Chance The Rapper and Jason Moran will be delivering special tribute performances at The Gordon Parks Foundation Annual Awards Dinner and Auction, honoring boxing legend Muhammad Ali.

The gala is set for May 19 in NYC at Cipriani 42nd Street, and tickets are available, starting at $2,500. Proceeds from the evening will benefit the next generation of creatives through educational programming, fellowships, scholarships and prizes courtesy of The Gordon Parks Foundation.

“To be recognized in a space honoring Gordon Parks and Muhammad Ali is humbling. They told the truth through their work, and that’s always been the goal of mine too,” Chance tells Billboard. “The tribute to Ali is really about honoring that spirit and showing gratitude to his legacy.”

Chance is also among the list of honorees for the night, which includes Elizabeth Alexander, John Legend, Henry Taylor and Lonnie Ali (representing Muhammad Ali).

“It is an honor to work with The Gordon Parks Foundation because Parks truly understood the psyche of the musician,” Jason Moran adds to Billboard. “His sensitivity, not only with his camera, but with his ear.  He knows exactly when to snap the shutter, which informs the way he composes his music as well.  For Parks, the eye is also the ear, and the ear informs his eye.”

Former NFL star and activitst Colin Kaepernick will be a presenter alongside Darren Walker, Hank Willis Thomas, New York Times critic Salamishah Tillet and artist/photographer Deana Lawson.

It’s a star-studded group of co-chairs for the event that includes Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, Spike and Tonya Lee, Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor, Anderson Cooper, Malcolm Jenkins, as well as Crystal McCrary and Raymond McGuire.

The 2026 gala marks 20 years of celebrating the visionary photographer, Gordon Parks, through The Gordon Parks Foundation.

“Music played such an important role in Gordon’s life — he was a musician and celebrated composer as well as a photographer and filmmaker,” The Gordon Parks Foundation’s executive director Peter W. Kunhardt Jr. said in a statement. “To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we are thrilled that Chance The Rapper and our inaugural Gordon Parks Foundation Music Fellow Jason Moran will each pay tribute to the legacies of Gordon Parks and Muhammad Ali by performing on May 19. They both embody Gordon Parks’ belief that art can change the world.”

Hailee Steinfeld and Josh Allen are parents! The couple announced the birth of their first child on Thursday (April 2).

In a post titled “Special delivery” on her Beau Society newsletter, the singer-actress shared the news on Substack. “Our baby girl has arrived!!” she wrote. “We’re feeling incredibly grateful and blessed and savoring these early moments.”

She added, “Thank you so much for the love and well wishes.”

The pair’s first child arrives less than four months after they announced they were expecting in December. At the time, Steinfeld and the Buffalo Bills quarterback shared a joint video on Instagram showing off the Sinners star’s baby bump in the snow. In January, she stepped out at the Golden Globes with her “newest plus one” — as she wrote on Instagram with photos of her pink gown — and in February, she gave followers an update with a photo of herself sitting on a kitchen island with her bump on display, giggling with Allen.

Steinfeld and the football pro first started dating in spring 2023. They tied the knot in May 2025, just a few months after Allen proposed in November of the year prior.

The Pitch Perfect 2 alum has released several batches of music over the years, notching five entries on the Billboard Hot 100 since debut single “Love Myself” reached No. 30 on the chart in 2015. Her EP charted on the Billboard 200 that same year.

She’s also worked on music for a number of her screen projects, including four-time Oscar winner Sinners, for which she contributed the track “Dangerous.” She told Billboard a year ago, “Blending music and acting like this feels like the fullest expression of who I am. It’s rare to have a project that lets you show up completely — and Sinners gave me that.”

Saweetie is taking her talents to the IDL. While she won’t be competing in the International Dance League, the Bay Area native is set to perform at the league’s inaugural event in New York City on May 2.

Tickets to the Hammerstein Ballroom competition are available on the IDL website for $44.99 to $64.99 plus taxes and fees. The event will bring six teams from across the globe, boasting various styles, to compete for the top spot.

“Movement is alchemy. You take something you feel, something you can’t even name, and you turn it into something people can see and feel across the world,” Saweetie said in a statement. “That’s what these dancers do. That’s what I try to do with music. IDL is putting both of those things on the same stage and I’m here for it.”

Clashing culture, competition and community, the six dance teams heading to NYC include Brotherhood (Vancouver), Quick Style (Oslo), Jam Republic (Singapore), GRV (Los Angeles), Royal Family (Auckland) and 1Million (Seoul).

“Dancers have been choreographing to Saweetie’s music for years. There’s a reason for that, the music moves,” said Connor Lim, cofounder and CEO of IDL, in a statement. “Having her halftime our first event in New York felt like a natural fit, the music and the moment line up perfectly.”

Following New York City’s season kickoff, the IDL will be making stops in Vancouver, B.C. (May 23), Sydney (June 20), Seoul (Aug. 1) and Los Angeles (Sept. 20).

On the music side, Saweetie hasn’t released a single yet in 2026. Back in August, the “My Type” rapper dropped her Hella Pressure EP.

This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2006 Week continues here with a look back at the brief (and possibly media-created) sensation that was the U.K.’s new rave movement, kicked off in ’06 with a pair of breakout singles from London dance-rock group Klaxons.

The 2008 BRIT Awards were something of a fever dream. For anyone who had spent the past two years living through the new rave era – a short-lived, chaotic fusion of electronica and indie-rock – it would have been vindicating to see Rihanna up on stage performing “Umbrella,” a global No. 1 smash, backed by Klaxons, the scene’s leading and most recognisable name. After all the jokes, the parties and glowsticks, the scrappy scene proved it could go toe-to-toe with pop megastars – before falling apart completely.

The seeds for this madness were sown in 2006. That was the year that the term new rave (or nu rave, as it was often styled) entered the British lexicon, and when bands like Klaxons, Late of The Pier and New Young Pony Club provided a garish alternative to Arctic Monkeys’ buttoned-down indie-rock. New rave shared many of the hallmarks of electroclash and dance-punk, two similarly frenetic and enlivening subgenres that had success on both sides of the Atlantic and throughout Europe.

In recent years, new rave has been one of the micro-genres swallowed up by the catch-all ‘indie sleaze’ label. The latter has been applied retroactively to a number of bands, artists and fashion styles that appeared in Lizzy Goodman’s totemic Meet Me in the Bathroom — an oral history of New York’s post-9/11 rock revival — and renewed interest in several of the acts. Though that book focused on the New York scene, British acts from the era were soon included into the “indie sleaze” aesthetic with Bloc Party, The Libertines and Franz Ferdinand among them.

New rave, however, provided an alternative to the trilby hats, leather jackets and winklepickers from acts looking to capture the same spirit as the post-punk bands of the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Instead they paid homage to the U.K. rave scene during 1989’s “Second Summer of Love,” and its attire was vibrant and a fusion of mid-00s high-street fashion (Topshop, H&M) with nods to ‘70s psych style. Glowsticks were worn as accessories. The more neon shades you could wear at once, the better. It was bold, silly and, according to the people who were there, barely even a scene at all.

Klaxons, formed by Jamie Reynolds, James Righton and Simon Taylor-Davis, were at the heart of it. The invention of the term was, in their own words, a ploy to give the music press a story to latch on to. “The whole idea of new rave was to take the piss out of the media by making them talk about something that didn’t exist, just for our own amusement,” founding member Reynolds told MTV.

But for journalists in the U.K., particularly at new music-focused weekly NME, it was an opportunity to create excitement for readers and bring together disparate artists, parties and characters into an umbrella term. A compelling narrative, particularly one that a title tries to own, is a shrewd way to shift magazines, however tenuous it may feel.

Speaking to Daniel Dylan Wray for his authoritative oral history in Vice, the paper’s former editor Connor McNicholas said: “People underestimate just how much the music press was driving forward these things. People always say to me I was incredibly lucky that there was so much going on during the time I was NME editor. And I’m like, “Are you f–king kidding me? We built that s–t.”

For Klaxons, 2006 was the start of their breakthrough moment. The group released their thundering debut single “Gravity’s Rainbow” in March 2006, which eventually landed at No. 35 on the U.K. Singles Chart, with follow-up “Atlantis to Interzone” (which the Billboard staff’s just named one of the year’s 100 best songs) arriving in June. Both were bombastic, intense and nailed the often-daunting task: a rock band matching the intensity of dance music. Following radio plays by influential DJs on British radio like Zane Lowe, Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley, and the release of their Xan Valleys EP, the group landed a deal with Polydor Records. 

In August the group played a fervent show at Reading & Leeds Festival, a rite of passage in the U.K. for post-exam students. It was music that felt thoroughly modern and fun and buzzed with electricity, and captured those who liked moshing to guitars, and those who wanted to drop a pill and cut some shapes on the dancefloor. Many soon graduated to Erol Alkan’s popular club night Trash, held in London from 1997 to 2007, which helped outsiders find a home and connect artists.

In late 2006, NME’s New Rave Revolution tour – a riff on the New Rock Revolution tag initially attributed to many of the acts featured in MMITB – starred Klaxons, Shitdisco and Datarock and took the sound to students across the U.K. Channel 4’s zeitgeisty teen drama Skins, which showcased scenes of debauched parties soundtracked to cutting-edge music, only added to the mystique and plausibility of the new rave title.

While those within the sub-genre bristled at the label, the fashion styles and inclusive spirit created a low barrier for entry. Alkan told Vice, “I try to think of what it’s like to be a kid in the middle of nowhere, reading about something and seeing there’s some kind of movement they can relate to. It can be exciting for people on the outside looking in.”

In January 2007, Klaxons released their debut album Myths of the Near Future which landed at No. 2 on the U.K.’s Official Albums Chart. The band’s profile in mainstream platforms was growing, and a year before their BRITs performance, saw them bring pop into their own world with a cover of Justin Timberlake and T.I.’s Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “My Love.” 

They would go on to win the U.K.’s acclaimed Mercury Prize in October of that year, but the group grew weary of their associations with the term. What started as an inside joke soon had been blown up and was outside of their control. In November, the group banned glowsticks from their show at London’s Brixton Academy and acts like CSS distanced themselves from the name, feeling that their work was being restricted. Journalists, too, turned on it quickly with The Guardian’s John Harris labelling acts like Klaxons and Shitdisco as “old rubbish.”

Like most underground music scenes, the end is swift. The genre’s defining throughline – party all the time – eventually had a detrimental effect. Drugs, predictably, played a role in the creative breakdown as did changing trends. After shifting over 350,000 copies of their debut, Klaxons’ 2010 follow-up Surfing the Void came too late and the dance scene had moved onto dubstep and EDM. Pointedly, the New Rave Revolution tour did not come around again in the following years and by February 2007, NME had already rebranded it to the Indie Rave tour.

Speaking to Loud & Quiet, Righton said that the new rave tag was a “death knell” from the start and they knew they couldn’t “ever live up to the level of expectation.” The group frittered away their label’s cash and several albums worth of material as their momentum stalled. The global financial crisis in 2008 brought in years of austerity in the U.K. and the relatively carefree moment of the mid-’00s felt abrupt. Singer-songwriters with sparse set-ups such as Ed Sheeran and James Blake felt more apt for the era.

By the time Klaxons hit the BRITs stage, the moment was already coming to an end. New rave’s legacy is confusing, disputed and loathed in equal-measure. But for a brief window, it was electrifying and unique for a new generation of music fans and even Rihanna. Speaking on BBC 6 Music, post-performance Rihanna called the collaboration and sound “really different, very cool, and unexpected.” We’re with you, RiRi.