. 

Alongside expected headline dates in cities such as Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, Kravitz will also be visiting Newcastle and the South Australian capital of Adelaide to perform at the bp Adelaide Grand Final motorsports event.

Most notably, Kravitz will also be visiting the regional Victorian city of Mildura which – according to the 2021 census – boasts a population just shy of 35,000. Though not a location completely devoid of live performances, it’s a city that rarely features on the itinerary for international artists.

“We are so excited to once again be hosting an international act at the Mildura Sporting Precinct,” said Mildura’s City Council Mayor Helen Healy in a statement to the press. “This is a major win for our region and a testament to the success of hosting world-class events like the Kings of Leon concert in 2022.”

The forthcoming run of tour dates will be the first time Kravitz has visited Australia since 2012. That visit was itself many years in the making, with his only other visits to the country taking place in 1993 and 1994.

Since his last visit, Kravitz has released three further albums, including 2014’s Strut, 2018’s Raise Vibration, and 2024’s Blue Electric Light. Additionally, in 2024, he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and also received his first nomination for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, though he was not inducted.

Lenny Kravitz – Blue Electric Light 2025 Australian Tour Dates

Nov. 18 – Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney, NSW
Nov. 19 – Newcastle Entertainment Centre, Newcastle, NSW
Nov. 21 – Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Brisbane, QLD
Nov. 25 – John Cain Arena, Melbourne, VIC
Nov. 28 – Sporting Precinct, Mildura, VIC
Nov. 29 – bp Adelaide Grand Final, Adelaide, SA

As Australian youth broadcaster triple j recovers from its 50th birthday celebrations in January, they’ve announced the festivities will continue with a newly-detailed Hottest 100 poll.

Officially dubbed the Hottest 100 of Australian Songs, the new countdown will take place on July 26, with voting open to the public, who can select their favorite songs performed by Australian artists.

As usual, there are a few eligibility caveats. Firstly, eligible songs are any tracks which were released prior to Jan. 19, 2025, and must feature a minimum 50% of Australian artists. As a result, New Zealand artists (who are often considered honorary Australians) are ineligible, though Crowded House are eligible, despite being formed by Neil Finn after the dissolution of Split Enz and his move from New Zealand to Australia.

Notably, tracks recorded for triple j’s long-running Like a Version cover series are not eligible either. Though perennial favorites of triple j’s annual Hottest 100 countdown, the series received its own poll back in 2023, with DMA’S reigning supreme with their acoustic cover of Cher’s “Believe.”

triple j – which launched on Jan. 19, 1975 as the result of new policies by then-Prime minister Gough Whitlam – first kicked off their Hottest 100 countdown in 1989, with the first three years allowing listeners to vote for songs from any year.

In 1994, the station rebooted the concept, this time opening the polls only to songs which had been released the year prior. It’s since become known as – as triple j have labelled it – “the world’s greatest music democracy,” with an average of almost 2.5 million votes being cast each year.

In the ensuing decades, the list of winners has been plentiful, featuring Australian acts such as Spiderbait, The Wiggles, and two-time winners Powderfinger and Flume. Numerous international acts have also taken out the top spot, such as Oasis, Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar.

The most recent poll was announced in January 2025, with Chappell Roan being crowned the victor with “Good Luck, Babe!” 

Notably, the latest countdown also left a sour taste in the mouth of Australian music-lovers, with the full list featuring the lowest number of homegrown artists in almost three decades. With only 29 Australian artists appearing across the full list of songs, it was the worst showing for Aussies since the 1996 list. Only the debut poll in 1993 and its 1994 follow-up are worse, with 24 and 26 Australian artists, respectively.

Alongside the annual poll, other one-off countdowns have been held over the years, with 1998 and 2009 seeing the release date restrictions lifted once again, 2011 focusing on Australian albums, 2013 allowing songs released in the past 20 years, and 2020 focusing on songs released in the 2010s. 

The latter poll may give an indication of what may rank highly in the upcoming countdown, having been topped by Tame Impala’s “The Less I Know the Better.”

Backed by science and heart, Moms Clean Air Force, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group whose goal is to protect clean air and children’s health — and EcoMadres, their Latino community outreach program — educates families about why they should care about climate disruption, air pollution and toxic chemicals, and engages them in taking action to preserve their futures — all with the help of music.

With data that Latinos in the United States are disproportionately impacted by climate change, an initiative called EcoMusica was born.

As part of EcoMusica, SonTierra, a multi-ethnic ensemble of Latino musicians whose name means “we are the Earth,” perform tunes that offer hope and encourage listeners to reach out to legislators and leaders. The music played at outreach events incorporates a number of Latin music styles: cumbia, banda, bolero, merengue, balada and Andean folk.

They will be performing at the annual EcoMadres Summit in Las Vegas on Sept. 12, Moms Clean Air Force tells Billboard Family.

Who is SonTierra? With an age range of about 11 to 64 years old, the multi-generational band includes Edgar East (Panamanian), Edgar Solís (Mexican), Gabriela Valdivia (U.S.-born; Brazilian mother, Mexican father), Karen Stein (Colombian), Leo Roldán (Argentinean), Marián Vivas (Venezuelan), Stephanie Rivera (Cuban), Valentina Weihe (U.S.-born; Mexican mother, Puerto Rican father), Valery Figueroa (Venezuelan) and Víctor Lara (Mexican).

“I wanted SonTierra to include youth and children at a professional, quality level because we are working for their future,” Stein, both a performer and the group’s manager, shares in an interview with Billboard Family. “And if we’re going to gain trust with Latino communities, we don’t just have to come in and sing at them. We have to sing with them. Including people of various generations and of various ethnicities, it is important to make Latino communities feel like, ‘Oh, we could be [a part of this].’ They can identify with someone on stage.”

The collective of musicians released a 12-track, mostly Spanish-language (with some English, on a few bilingual songs) album of originals and covers, titled EcoMadres, on Earth Day 2023. The album is available to stream on SoundCloud.

Stein had a hand in penning nine of the dozen songs, all of which address climate change, air pollution, ecosystem destruction, environmental justice, taking action and finding hope.

EcoMadres tunes include “Mama,” which she says was written inspired first by her musician mother who sang to her, and then by Mother Earth, with the lyrics “Hoy este arrullo es para la madre tierra/ Que tiene fiebre, que tiene fiebre y no la escuchan, no la escuchan/ En su agonía, en su agonía” (“Today this lullaby is for Mother Earth/ She has a fever, she has a fever/ And we aren’t hearing her agony”).

Other album tracks include “Corrido p’al Congreso” (“A Corrido for Congress”), a message to the U.S. government in mariachi style with corrido and ranchera rhythms, and “Legado” (“Legacy”), written from the perspective of children looking ahead to their future, in the style of bolero. “El pico del tucán (“The Toucan’s Peak”) is set to a cumbia beat and tackles a tough topic: solving “the dilemma between what humans want and what the earth needs to continue to sustain us.”

Born and raised in Colombia, Stein is the Iowa field coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force and EcoMadres. Her heart and roots are in music.

She grew up on a rural farm. On a call with Billboard Family, she cites she’s from and her mother as the reasons she’s a musician.

“The location where we grew up was so isolated, [with] no electricity, so there were very few distractions. I grew up paying a lot of attention to sounds,” including the sounds of nature, animals, and the men on the farm milking the cows, says Stein. “They’d talk to the cows and oftentimes they would sing to the cows. They would just hum,” sometimes to pop music and sometimes to traditional songs.

Meanwhile, her mother was a trained classical pianist who “ended up in this godforsaken corner of Colombia,” Stein jokes. “Of course she hauled a piano down into the farm, right?”

As a young child, Stein would pick up her mom’s knack for music.

“She discovered that since I was young I was able to carry a tune, and so she would harmonize with me since I was very, very little, and that trained my ear to maintain a melody,” says Stein.

Her family ended up moving to Costa Rica, where Stein had music lessons and sang with the Costa Rican Symphony Choir, and she was awarded a scholarship to attend Grinnell College in Iowa. Before she uprooted, she learned as much as possible in traditional guitar technique from the enclave of Latin-American artists who were living in San José at the time. “It was at a time when there were a lot of military dictatorships in Latin America, in the early to mid ’70s,” she recalls. “Costa Rica was a politically neutral country. A lot of the artists who were outspoken against governments, they were musicians. They were theater people. They were writers. They ended up in Costa Rica. I had a lot of mixed feelings about the States because of the United States’ involvement in supporting some of these governments that were making artists escape. But I was at the same time fascinated. It was just, you know, everybody wants to try to understand this country.”

“That’s the beginning of why I consciously connected to music,” she says, “though I studied biology and French. And as soon as I got my master’s in the sciences and horticulture, I decided to switch back to music and become a full-time musician. Those are the roots: rural upbringing and political. The timing of political upheaval in Latin America put me in the path of a deep connection with a large variety of Latin music styles.”

“It’s been home again to go [back] to music,” says Stein, who’s the founder and director of Artes Latinas, a consortium of several different ensembles.

Since 2019, she’s been involved with Moms Clean Air Force, who eventually asked her to join the EcoMadres initiative.

“This is a powerful group of women,” Stein tells Billboard Family, adding that they act on just the right balance between “the heart and the brain.” “I think it has to do with our work being centered on children. I mean, it keeps us vulnerable. We’re not afraid of being vulnerable as human beings while we’re being purposeful and organized and professional in our environmental work. The combination is very powerful.”

Stein says, “The Latino community, whether they still speak Spanish at home or not, or Portuguese … Whatever region or country — you know how diverse Latin America is, it’s incredibly diverse … But regardless of where we’re from, there’s one thing that we respond to, and that is music. In a visceral way.”

EcoMusica’s use of live performance at community outreach events concerning climate crisis has become “a tool to build trust in the Latino community,” she explains.

“This is a tool to start reaching the Latino and Latina community a little more widely than we had been, because that was also on the mind of Moms Clean Air Force at the time. How do we expand? How do we make our program relevant to Latino and Latina communities who are disproportionately affected by these things that we’re working on, the air pollution and the environmental justice issues and climate effects?”

The team’s hope is that the music naturally resonates with those most impacted by climate crisis.

As Stein points out, the group can “recognize the other reality is that the communities that are most impacted by the climate crisis and by pollution are people who for whom acting on climate is a luxury.”

“We have to understand this,” she says. “They’re not at the level of being able to devote 10 hours a week to fighting climate crisis. No, they just stopped at the supermarket and bought 30 bottles of bottled water feeding the problem that we’re having, because they’re afraid of the water pollution coming from their faucet. They just came home from working three jobs. How do we get them to sign a petition? The trust has to come first.”

Stein emphasizes that the environmental justice work they’re collectively doing “resonates with every member” of SonTierra, and praises each musician’s contributions.

“I want to say that what stands out to me is how remarkable every individual in the group is, and how honored I am to have them there because they’re not just good musicians,” says Stein. “And I’m talking about the 11-year-old girl. And I’m talking about this 18-year-old young woman and the 22-year-old young woman, and then us geezers … The rest of us are seasoned touring musicians. But each one of us has a purpose for being in SonTierra.”

Stein adds, “I would like to tell all the communities who read this: You don’t have to be Latino or Latina if you want to bring us to your community because you want to work on climate issues or environmental justice issues as a field organizer for EcoMadres and Mom’s Clean Air Force. If they want to invite SonTierra to the community, it doesn’t have to be a Latino community. It can be any community. It can be an African American community. It can be an African community. It can be an Asian community. It can be, you know, the Methodist Church in New York City.”

Those who wish to learn more, or to join Moms Clean Air Force’s fight against climate disruption, can find resources and learn about action points at the organization’s official website.