Author: Rap Hooks

Kacey Musgraves is recuperating after sustaining an injury from a fall while in Mexico.

In a post to Instagram Stories on Friday (June 20), Musgraves shared an image of an x-ray shot of her ribs. She wrote over the image, “Sooo I’m in Mexico with a f—in’ broken rib. Wednesday night it was raining and I was running to grab some towels and had an extremely hard fall on some very slick tile I didn’t see. Thankful I didn’t smack my head but I landed very very hard on my back left ribcage and I broke rib number 6.”

She added, “This s— is no joke. I’m in a lot of pain and doing anything is extremely difficult but I’m managing and being well taken care of.”

Musgraves noted that due to the injury, she would be rescheduling her performance at a Sing For Science event, which had been set for Sunday (June 22) at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. “There is no physical way I can get on a plane and fly back to Nashville … I am extremely bummed to have to reschedule as I have been looking forward to this for months but there is literally no other option,” she wrote. “I’m so sorry for the inconvenience.”

The event is now set to take place on Sept. 18 at the Ryman. In addition to Musgraves’ performance, the event will also feature fungi expert Paul Stamets. The tickets purchased for the original June 22 show are valid for the new Sept. 18 date. The event, sponsored in part by The Simons Foundation, is a live taping of the Sing For Science podcast.

Musgraves’ other upcoming shows, according to her website, include a July 5 appearance at the Zootown Festival in Montana and an Aug. 2 appearance at Hinterland Music Festival in Iowa.

Since blasting onto the scene with his breakthrough hit “Beautiful Things,” Benson Boone has become the internet’s favorite punching bag. But instead of trying to prove them wrong, the singer decided to lean in with his latest music video.

On Friday (June 20), Boone dropped the tongue-in-cheek music video for his new song “Mr. Electric Blue,” off his just-released LP American Heart. From the start of the clip, Boone goes out of his way to play with all the worst things the internet has to say about him when he walks into “Industry Plant Records” wearing a t-shirt that simply says “one hit wonder” for a frank conversation with his sleazy agent (played by his frequent songwriting collaborator Jack LaFrantz).

“Have you not been on the internet? Everything is terrible, Benson! We put all of our money into ‘moonbeam ice cream’ and the backflip, and it’s done absolutely horrible,” LaFrantz’s character tells an exasperated Boone. He informs the singer that he owes his faux label $10 million, and suggests that he find “a new gimmick” like “good songwriting.” At the suggestion, Boone deflates: “You know I can’t do that.”

What ensues is a madcap montage, where Boone takes as many odd jobs as he can to raise the money. He walks dogs (while wearing another T-shirt that says “”), mows lawns (for a company called “Auto-Tune Trimmers”), washes cars (with bumper stickers declaring “mustaches are lame”) sells his sparkly jumpsuits and even opens a moonbeam ice cream truck. Of course, that still doesn’t stop the criticism from coming — when he’s recognized by a little girl as “the guy who sings ‘Beautiful Things,’” she quickly humbles him: “Your music is terrible.”

For his hustling and hard work, Boone makes a grand total of $168, but begs LaFrantz’s agent to give him another chance. But his agent assures him that he found a better solution, saying he “sold your entire catalog to retail chains, fast food chains and movie theaters,” promising that “you’ll be the most overplayed artist in the world, and I’ll be rich.” A dejected Boone sighs and smiles, saying “that’s all I’ve ever wanted,” before celebrating his ubiquity.

It’s far from the first time Boone has commented on the way people perceive him. The singer posted a TikTok back in April, explaining that he could understand people not liking him or his music if there were more people offering concrete reasons for their distaste. “I just read a comment that said ‘idek why I hate Benson Boone but it feels right,’” he wrote on the video. “Like WHAT!!? how am I supposed to improve after reading that? At least say something valid like ‘he low key just flips everywhere can he [do] anything else?’”

Watch the full video for Boone’s “Mr. Electric Blue” above.

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The WWE’s reality competition series WWE LFG (Legends & Future Greats) premieres its second season on Sunday (June 22).

It features 16 contenders battling for a chance to make it to the big leagues of pro wrestling in the WWE. Season two also features five legendary coaches: Undertaker, Booker T, Michelle McCool, Bubba Ray Dudley and Shawn Michaels.

When Does ‘WWE LFG’ Start?

Season two of WWE LFG has a start time of 10 p.m. ET/PT.

Where to Watch ‘WWE LFG’ Online

WWE LFG airs on A&E. The series is available to stream on Philo, DirecTV, Fubo and Hulu + Live TV. Keep reading for more details on how cord-cutters can watch the WWE reality series online.

How to Watch ‘WWE LFG’ with Philo

A subscription to Philo — which comes with A&E — gets you access to live TV from cable channels for just $28 per month.

In fact, you can watch more than 70 cable networks, such as AMC, BBC America, BET, Cartoon Network, CMT, Discovery Channel, Food Network, Hallmark Channel, HGTV, History Channel, IFC, Lifetime, Logo, MotorTrends, Nickelodeon, OWN, Paramount Network, Smithsonian Channel, Sundance TV, TLC, VH1, Vice and many others.

In addition, AMC+ is available on Philo. The premium streaming service comes with Philo Core for free, so you can get even more movies and TV shows to watch with signup.

How to Watch ‘WWE LFG’ with DirecTV

A subscription to DirecTV — which comes with A&E for WWE LFG — gets you access to live TV, local and cable channels, starting at $59.99 for the first month of service ($89.99 per month afterwards) for the streamer’s signature packages.

You can watch local networks such as NBC, ABC, Fox, and PBS, while you can watch many cable networks, including ESPN, FS1, Lifetime, FX, AMC, Bravo, BET, MTV, Paramount Network, Cartoon Network, VH1, Fuse, CNN, Food Network, CNBC and others.

How to Watch ‘WWE LFG’ with Hulu + Live TV

WWE LFG on A&E is available to watch with Hulu + Live TV. Prices for the cable alternative start at $82.99 per month, while each plan comes with Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN+ at no additional cost.

Hulu + Live TV might be best for those who want all of these streaming services together in one bundle. It features many other networks, including ESPN, ABC, Hallmark Channel, BET, CMT, Disney Channel, NBC, Fox Sports and more.

How to Watch ‘WWE LFG’ with Fubo

To watch season two of WWE LFG on A&E, Fubo starts at $64.99 for the first month, $84.99 per month afterwards (the streamer’s current deal) with more than 225 channels — including local and cable — that are streamable on smart TVs, smartphones, tablets and on web browsers.

The service even gets you live access to local broadcast networks including NBC, Fox and ABC, while it has dozens of cable networks, such as ESPN, Bravo, CMT, ID, TV Land, VH1, TLC, E!, FS1, MTV, FX, Ion, OWN, Paramount Network and much more.

Starting at 10 p.m. ET/PT, WWE LFG (Legends & Future Greats) airs on A&E on Sunday (June 22). The series features the opening theme song “Take A Lesson” by def rebel (music producer Doug Davis), while it’s available to stream on Philo.

Want more? For more product recommendations, check out our roundups of the best Xbox deals, studio headphones and Nintendo Switch accessories.

Pop-rock artist Role Model has signed with Good World Management’s Brandon Creed and Dani Russin, Billboard can confirm. 

Role Model joins a stacked roster of superstars at the firm, including Charli xcx, Troye Sivan, Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato.

In April, Role Model parted ways with his manager, Best Friends’ Danny Rukasin, who helped the artist become a breakout star. The singer-songwriter recently scored his first Hot 100 hit with “Sally, When the Wine Runs Out.” The song is off the deluxe edition of Role Model’s 2024 album, Kansas Anymore, which arrived in February.

Role Model signed to Interscope in 2018 and released his debut album, the more alternative-sounding Rx, in 2022. But last year’s Kansas Anymore — which featured a softer, more Americana-inspired sound — changed the course of his career and helped solidify him as one to watch. 

Since the release of Kansas Anymore, Role Model has opened on tour for Gracie Abrams and, more recently, celebrated two sold-out shows in Los Angeles; at one of those shows, he welcomed Reneé Rapp on stage as a surprise guest during “Sally.” Attendees at the L.A. concerts included Laufey, The Kid Laroi, Shaboozey, Shaboozey and Jason Sudeikis.

In May, it was announced that Role Model will make his acting debut in the upcoming Lena Dunham-directed Netflix film, Good Sex, starring Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman. He will be credited under his born name of Tucker Pillsbury.

Creed founded Good World in August 2023. At the top of 2025, he was named Billboard‘s Manager of the Year along with his tight-knit team. In the interview, he said of signing new talent: “We are extremely discerning,” before adding, “We have room, don’t get me wrong, for the right thing.”

A federal judge has rejected R. Kelly’s emergency request to be let out of prison due to an alleged jailhouse murder plot against the disgraced R&B star, who’s serving more than 30 years for multiple sex crime convictions.

Kelly’s attorney, Beau Brindley, has been petitioning a Chicago court for Kelly’s release since last week, saying prison guards are trying to have the singer (Robert Sylvester Kelly) killed to stop him from uncovering prosecutorial misconduct in his case. Brindley claims jail officials attempted to solicit a fellow inmate to carry out the hit, and that when that didn’t work, they fed Kelly an overdose quantity of sleeping pills and denied him medically-necessary surgery for blood clots.

Prosecutors have dismissed the allegations as a “fanciful conspiracy” and “deeply unserious.” Judge Martha M. Pacold denied the bid for release on Thursday (June 19) without addressing its merits, saying such a request must be brought as a civil rights lawsuit or habeas corpus petition in North Carolina, where Kelly is imprisoned.

“Jurisdictional limitations must be respected even where, as here, a litigant claims that the circumstances are extraordinary,” wrote the judge.

Judge Pacold issued her decision ahead of a hearing that had been set for Friday (June 20), canceling the court date after seemingly learning all she needed to know from voluminous court papers that have been filed on the issue.  

In a statement shared with Billboard on Thursday, Brindley said his team is “not surprised by this ruling as we knew that technical jurisdiction would be a challenge under these circumstances.”

“However, we had no choice but to act immediately given explicit evidence of a threat to Robert Kelly’s life,” Brindley added.

On Friday (June 20), Brindley tried another avenue to convince the Chicago judge to release Kelly: filing a motion for a new trial and asking for emergency bail in the meantime.

The Friday motion reiterates Brindley’s previous allegations that prosecutors unlawfully pressured a witness to testify against Kelly and intercepted Kelly’s communications with his lawyers ahead of his federal trial in Chicago.

“If someone dies in prison, it seems commonplace,” writes Brindley. “With that in mind, it becomes easy to understand how the people who committed this corruption and those that helped cover it up would rather kill a disgraced inmate convicted of sex crimes than face consequences that could ruin their lives and careers.”

The motion repeatedly notes that President Donald Trump is prioritizing rooting out corruption in the justice system. Brindley has publicly asked Trump to pardon Kelly in conjunction with the jailhouse murder plot claims.

A spokesperson for prosecutors did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday.

Kelly was convicted in Chicago of child pornography and enticing minors for sex in 2022, one year after a separate federal jury in New York also found the singer guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking

The former R&B star was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the New York conviction and 20 years in the Chicago case, though all but one year of the second sentence will overlap with the first. Both convictions have been upheld on appeal.

In 1995, the Argentine rock trio Soda Stereo returned to the studio after a three-year hiatus to record a brand-new album, Sueño Stereo (Stereo Dream), its seventh and final project. At the time, no one knew this would be the band’s farewell record. Its predecessor, Dynamo, was its most experimental and eclectic work, showcasing a complete turnaround of its new wave style over the previous decade. Sueño Stereo continued this exploration — an alternative album with a noticeable British influence, full of electronic sounds and violins, cellos and violas on many tracks.

The 1990s brought a completely different flow from the ’80s new wave that made Soda Stereo famous. As the alternative rock movement gained popularity in the U.S. and Europe, listeners also increased in Latin America, and Soda Stereo embraced it and made the genre its own. After 10 years of working nonstop, releasing album after album and touring Latin America, the band decided to experiment and created an utterly progressive rock album that fans and other artists still praise 30 years later. 

“Latin American rock DNA is partly based on a tremendous sense of inferiority because it always copied everything that was happening in England and the United States,” Ernesto Lechner, a music journalist from Argentina who has lived in the U.S. since the 1990s, tells Billboard. “Soda Stereo changed that.”

Soda Stereo revolutionized Latin rock history with their new sounds and exploration of diverse musical genres. That style would become the stamp of the lead singer Gustavo Cerati’s artistry, which he would perfect in his first solo album, Bocanada (1999), after Soda Stereo disbanded in 1997. Sueño Stereo, released on June 25, 1995, became the band’s magnum opus.

“Sueño Stereo, for me is, without a doubt, without discussion, Soda’s best album,” Lechner adds. “It’s a glorious record. A psychedelic rock album — electronic rock with moments of ambient music, a very sophisticated thing. It was like a full circle.”

“Is like the final masterpiece, very refined and perfect,” Valeria Agis, editor of Argentine newspaper La Nación, tells Billboard of the set, which in 2012 was ranked fourth by Rolling Stone in its 10 greatest Latin rock albums of all time.

Sueño Stereo’s journey begins with the alternative rock of “Ella Usó Mi Cabeza Como un Revólver,” a melancholy, complex track that presented a string arrangement of viola, violin and cello. A significant change also came with “Disco Eterno” and “Zoom,” two neo-psychedelic pop-rock songs on the set that became classics in the band’s repertoire. 

Further into the album, The Beatles’ influence became apparent with the Britpop tracks “Paseando Por Roma” and “Ojo de la Tormenta.” The set concludes with a surprising shift in the last three songs, instrumentals in which the psychedelic sounds mash up with electronic ones.   

For Soda’s bassist Zeta Bosio, it was the album that allowed him to keep going. A year before the release, his 2-year-old son Tobías had died in a car accident. “That was the album that brought me back to life a little, back to reality,” he tells Billboard. But it was also the album that brought the band back together as a family, allowing them to “become an organism where we could feel what the other was going to do.”

Drummer Charly Alberti felt it too. The album “presents us already at a really high musical level, the three of us,” he adds. “Things would come together really organically.”

Within 15 days of its release, Sueño Stereo went platinum, making it an instant hit in Argentina and all over Latin America. Still, two years later, the band decided to end its 15-year journey together with the farewell tour El Último Concierto (The Last Concert), which culminated in a final show at the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires — a performance that left us not only with the live album and DVD of the same name, but also with Cerati’s iconic phrase “Gracias totales” (which literally means “total thanks” but does not translate perfectly into English).

Cerati took the time to focus on his personal projects. In 1999 he released Bocanada, the album he considered his official solo debut, although he had previously released two sets during Soda Stereo’s hiatus before Sueño Stereo. In this context, Bocanada, which means breath or puff, is used metaphorically to symbolize a “new breath of creativity,” as Cerati noted that the songs were coming to him very easily. 

In 2007, Soda Stereo reunited for the Me Verás Volver Tour (You Will See Me Return), which took them all over Latin America and some U.S. states, including Florida and California. The trek began and finished at River Plate, Buenos Aires’ biggest stadium with a capacity of 70,000, where they performed six sold-out nights — five more than in 1997. 

Soda Stereo was planning a few additional shows, even one in Spain, a market they never got to conquer. According to Bosio, the doors were open to doing more with the band. “The music was still intact. It was like we were entering a new stage of maturity and starting to understand things in a different way,” he says. “[But] being Soda Stereo always came with a lot of pressure. Especially for Gustavo, who was the main songwriter.”

In 2010, Cerati suffered a stroke after finishing a concert in Caracas, Venezuela, while promoting his last solo album, Fuerza Natural. He remained in a coma until his death on Sept. 4, 2014, at the age of 55. 

But it was Sueño Stereo that prepared the ground for what came later. Sueño Stereo didn’t mark the end; it was the beginning of a new sound that still echoes 30 years later. 

“One of our goals for this album was to take a subtractive approach,” said Cerati, as quoted in the book Cerati en Primera Persona (Cerati in First Person) by Maitena Aboitiz. “It was like saying: ‘Let’s pull back a bit’ — not to keep a low profile, but because we didn’t need to repeat the same thing over and over.”

Solo, Cerati had the freedom to do whatever he wanted, in his own words. With Soda, the exploration that began with Dynamo and that the band perfected with Sueño Stereo reached its highest point. The outcome was one of their most important pieces and one of rock’s greatest bodies of work, influencing artists all over Latin America and the world for years to come.