Elton John & Bernie Taupin’s current Grammy nomination (best song written for visual media for “Never Too Late”) is their first as a songwriting team in 54 years. They share the nod with Brandi Carlile and Andrew Watt. The song, which was written for the documentary Elton John: Never Too Late, was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year.

It’s the first time John and Taupin have been nominated for a Grammy as a team since their music for the British-French teen romance Friends (no relation to the later smash TV series) was nominated for best original score written for a motion picture or a television special at the 1972 ceremony. (It lost to Isaac Hayes’ blockbuster Shaft soundtrack).

Amazingly, no John-Taupin collab has ever been nominated for song of the year. “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” was nominated for record of the year at the 1975 ceremony, but not song of the year. Their Oscar-winning “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” from Rocketman failed to even land a nod for best song written for visual media.

Both John and Taupin have been nominated for songwriting collabs with other partners. John received four nominations for the 1995 ceremony for co-writing songs for The Lion King with Tim Rice. “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” and “Circle of Life” were nominated for both song of the year and best song written specifically for a motion picture or for television. (The songs lost to Bruce Springsteen’s haunting “Streets of Philadelphia” from Jonathan Demme’s AIDS drama Philadelphia, an outcome that John, a longtime AIDS activist, was probably more than OK with.) John and Rice won best musical show album in 2001 for composing the score for Elton John & Tim Rice’s Aida.

Taupin received a best country song nod for the 2003 ceremony for co-writing “Mendocino County Line” with Matt Serletic. Willie Nelson recorded the song with Lee Ann Womack for his 50th studio album, The Great Divide.

John broke through in 1970, but didn’t win his first Grammy until 1987, for his featured role on Dionne & Friends’ “That’s What Friends Are For.” He won his first Grammy for one of his own records in 1992 when “Basque” won best instrumental composition. He composed the instrumental for flute player James Galway.

John has won five Grammys, far fewer than you might imagine for an artist of his stature. Taupin has yet to win one. “I’ve never been a favorite of the Grammys, I have to say,” John told writer Chris Willman in a current cover story for Variety. “It’s been very rare that I’ve won anything.”

John’s husband, David Furnish, added: “Elton and Bernie have never won a Grammy — can you believe that? — as a pair of songwriters.”

John received a Grammy Legend Award in 2000 but has yet to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy. Taupin has yet to receive a Trustees Award (the equivalent award for non-performers). They have fared better in other prestigious honors programs. They received the Songwriters Hall of Fame’s highest honor, the Johnny Mercer Award, in 2013, and are the reigning recipients of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

How does John and Taupin’s tepid Grammy showing compare with other legendary songwriting teams? Let’s start with the most fabled songwriting collaboration of them all – John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They received 10 Grammy nods in songwriting or composing categories.

Let’s also look at the nine collaborations that have received the Johnny Mercer Award from the SHOF. All but one has received at least one Grammy nod as a team. That one is the human hit factory known as Holland/Dozier/Holland, who collaborated on some of the biggest and best hits of the 1960s, including “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “I Can’t Help Myself” and “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” No Grammy nods for any of those songs? Please.

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, like John and Taupin, received two Grammy nods as a team. Looking at the other Mercer Award recipients, and listing them in ascending order in number of nods as a team, we find Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (four), Broadway scribes Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (five), Burt Bacharach and Hal David (six), Broadway scribes Betty Comden and Adolph Green (eight), Kenny Gamble & Leon Huff (nine) and Marilyn and Alan Bergman (11).

This year’s other nominees for best song written for visual media are “As Alive as You Need Me to Be” from TRON:Ares (Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross), “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters (EJAE & Mark Sonnenblick) and three songs from Sinners – “I Lied to You” (Ludwig Göransson & Raphael Saadiq), “Pale, Pale Moon” (Ludwig Göransson & Brittany Howard) and “Sinners” (Leonard Denisenko, Rodarius Green, Travis Harrington, Tarkan Kozluklu, Kyris Mingo & Darius Poviliunas). “Golden” also received a nomination for song of the year, so it’s probably the front-runner in this category.

It’s almost time to find out what artists, songs and albums dominated the 2025 Billboard year-end charts — and this year, we’re doing it live.

Comedian and social superstar Druski will host the Billboard 2025 No. 1s Livestream on Tuesday, Dec. 9, starting at noon ET/9 a.m. PT, where he’ll welcome special guests to help reveal the biggest chart-toppers of 2025. It’s all going down on the Billboard News YouTube channel and BillboardTV on Samsung TV Plus.

Once the livestream — co-hosted by Billboard News’ Tetris Kelly — wraps on Dec. 9, hundreds of 2025 year-end charts will be posted to Billboard’s website.

Druski has always had a strong connection to the music world, from his cameos in videos for Drake, Jack Harlow and Lil Yachty to his trio of skits on Justin Bieber’s SWAG album earlier this year. He also has his Coulda Been Records, which started out as a spoof but turned into an actual record label that has released songs featuring Young M.A, Yung Bleu and Yachty. Druski is currently on The Coulda Fest Tour, with special appearances from BigXthaPlug, which kicked off in London in September and wraps this weekend at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California.

Starting Monday (Dec. 1), we’re offering up a sneak peek of the full chart menu by rolling out the top 10s of select tallies. First up: the top 10s of the 2025 Top Rock & Alternative Albums and Top Rock & Alternative Songs charts.

Billboard’s year-end music charts represent aggregated metrics for each artist, title, label and music contributor on the weekly charts from Oct. 26, 2024, through Oct. 18, 2025. Rankings for Luminate-based recaps reflect equivalent album units, airplay, sales or streaming during the weeks that the entries appeared on a respective chart during the tracking year. Any activity registered before or after a title’s chart run isn’t considered in these rankings. That methodology detail, and the October-October time period, account for some of the difference between these lists and the calendar-year recaps that are independently compiled by Luminate.

While Americans were celebrating Thanksgiving by gobbling up turkey, stuffing and more football than is absolutely necessary, Rihanna spent the holiday weekend honoring her home country of Barbados while also sneaking in a few previously unseen pregnancy bikini pics.

The singer paid tribute to the Caribbean island nation where she was born in an Instagram post on Monday morning (Dec. 1) featuring a slide show packed with snaps of food, island scenes, her Barbadian passport and adorable pics of her two eldest children with partner A$AP Rocky.

“Congratulations to Barbados, MY HOME, on our 59th year of Independence and our 4th year as a Republic!,” Rihanna wrote in a post that opened with a moody picture of the “Work” singer standing amid tall grass, with her hair blown across her eyes by the wind. “Today also marks the installation of our 2nd President, His Excellency Lieutenant Colonel The Most Honorable Jeffrey Bostic , who alongside our Honorable Prime Minister Mia Mottley will continue to lead Barbados with excellence!! Barbados I L🇧🇧VE YOU!!!!”

Other snaps in the post picture RihRih floating in the ocean, chilling with three-year-old son RZA and two-year-old son Riot Rose and posing in a green string bikini at sunset while seemingly heavily pregnant with the couple’s third child, three-month-old daughter, Rocki. In another shot, Rihanna sits in the grass with one of the babies while wearing a pink bikini and smiles as she walks by a pool while carrying Riot Rose on her hip and holding RZA’s hand.

There are also throwback pics of Rihanna’s frequent trips back home to participate in the nation’s Carnival-like annual Crop Over Festival, including several in which she is wearing a traditional bejeweled, skin-baring costume, a toast snap of two hands holding delicious tropical drinks inside coconut shells and a tribute to the beloved Snowcone Man.

You already knew Jon Stewart could skewer bloviating politicians with effortless, cutting wit. But did you know he can also rock the house? The 63-year-old Daily Show legend proved it’s never too late to learn a new trick on Friday (Nov. 28) when his indie rock band, Church and State™️ made their debut at the legendary New Jersey rock club The Stone Pony.

Jersey native Stewart, who took up the drums after retiring from the Daily Show in 2015, has been playing shows here and there over the past year with the group that also features Rick Barry on vocals/guitar, Justin Bornemann on bass and Stewart’s drum teacher, And Bova on guitar. The band’s big coming out party at the Stone Pony featured them on the bill with fellow alt rock band Yawn Mower and main attraction Status Green, who were celebrating their 20th anniversary.

Stewart has been holding down just Monday nights on the Daily Show since his 2024 return, gleefully skewering politicians and bad actors in his signature style while taking particular, gleeful aim at one of his favorite targets: Donald Trump. But for all the heat and outrage Stewart shares with viewers on a weekly basis — and on his The Weekly Show podcast — videos from Friday’s show suggest that his role in the band with a dreamy, heartland shoegaze style is much more sedate. Keeping time on the group’s moody ballads, Stewart is a steadying force, capably anchoring the sound led by Barry’s laconic vocals and drum teacher Bova’s spiky guitar leads.

The no-frills bar band’s Instagram bio says it all: Church and State™️ is a music band. We make music.

Check out the poster for Church and State™️‘s Stone Pony show.

Britney Spears is back on Instagram doing what she does: dancing and sharing small glimpses into her private life. The singer who deactivated her Insta account on Nov. 2 before quietly reactivating it less than a month later, took to her feed over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend to offer up a bit of both in a clip in which she danced to Adele’s “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” while musing about the light that comes after darkness.

While the post now has a benign comment about the singer’s leopard-print outfit and shoes (“I feel pretty in that bathing suit… pssss gotta find those Mary Jane shoes”), according to People, the now-deleted original message was more intense and emotional. “Haven’t found my party dress for this year 👗… Reflecting is good for the soul… Sometimes when hard things happen, good things come from it and we learn… I learned that a real note of expression with emotion speaks volumes for us all!!,” Spears wrote in the since-wiped post.

“Call it childish, silly, annoying… We grow up to become women but do you dare keep the most sensitive part of the soul and allow it to rebel… the child within must speak in the most vulnerable of times,” she continued in the note. “Sadness and darkness survive to make an understanding of losing someone and of the hurt and pain… Sometimes through suffering and ugliness and sacrifice, extremely rare and beautiful things can be manifested and shared that can touch another person so they understand they are not alone… and yet the woman in me will make sure I find my destination.”

While the overall message felt portentous, Spears ended it with a very relatable p.s. about going ham on the turkey over the weekend. “I can’t even look at food after this Thanksgiving,” she wrote. “I cheated I was so bad… but it felt so damn good… forgive me father.”

Spears briefly deactivated her Instagram account early last month in the midst of ex-husband Kevin Federline’s press tour for his tell-all memoir, You Thought You Knew, in which he made shocking allegations about what he said was Spears’ unpredictable behavior as a young wife and mother, including allegations that she drank wine while pregnant with their children and did cocaine while she was breastfeeding. Spears has hit back at what she has deemed “constant gaslighting” from Federline in seeming response to the memoir’s allegations; the couple were married from 2004-2007 and share two adult children.

Since her return to Instagram, Spears posted about getting “stuck in Mexico for two weeks” last month, shared the usual compliment of dancing videos, appeared to tease an upcoming jewelry line and re-posted the poignant message “F–k normal I want magic.”