Kendrick Lamar was the big winner at the 2023 BET Hip Hop Awards, winning in four categories – hip hop artist of the year, best live performer, lyricist of the year and, with his creative partner Dave Free, video director of the year.

Lamar made history with all four of these wins. He is the first artist to win hip hop artist of the year three times. He won best live performer for the fourth time, tying Kanye West and Jay-Z for the most wins in the category. He won lyricist of the year for the ninth time, extending his lead for the most wins in the category. Lamar and Free won best video director of the year for the second year in a row, becoming the first directors to win back-to-back awards in that category since Hype Williams won four years running from 2009-12.

The BET Hip Hop Awards were taped last week at the Cobb Energy Center in Atlanta and aired on BET on Tuesday (Oct. 10). There will be an encore airing Tuesday at midnight ET on BET.

Lamar wasn’t the only big winner at the show. Two successful collaborations, Drake & 21 Savage and Lil Durk featuring J. Cole, each won two awards, as did Lil Uzi Vert and Metro Boomin.

Her Loss by Drake & 21 Savage, which topped the Billboard 200 in November 2022, won hip hop album of the year. It’s the third collaboration to win in that category, following Jay-Z & Kanye West’s Watch the Throne (2012) and Beyoncé & Jay-Z’s Everything Is Love (2018). Drake & 21 Savage also won best duo or group.

Lil Uzi Vert’s “Just Wanna Rock,” which reached No. 10 on the Hot 100, won song of the year, beating a pair of songs that were notably bigger crossover hits – “All My Life” by Lil Durk featuring J. Cole and “Rich Flex” by Drake & 21 Savage, both of which reached No. 2. “Just Wanna Rock” also won best hip hop video.

But “All My Life” won two other awards — best collaboration and impact track, which is presented to a “song that moves our culture forward with social commentary, political discourse or other thought-provoking lyrics.” This was J. Cole’s record fourth win for impact track. He previously won for “Crooked Smile” featuring TLC, “Love Yours” and Middle Child.”

Metro Boomin became the first producer to win producer of the year three times. He previously won in 2015 and 2017. Kanye West, DJ Mustard and Hit-Boy have each won twice in the category.

Ice Spice won best breakthrough hip hop artist. GloRilla won in the category last year. This marks the first time that women have won back-to-back awards in this category.

Ice Spice is expected to receive a Grammy nomination for best new artist when the nominations for the 66th annual Grammy Awards are announced on Nov. 10. Four former winners of the BET breakthrough award (it has gone by various names over the years) have received Grammy nods for best new artist – Drake, Nicki Minaj, Iggy Azalea and Chance the Rapper (who went on to win the Grammy).

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Halsey is taking on a new role. The Grammy-nominated singer has signed on to star as Sally in a live production of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

The three-night concert event — celebrating the movie’s 30th anniversary — will be held at the Hollywood Bowl from Oct. 27-29.

Halsey will portray Sally for the first two nights of the production, starting on Oct. 27. Katherine O’ Hara, who voiced the character in the original film, will reprise the role on Oct. 29, Variety reported Monday (Oct. 9).

Tickets to the concert are available at Ticketmaster, Vivid Seats, Stub Hub, HollywoodBowl.com and other ticketing sites. Pricing ranges from approximately $75-$85 for the cheapest seats.

Tickets for the terrace and garden area range from approximately $350-$600, but you might be able to find tickets for around $200 (at Vivid Seats). Some of the tickets for the pool circle, located closest to the stage, are priced above $600.

Danny Elfman also returns to The Nightmare Before Christmas live concert as Jack Skellington. Elfman composed the music for the 1993 stop-motion film, which centers around Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town. The Nightmare Before Christmas concert will feature a live orchestra led by conductor John Mauceri. 

Special guests include Saturday Night Live alum Fred Armison as Lock and Ken Page as Oogie Boogie. More special guests are expected to be announced at a later date.

The Nightmare Before Christmas live concert has welcomed other recording stars in the past. Billie Eilish graced the stage as Sally in 2021.

If you’re unable to the make it to the Hollywood Bowl, you can probably find a Nightmare Before Christmas production or concert in your area for Halloween and the holidays. Click here to see more productions in Atlanta, Staten Island, N.Y., and other cities.

The Nightmare Before Christmas returns to theaters for its 30th anniversary on Oct. 20 (get movie tickets here). Additionally, the movie will air on ABC on Oct. 22 at 6 p.m.

If you don’t have access to local channels, you can watch the broadcast with an HD antenna, or subscribe to Hulu + Live TV ($49.99/month for a limited time), DirecTV (free trial included) and other streamers that provide live channels.

Where is The Nightmare Before Christmas streaming? Watch it free with a subscription to Disney+ or rent a digital copy through platforms such as Prime Video and Apple TV (it’s also available on Blu-ray).

Halloween is the perfect time to bust out some Nightmare Before Christmas merch, and Amazon has more than enough must-haves for fans of the franchise. Shop spooky decorations, Halloween costumes, clothing, Funko Pop! figurines and other collectibles such as the Little People’s Collector’s Set ($25), this Nightmare Before Christmas Cuckoo Clock ($250) and more at Amazon.

On Saturday, Bruno Mars was set to become the third American artist ever to perform two sold out concerts at the 70,000-capacity HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv, Israel — following Madonna in 2009 and Michael Jackson in 1993.

He played his first show there last Wednesday with two Tel Aviv acts opening, running nearly four hours in total. Both shows were promoted by Bluestone Group, which is owned by Live Nation Israel.

“I say Tel Aviv!” Mars shouted to the audience. “The Hooligans made it to Israel – thank you so guys so much for coming out,” Mars told fans after opening his show with his hit 2016 song “24k Magic.”

Mars’ Saturday show was supposed to be the second-to-last date on a brief world tour that previously stopped in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Oct. 1 and was headed to Doha, Qatar, for an Oct. 8 show to follow the Formula 1 Qatar Grand Prix.

Early Saturday, though, reports began to circulate of a coordinated Hamas-led terrorist attack that would escalate the ongoing Israel-Palestinian conflict. Later that day, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on television and declared that his country was now “at war” with Hamas. By afternoon, Live Nation Israel issued a statement that the concert was canceled. (The following day, Mars also cancelled his planned Doha concert.)

“All ticket purchases to the show will receive an automatic refund to the credit card through which the purchase was made,” said a statement that Bluestone Group shared online.

Securing the venue, located inside Tel Aviv’s one-and-a-half-square mile Yarkon Park, along the banks of the Yarkon River, during active fighting would present unnecessary risks to concertgoers, a source tells Billboard, noting that the decision to cancel was made a few hours after the attacks began that morning. By 2 p.m., Bruno Mars and his 60-person crew were at Ben Gurion Airport, where they boarded a flight to Athens.

From Athens, Mars was supposed to travel to Doha for his performance, but he was reportedly unable to pack up and transport his production gear out of Israel in time for that performance. On Sunday, hours before he was scheduled to take the stage in Doha, Lusail International Circuit racetrack announced on Instagram that Mars would not perform, and that French producer and artist DJ Snake would take his place.

Mars’ concert cancellation represents a symbolic setback for Israel’s touring business. For more than a decade, artists announcing plans to perform in the country faced harsh public criticism from activists and artists like Roger Waters and Brian Eno, who urged musicians to boycott the country over what they describe as its unjust treatment of the Palestinians.

In 2018, Lana Del Rey was booked to headline the Meteor Music Festival when Waters urged her to reconsider. (Her trip fell apart due to scheduling issues.) Waters, a proponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Palestinian-led campaign to isolate Israel, has also targeted Radiohead, Bon Jovi and Jennifer Lopez, albeit unsuccessfully.

New generation promoters like Tel Aviv-based Bluestone Group — which Live Nation bought in 2017 as a joint venture of several investors, including Maverick’s Guy Oseary — has worked to increase the potential gross artists can make playing Israel, while also helping them to navigate anti-Israel backlash. In 2023, the country hosted a number of top tier Western acts including Imagine Dragons, Tiesto, Ozuna, Christina Aguilera, the Black Keys and Guns N’ Roses.

An artist manager who had several acts scheduled to play the Paralello Universo festival in Re’im, Israel, near the Gaza Strip, and who was there during the attack on the festival, describes a scene of chaos and terror.

Raz Gaster had multiple artists playing the electronic music festival, where at least 260 people were killed and others were abducted amid an attack by Hamas operatives Saturday (Oct. 7).

Gaster arrived on site at the festival event at approximately 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, with the party — which had started the night prior — meant to go until approximately 5 p.m. Saturday evening. An offshoot of the Paralello Universo festival brand started in Brazil nearly 20 years ago; the Israel event was called Supernova Sukkot Gathering after the Jewish holiday and was hosting several thousand attendees in a rural location near the Gaza Strip, with a lineup focused on the electronic psytrance genre.

Everything changed, though, when rockets and missiles launched from the Gaza Strip by Hamas starting landing on the site an hour later, part of a widespread attack on Israel.  

“Around 6:30 in the morning we started hearing explosions,” Gaster says. “We went out of the backstage and we saw a full bombardment everywhere. It was hundreds of rockets and mortars flying from everywhere and explosions all around us.”  

Gaster says that at this point, festival security advised everyone to get down on the floor and put their hands above their heads for protection. But after 5-10 minutes, Gaster says, “the policemen shouted in the microphones, ‘Okay, get in your cars and go.’” 

“The moment the policemen said ‘go now,’ I ran,” Gaster recalls. “I didn’t wait, because we know it’s a rocket attack. You need to act quick.”  

Because his car was parked near the stage very close to where he was standing, Gaster and three other men — including Universo Paralello co-founder Juarez Petrillo — were able to immediately get in Gaster’s car and drive out minutes later, after Gaster made sure the artists he works with were also in vehicles fleeing the site.

Gaster says he was “driving super fast, not stopping for anything, even when missiles are coming down. My instinct told me don’t stop for shelter, just drive… We drove so fast we didn’t even know what was happening.” 

By the time Gaster and the others made it to a villa rented by the production team, located approximately 30 kilometers away from the festival, they had started getting texts and phone calls telling them that minutes after they drove away from the site, Hamas fighters had arrived “with machine guns, with RPGs, with grenades, and just slaughtered whoever they could.”

He says that these attackers arrived by motorcycles, quads and trucks approximately 20 minutes after missiles started landing. 

Gaster and those he was with turned the villa into a command center, contacting IDF, other Israeli security services and “all of our friends that we know personally that have firearms that have connections that can go there.”  

During this time he and the others were receiving messages from friends and colleagues still on site, who reported that the attackers were shooting attendees in their cars as they attempted to drive away. A friend of Gaster’s messaged to say that the driver of her car had been shot and that she and another friend were pretending to be dead to avoid being killed. He says these women ultimately played dead for five hours before being rescued. As of Sunday (Oct. 8), Israeli rescue service Zaka has reported at least 260 bodies at the site.

“People were hiding in ditches, hiding in bushes, hiding in the woods, hiding wherever you can think of,” says Gaster. “We were getting horrible messages from friends saying, ‘Please help us, they are shooting people next to us.’” 

Gaster says it took IDF and special forces a few hours to arrive on site, with those who were there attempting to defend themselves in the meantime.  

“At the party there was already a police force, like any licensed party,” Gaster says, “and they were the first ones to try to give assistance by fighting… We are Israelites, so most of us have military experience, and a few from the production managed to kill some terrorists with their bare hands and their weapons.”  

Gaster says that the owner of the production company behind the festival, Nova Tribe, killed two of the attackers after taking their guns. Gaster says he and the team at the production villa were being sent on-site locations from various attendees and then sending these locations to the owner, who then went to help these attendees.  

“It was 24 hours of working to find as many people as we could and get as many signs of life as we could,” says Gaster.  

Universo Paralello was not origintally intended to take place at the Re’im site, with organizers moving it to this location only two days before it started, when another site in southern Israel fell through. The new site at Re’im featured a pair of stages, with the Israeli producer Artifex playing the mainstage when the attack started. Gaster was told that the attackers closed the road into the festival from both sides so attendees could not escape.  

Other festival attendees have been abducted by Hamas. As a group of between 15-20 people gathered at the production villa, they, says Gaster, “started seeing videos on social media of hostages and people we know that are kidnapped and bodies we could recognize [as] our friends. Many friends are still missing, and we still don’t know where they are.” 

He approximates that there are still 600-700 people missing from the party. All but one artist on the festival lineup has left Israel, with Gaster and others putting artists on any available flight into Europe as airlines canceled flights amid the attacks.

While Gaster had just arrived to his home in the north of Israel when Billboard spoke with him at around 1 a.m. local Israeli time (he says the IDF controls most of the area between where he was and where he lives, so he felt safe to drive home), he says that amid the chaos they are all “still trying to find any signs of life.”

“We are a peaceful community, we are a musical community, we do it for the creation of fun,” says Gaster. “We only wanted to dance and have a good time and enjoy music together, and it turned into a nightmare.”