After Wednesday night’s (Sept. 11) VMAs ceremony treated viewers to performances by Megan Thee Stallion, Eminem, GloRilla, DJ Khaled, Fat Joe, and a special Def Jam 40th Anniversary medley featuring LL Cool J and Public Enemy, the past weekend in hip-hop and R&B had a lot to live up to.

Playboi Carti and The Weeknd both launched their new eras with the release of their lead singles “All Red” and “Dancing In The Flames,” respectively; Nicki Minaj announced a forthcoming third installment of her Pink Friday album series; and NYC banded together at the Apollo Theater to honor the life of Grammy-winning Harlem native Fatman Scoop (Sept. 12). It’s been a heavy few weeks for the world of hip-hop and R&B, with the losses of Scoop, Rich Homie Quan, Frankie Beverly and Tito Jackson hitting the community in quick succession.

With Fresh Picks, Billboard aims to highlight some of the best and most interesting new sounds across R&B and hip-hop — from Leon Thomas and Ty Dolla $ign’s scorching new duet to Jdot Breezy’s emotional new track. Be sure to check out this week’s Fresh Picks in our Spotify playlist below.

Freshest Find: Leon Thomas & Ty Dolla $ign, “Far Fetched”

Is it really toxic if you’re up front about it? With their latest collaboration, Leon Thomas and Ty Dolla $ign lay all of their cards on the table, and that commitment to honesty ultimately trumps the darkest parts of those cards. “She got dreams of love and marriage/ But that’s far-fetched, far-fetched/ ‘Cause if we don’t work out, girl, that’s a large check,” Thomas explains over a heavily percussive beat peppered with electric guitar and morose piano, courtesy of Oshi and Thomas himself. Ty smoothly slides in with a verse of his own that recounts all the money he’s put up for this lady, but there’s a hint of exasperation in his tone that calls back to Thomas’ overarching message: anything beyond the current state of this relationship isn’t feasible. “Far Fetched” follows “Mutt” as the second single from Thomas’ forthcoming Mutt LP, giving him two standout singles in a row.

Jay Swishes, “Mona Lisa”

On this Afrobeats-infused hip-hop joint, Ontario-born, Brooklyn-raised rapper Jay Swishes sings the praises of a woman so beautiful her only point of comparison is the Mona Lisa. “Melanin hit her like the sun, her complexion/ 5’2,” one not the two, no contestant/ She a lil freak, we Minaj with her best friend,” he sing-raps before dipping into a more dancehall-adjacent cadence, with X-rated bars like, “Make her suck pon di c–ky like breadfruit/ Put mi wood inna her belly, don’t run.” Accented by shimmering synths and fingerpicked guitar, “Mona Lisa” combines different elements from the year’s hottest sounds into one sultry banger.

Yolanda Adams, “On God”

Last week (Sept. 13), gospel icon Yolanda Adams dropped off Sunny Days her first studio album in 13 years, and she wasted no time to get things started with the terrific opener, “On God.” A sleek mélange of contemporary R&B and gospel, “On God” finds Adam honoring the Man Above for all of the times he showed up for her — even when times looked especially dark. “That’s my God, that’s my Rock, that’s my King, my Messiah/ Gave His all for mе/ He made a way out of no way/ That’s on God, on God, on God, on God, on God,” she croons over a sparkling R&B-infused arrangement crafted by John Jackson and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis.

Ray Vaughn & SiR, “Everybody Dies”

The Top Dawg Entertainment rapper wastes no bars with his layered messaging. “Everybody Dies” is a sobering reality and Ray Vaughn confronts a cross-roads in his life while internally grappling with if the juice is worth the squeeze when attempting to conquer your dreams. SiR takes the baton and angelically croons on the soulful chorus as he asserts his legacy will live on long after his physical existence on earth is over. With a handful of singles under his belt in 2024, it’s gotta be album time for Vaughn. 

Babyface Ray & Hunxho, “Delusional”

Babyface Ray is The Kid That Did It. The Detroit spitter narrates his rags to riches story with his fourth studio album. “Delusional” serves as a project standout and the first team-up between Ray and Hunxho. A certain woman in Babyface’s life is using him, but he doesn’t even care at this point as he’s blinded by her beauty. Love can make you do crazy things and Hunxho promises to ink her name on his body so she knows it’s real. “I’m stuck on you, get a new b—h and look for you underneath/ I don’t even put names on my body, but I put you on my neck,” he raps with a heavy dose of AutoTune. 

Jdot Breezy, “Heart of Flames”

It’s a game of fire and ice. If Rod Wave has his “Heart on Ice,” Jdot Breezy flips the script with “Heart of Flames” to serve as his apologetic Sorry I Took Long project opener. The Florida rapper vulnerably opens up about going to great lengths to win over a potential girlfriend. While he fits into the melodic rap landscape, Breezy has an old soul with shout-outs to Phil Jackson and shrewd wordplay referencing Morgan Freeman’s 1989 film Lean on Me. Look for Jdot to hit the road with his woozy tunes for the Straight Madness Tour next month.

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Calling all Bachelor Nation fans! Get ready to watch Joan Vassos’ journey to find love as the first star of The Golden Bachelorette, premiering Wednesday night (Sept. 18) at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

Vassos quickly became a fan favorite on the first season of The Golden Bachelor. Despite her strong connection with Golden Bachelor star Gerry Turner, she made the difficult decision to leave the show to address a medical issue involving her daughter.

Now, it’s Vassos’ turn to find the love of her life. “For the first time in Bachelor franchise history, 24 seasoned men in the prime of their lives will roll up their sleeves and step into the spotlight, all vying to make a lasting impression on Golden Bachelorette Joan Vassos,” ABC shared in a press release.

Jesse Palmer returns as host of the new season. In July, the former Bachelor star posted a photo on Instagram featuring himself and Vasso in front of the iconic Bachelor Mansion with the caption, “It’s been a busy summer.”

Keep reading for details on how to watch the first season of The Golden Bachelorette.

How to Watch The Golden Bachelorette Online for Free

The first season of The Golden Bachelorette airs Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC, and streams on Hulu the following day.

If you have cable, you can catch The Golden Bachelorette on your local ABC affiliate. For those without cable, ABC can be streamed online via ABC.com with a provider login. You can also access ABC through free trials from DirecTV Stream, fuboTV or SlingTV (and Express VPN or Pure VPN, if you’re outside of the U.S.). With these options, you’ll be able to watch the latest Bachelorette season live on TV or stream from your laptop, tablet or phone.

Fubo and DirecTV Stream offer free trials for up to a week (plans start at $75-$85/month). DirecTV Stream’s most affordable plan, the Entertainment package, comes with 90+ channels including ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, MTV, ESPN, BET, VH1, TLC, WeTV, Lifetime, HGTV and more.

The Golden Bachelorette is also available to stream free with a Hulu subscription. Not subscribed for Hulu? Hulu is currently offering a 30-day free trial which you can use to watch new season of The Golden Bachelorette. You can also catch up on Vasso’s journey and learn more about her previous experience by streaming The Golden Bachelor.

You can catch episodes of The Bachelorette, The Bachelor and more with a subscription to Hulu+Live TV ($77) which includes, Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN+ in addition to 90+ channels.

Looking for another streaming option? You might want to consider subscribing to Sling TV. Subscriptions start at just $20 for the first month (regular $40) to stream dozens of channels including ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox in select regions and cable channels such as Bravo, E!, MSNBC, TLC, USA, Food Network, Discovery Channel, FX, ESPN and more.

The Golden Bachelorette 2024: Who Are the Contestants?

A retired videographer, a chiropractor, a portfolio manager, a retired financial analyst, an insurance executive, a contractor and more are among the 24 men who compete for Vassos’s heart this season.

The full list of contestants range from ages 57 to 69, and come from all over the country.

Watch a sneak peek of The Golden Bachelorette below.

In the weeks preceding my trip to Grenada to celebrate Spicemas 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris – amid her ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket – became the subject of a kind of Birtherism 2.0, in which former President Donald Trump attacked and undermined her Blackness because, in his mind, a person cannot be both Black and South Asian or any combination of races. 

While I am not mixed, I identified with those attacks. I grew up the only son and eldest child of two St. Lucian immigrants in a majority Afro-Caribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. I’m Black. I’m American. Ethnically, I’m Afro-Caribbean. Culturally, I’m a pretty solid mixture of Caribbean and African-American. I’ve always understood myself to be all of these things at the same time. Trump’s attacks on Harris’ Blackness hit so close to home, not because she and I share the exact same racial-ethnic-cultural makeup, but because his disrespectful jabs were an extension of a nefarious movement to strip non-American Black people of their Blackness. All this is to say, how I perceive and define my own Blackness was heavy on my mind as I boarded my flight to Grenada on Aug. 9. 

I should note that I’ve yet to visit St. Lucia – fingers crossed for this winter – so this trip to Grenada was my first visit to the Caribbean, the place in the world where the majority of my roots lie. Upon reviewing the trip’s itinerary, which was painstakingly curated by the Grenada Tourism Authority, Industry 360 and Mel&N Media Group, I noticed that we would be learning the history of the Grenadian tradition of jab jab. Now, I had heard about jab jab here and there growing up, but with descriptors that often landed on some variation of “demonic,” I wasn’t really sure what I was actually getting into. I wasn’t afraid, but I was relentlessly curious. After feeding my musical soul at Soca Monarch and Panorama, I was ready to indulge myself in the rawer parts of my Caribbean heritage – and hear from actual Grenadians about this specific cultural practice. 

On Friday, J’Ouvert morning, about two hours before the sun announced itself, my fellow revelers and I enjoyed a traditional Grenadian breakfast at Friday’s Bar, where we got to hear the true history of jab jab. 

“Black was seen as the devil. Black was seen as bad, substandard, scum of the earth. So, we got even blacker,” explained Ian Charles, one of the founders of Jambalasee Grenada, a group committed to the preservation of Grenada’s culture and history. “You have to understand that jab jab utilizes satire, mockery, [and] ridicule to fight against a system which was designed deliberately to mentally, physically [and] spiritually break us.” 

Dating back to 1834, the jab jab tradition finds its roots in freed Afro-Grenadians celebrating the abolition of British-operated slavery through masquerading. Across the island, Grenadians literally become “blacker” by coating their entire bodies in molasses, black paint, tar, engine oil, or the more recent (and more sustainable) combination of vegetable oil and charcoal powder.

Repurposed helmets adorned with either cow or goat horns crown their heads, while their hands drag loose chains (also black) in recognition of their freedom. Although we hit the road a bit later than anticipated, I was still able to catch a glimpse of the Capitals — individuals who lead different groups of jab jabs in call-and-response chants (also known as spellings) that blended unifying proclamations with historical and sociopolitical commentary. 

As I rubbed the charcoal-oil concoction over my body – and eventually gave into the gravity of the engine oil’s richer pigmentation – everything clicked. Jab felt natural in a way that I wasn’t necessarily anticipating. Everything was so Black. From the dozens to the Black ballroom practice of “reading,” satire, sarcasm and a general finessing and manipulation of language is inherently Black. It shows up across the diaspora in the ways we converse and the ways our intonations shift mid-dialogue. By painting ourselves black, we were tapping into the tradition of “playing the devil.” (“Jab” means “devil” in Patois). If slave masters were going to call us devilish, we were going to take it, flip it and mock them. As we made our way down the road, I thought about the ways I’ve unknowingly “played Jab” in different contexts in my life. 

I haven’t been on this Earth for too long, but my story is pretty lengthy: lots of twists, and a few turns as well. I’ll spare you all the details here, but there were more than a few instances in my life in which my Blackness was demonized with the hopes that I would try my best to detach myself from it. I doubled down every time. Yes, the scales are vastly different, but, to me, the essence is one and the same. When all is said and done, our Blackness will never be demonized; not by ourselves, and certainly never by those who are wholly unable to see Blackness for what it truly is. 

In conversation with the late Greg Tate, hip-hop artist Djinji Brown said: “Sometimes when I’m rhyming on the [mic], I feel like there’s nothing inside me but blackness – no veins, no organs, just a shell physically, but open and full of universes from my toes to my hair follicles. There are rhymes coming out of me, because there ain’t no stomach, there ain’t no heart, no intestines to get in the way of that s–t.” 

We weren’t rapping on the road – although some of those chants were a not-so-subtle sonic bridge between call-and-response rhythms and hip-hop song structures – but there was indeed nothing but blackness inside of and all around us. In that blackness lay a level of liberation that was hard-fought, and a predisposition for resistance that was inherited – and reinvigorated in the wake of Hurrican Beryl. Like everything else, my Spicemas experience exists in the context of all that came before it, including Hurricane Beryl, which particularly ravaged Grenada’s sister islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique. While stepping into Grenadian culture, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the Global South – and its people, artists and culture – will be the first to feel the cruelest effects of climate change primarily spurred by superpowers in the Global North. It’s not fair and it’s not right. It’s just the latest effect of the incredibly violent and heinous project that is colonialism. But it’s also a stark reminder that we must protect the breadth of our West Indian cultures with every fiber of our beings. 

Whenever my height doesn’t annoy me, it can be quite an advantage. My heart swelled as I took a look at the sea of Blackness in front of me and the waves of Blackness behind me. I was literally and figuratively consumed by Blackness on all sides and it couldn’t have been a more picturesque sight. I’ve always considered Brooklyn to be home, and I still do – those blocks raised me, after all – but the sense of connection I felt to the literal land of Grenada while playing jab forced me to, if only for a few moments, seriously reconsider how I understand the term “home.” As far as I know, I don’t have any family in Grenada, but the air felt familiar, as did the energy that permeated the atmosphere. Almost all of my family hails from another island just over 100 miles away, but I still felt the connection of a deep, shared history that I felt an innate responsibility to help protect. 

From Miami to Notting Hill, the Caribbean carnival experience has evolved into myriad celebrations around the world – many of them inching further away from the history that grounds those practices. As we continue to wade our way through this particular era of globalization and the commercialization and corporatization of carnival celebrations, maintaining and respecting the rich history of its formative traditions will be paramount to protecting the integrity and sanctity of the Caribbean at large. Jab jab is resistance in one of its purest forms, rooted in the soil of Grenada. What’s Blacker than that?  

Seeing how fiercely protective and reverent Charles was in his explanation of jab jab reminded me of something chart-topping Afrobeats superstar Rema said in an Apple Music interview promoting his new Heis album. “Everyone is chasing something that the whole world can enjoy… we’re listening to the voices of the world too much,” he said. “We gotta listen to the voices back home to keep our roots. Our roots [are] very important.”  

But how do we balance prioritizing “the voices back home” while inviting outsiders amid an effort to increase the amount of capital we can squeeze out of centuries-old cultural practices? That’s a question I toyed with a lot. After all, I’m a first-generation St. Lucian-American experiencing Spicemas by way of a press trip — is the call not coming from inside of the house, to some degree? For Jab King, a Grenadian soca powerhouse whose “Jab Did” was inescapable throughout Spicemas, it’s certainly a “bad idea” when cultural practices start bending to the whims of capitalism and corporatization, and we should “let the Carnival evolve on its own and control it along the way.” 

Ideally, that’s the next frontier of this era of musical and cultural globalization: concerted efforts to protect the history of the cultures that so often get pillaged and bastardized for capitalism-blinded, voyeuristic eyes. The pessimist in me says that’s wishful thinking, but there was simply too much hope in that sea of blackness for me to let that voice win. 

Tom Morello is raging against Elon Musk.

The Rage Against the Machine rocker took to social media on Sunday (Sept. 15) to poke fun at Elon Musk after the Tesla CEO tweeted, “Why are so many people raging FOR the machine?”

While it’s not clear that the post was a direct hit at RAGT, Morello responded to the sentiment, writing, “Funny cuz Elon was the kid on the cover of Evil Empire.” He also shared the cover art for the band’s 1996 sophomore album, Evil Empire, which features a young man on the cover who bears a resemblance to Musk.

Morello has a long history of political commentary in his music and beyond. Per The Harvard Crimson, Morello once described himself as “the only anarchist in a conservative high school.”

This month, he will be awarded with the 2024 Woody Guthrie Prize. The annual award recognizes a recipient who embodies the spirit of Guthrie’s social consciousness and musical legacy. Previous honorees include Pete Seeger, Mavis Staples, Kris Kristofferson, John Mellencamp, Chuck D, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen and Pussy Riot as well as groundbreaking TV producer Norman Lear.

“Woody Guthrie was a fearless agitator, a six-string instigator, a poetic truth teller and a harmonizing hell raiser,” Morello said in a statement. “He was the original punk rocker whose life, music, art and lyrics were beacons of justice and liberation for the downtrodden and oppressed. In my own work, Woody has been an inspiration to tell it like I see it without compromise or apology and to play my songs (and his songs) on the picket line and at the barricade whenever and wherever people are taking a stand.”

Ye — formerly known as Kanye West — made his return to China for his first performance in 16 years on Sunday (Sept. 15) alongside Ty Dolla $ign.

It was a family affair in Haikou, China. West brought his wife Bianca Censori, all four of his children and his ex Kim Kardashian with him for the show. North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm even hit the Wuyuan River Sports Stadium stage with their dad for a performance of his fan-favorite shelved Vultures track “Everybody.”

Eldest daughter North West and her furry hat led the charge as she held hands with her siblings through the fake amber high-grass field making up the stage. Fans cheered on the family reunion while singing along to the Backstreet Boys-sampling chorus sang by Charlie Wilson. “Goosebumps,” one person replied.

West also revealed plans for his next solo album, debuting a heavenly new track at the Haikou show titled “Preacher Man.”

It appears Ye and the team could be extending their stay in China as rumors of a second show have circulated in Haikou on social media slated for Saturday night (Sept. 21).

West bringing his kids on stage to perform isn’t too unfamiliar to his audience. He previously had North join him at his Vultures listening experience in Paris back in February, which saw her sing along to her “Talking” track on the Vultures album.

“Talking” debuted at No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 and Kim Kardashian congratulated her daughter on the accomplishment, which saw her become one of the youngest acts ever to hit the Hot 100. “My baby,” she wrote to her Instagram Story.

West is busy outside of his own music as well. He appears to have a hand in Playboi Carti’s upcoming Music album. Carti shouted-out Yeezy while hyping his LP on social media last week.

“@Ye KANT WAIT 2 SHOW THE WORLD WHAT WE BEEN WORKIN ON WIT DIS ALBUM WE DA REAL 5L NO DOUBT,” he wrote over a photo of the “All Red” cover art.

Check out fan-captured clips from West’s Haikou show below: