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Everyone has that wacky aunt (or uncle) who love to tell jokes or do weird impressions at Thanksgiving. But not everyone has an aunt who also happens to be one of the most famous cartoon voice actors of all time. And for sure not everyone in that family also happens to be a chart-topping pop superstar.
Thanks to a TikTok video answering a fan question wondering if Sabrina Carpenter is indeed her niece, the world learned this week that Emmy-winner Nancy Cartwright — the voice of the lovable short-pants mischief maker Bart Simpson for more than 35 years — is indeed the “Please Please Please” singer’s aunt.
“Is Sabrina Carpenter your niece?” Cartwright said in the 17-second clip in which she posted a snap of her with the singer featuring the caption “yeah, absolutely.”
“Isn’t that amazing when you find out that somebody that maybe you’ve known me for a little while doing this little 10-year-old boy for like 35-some years and some of you guys for, like, way less than that find out that I’m related to this like superstar,” Cartwright, 66, said. “She’s pretty amazing.” Cartwright has voiced Simpson since the longest-running animated sitcom started airing on Fox in 1989 and in addition to Bart she also supplies the voices of Maggie Simpson, Ralph Wiggum, Todd Flanders and Nelson Muntz.
The comments on Cartwright’s video were evidence of the mind-blowing nature of the revelation, including, “Sabrina Carpenter is related to Bart Simpson, Ay, caramba!,” “Can we hear Bart sing espresso?! PLEASEEEEE,” “But why does Sabrina being related to Bart Simpson makes so much sense??? it really is a family attitude” and “I love the proud Aunt vibes.”
Voice acting seems to run in the family, as the former Girl Meets World star whose Short n’ Sweet album is due out on August 23 has also done some cartoon voice work on series including Phineas and Ferb and Milo Murphy’s Law among others.
Watch Cartwright’s video below.
The Lijadu Sisters and Numero Group have signed an expansive new partnership that seeks to bring justice to the legendary Nigerian duo’s catalog, it was announced on Wednesday (July 10).
Composed of identical twin sisters Taiwo and Kehinde Lijadu — who are second cousins to Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti — the Lijadu Sisters arose as fearless and groundbreaking leaders in the male-dominated Nigerian pop music scene. The duo fused Afrobeat, pop, psychedelic rock, reggae, disco and jazz music with messages about gender equality, government corruption, love and more in both English and Yoruba. They toured with Nigerian jùjú musician King Sunny Adé, David Byrne, Ginger Baker and Art Blakey and, during a 2014 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, performed in the Atomic Bomb! band tribute to Nigerian musician William Onyeabor.
The sisters, whose alté ethos paved the way for modern female African artists like Amaarae and Tems, released five albums in the 1970s under Decca Records’ Afrodisia imprint. That was followed by Double Trouble, a 1984 compilation featuring hits from those albums released by Shanachie Records. The Nigerian duo later signed a 10-year licensing agreement with Knitting Factory Records around 2011, according to a recent Rolling Stone profile, with four albums being reissued under the deal. They regained control of their catalog in 2021, two years after Kehinde died of metastatic breast cancer at age 71.
While their work has inspired a wide range of artists, according to the Rolling Stone profile, the sisters’ music and likeness has been exploited for decades and they’ve struggled with copyright infringements and unpaid royalties. Nas‘ “Life’s Gone Low” track from his 2006 The Prophecy, Vol 2: The Beginning of the N mixtape contains an uncredited sample of the duo’s “Life’s Gone Down Low” from their 1976 album Danger. And Taiwo’s current manager, Eric Welles-Nyström, told Rolling Stone that Ayra Starr failed to properly clear “Orere-Elejigbo,” a song from the sisters’ 1979 album Horizon Unlimited that Starr sampled on her 2021 track “Sare”. He added that they’ve found more than 50 total infringements of the sisters’ work to date.
The new partnership with Numero Group is meant to honor the duo’s legacy through the launch of a multi-year, multi-record reissue campaign to finally — and rightfully — bring their entire discography to the masses.
Kicking off the campaign will be the release of a remastered and restored version of Horizon Unlimited, which contains the hit “Come On Home.” Five-time Grammy-winning engineer Michael Graves, who remastered Blondie‘s Against The Odds: 1974-1982 and Written In Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos, is remastering the six-track album, which is currently available on DSPs and will be re-released on CD and vinyl on Sept. 20. The album’s physical packaging will include the first-ever transcription of the record’s lyrics in both Yoruba and English along with corrected album credits, original artwork and more.
Numero Group will eventually reissue all of the band’s albums as well as a collection of rediscovered, previously unavailable singles, promo EPs and rare recordings.
“I think one of the most exciting things about the reintroduction of Horizon Unlimited is the fact that young folk love our music and are surprised at the upbeat tempo and the lyrics, which are not only of today, but also very futuristic as well,” said Taiwo in a press release. “Horizon Unlimited was our last album with Decca that came out in 1979. It’s been a long time since then and this really is part of a much longer story, but amongst one of the most significant things I remember was that we, The Lijadu Sisters, paid for all the studio and band session fees. At the time, this was unusual, and not the arrangement we had with that record label. We were originally meant to record at Decca West Africa in Lagos, but when we got to the studio, no one had told us that it was being upgraded — from eight tracks to 24. So we brought everyone to London and made the album there instead.”
The Lijadu Sisters’ partnership with Numero Group “is allowing us to reach out to younger people. What’s going to come is creative collaborations with their music or their story, working with filmmakers and writers, trying to set stuff up creatively for Taiwo and younger artists,” Taiwo’s current manager, Eric Welles-Nyström, told Rolling Stone.
There’s no way around it. The music industry, with all its boundless nooks and crannies, will say farewell to many behind-the-scenes players over the course of 2024. From corporate executives of all stripes, to agents, managers and live promoters, to deal-making lawyers and policy-influencing lobbyists, and studio producers and other knob-twisters and songwriters, they are all part of the fabric of music.
To honor those who have passed on, we’re highlighting these often-unsung individuals who’ve left a lasting impression across every aspect of the business. In the first half of 2024, we’ve lost important figures including exacting rock engineer Steve Albini, MTV pioneer Gale Sparrow, The Fader co-founder Rob Stone, consequential lawyer Leon Wildes, a pair of BBC Radio icons, an inventor of one of music’s weirdest devices and the Svengali-like figure who gave the world Milli Vanilli.
Here are the industry players we’ve lost in 2024:
While you all are busy playing checkers on your phones, Eminem is playing multi-dimensional chess on his Apple Vision Pro headset. How do we know? Enterprising Stans went back to check the tape this week on an ad Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg released in February to promote their Gin & Juice cocktails in which the pair paid homage to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction while seemingly prepping the runway for Em’s upcoming album, The Death Of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce).
In the two-minute spot the old friends and collaborators are dressed in black suits like the iconic film’s hitmen, Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), as they sit in a car at night and argue about doing what Snoop calls “this same dumb a– s–t again.” When Dre opens the trunk, an annoyed Snoop asks, “what the f–k am I supposed to do with this s–t?” as he stares at something in the car’s trunk that we never see.
They proceed to put on black leather gloves and grab what appears to be a body bag and shovel out of the trunk, burying the unseen corpse in a woodland grave and then enjoying a celebratory can of their new favorite beverage (and a blunt for Snoop, of course) before things go south. At the time, one commenter on Dre’s X post of the G&J teaser quipped, “I was waiting for Eminem to jump out of the trunk.”
On Wednesday (July 10), Eminem revealed the track list for the mortality-obsessed album due out on Friday (July 12) featuring 19 tracks that appear to touch on themes including death, rebirth, evil and resolution via tracks titled “Lucifer,” “Evil,” “Antichrist,” “Somebody Save Me” and “Temporary.” The cover art is in keeping with the death becomes Em theme, as it features Slim Shady’s head peeking out of a body bag with one eye wide open and a terrified look on his face. The album is also slated to feature “Guilty Conscience 2,” a sequel to the 1999 hit featuring Dre; for now it’s unclear if the good doctor will appear on the new track.
At press time a spokesperson for Eminem had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment about the fan speculation.
Watch the Gin & Juice ad below and see if you buy the theory.
After Pearl Jam were forced to cancel shows in Berlin and London last week due to an unspecified illness affecting band members, singer Eddie Vedder opened up about what he described as a “near-death experience” during their return to stage in Barcelona over the weekend.
In video posted by fans, Vedder, 59, talked about the scary situation without revealing specific details of what the ailment was. “Can I just say that last week almost felt like a near-death experience?,” Vedder said during the show at Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona. “It was very uncomfortable, and it got frightening. It felt like chest bronchitis. It felt like maybe you couldn’t breathe, and maybe you wouldn’t make it through the night, and maybe you’d have to go to the hospital.”
After calling off a show at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London on June 29, the band subsequently cancelled a two-night stand at the Waldbühne in Berlin.
Though Vedder didn’t say who in the band was affected other than a “few of us,” he came clean about what a profound impact the health scare had on him. “You just realize how precious this life is,” he said. “How lucky we are to have been living on a planet where we can go around and play to incredible people like the people in this room here tonight. So, it was a poignant experience. I won’t be forgetting it anytime soon. And we won’t be forgetting tonight anytime soon.”
Last week, Pearl Jam announced the show cancellations in a statement, writing on social media, “Despite everyone’s best efforts, the band has yet to make a full recovery. The impacts of this decision are not lost on us. We feel deeply that so many people spend their time, money and emotional energy to get tickets and then to come see the band, and it is heart-wrenching to have to disappoint you. We also appreciate the many people whose hard work goes into making these shows happen.”
The band’s next show is at the Mad Cool Festival in Madrid, Spain on Thursday (July 11). After a gig in Portugal on July 13, the band will have a month off before picking their Dark Matter world tour up again on August 22 in Missoula, MT.
Watch fan video of Veddder’s comments below.
