Homeless man sings

That's the French for you. But there must be some juicy sexual escapades to be fondly recalled? Apparently not. "It's very lonely on the road for women," she insists. "At least for the type of woman that I am. The male groupie phenomenon is something totally different. Guys can do that. I wouldn't be interested in that anyway, and I have a family, so that's not my thing. But when I was single and on the road it was kinda weird, because there were only two types of guys that I would meet, and they were the kinds that were so intimidated that they would never speak to me. Either they thought I had a boyfriend, or they were totally crazy, they were lunatics, they were nuts, like 'I can control the world if...!'. It was just crazy, crazy people, so for me it was really do the show and, after the venue, go to the hotel." … [Read more...] about Lauryn Hill: ‘I’m not afraid to be the person I am’

“I get VIP treatment,” he says. “A convoy, police with hazard lights, ‘let’s roll’ – that kind of thing. I get that in a lot of countries. Egypt, Holland, France, Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, Cyprus, Germany, Italy … I’ve run out of pages on my passport. In Liberia, the whole street was shut down – it was crazy.” Get the picture? Fuse is big. “People try to get into your room. They grab everything they can grab.” … [Read more...] about Fuse ODG: ‘I chose to be happy’

But the preconceived ideas of how men in the public eye should present their masculinity persists – not too flamboyant, not too disruptive. And for Latino men, there are further layers of prejudice and expectation. When he posted on Instagram in March about his iridescent manicure, one comment in Spanish read: “(you’re) helping the youth distort their minds and go against what God has created.” … [Read more...] about Playboy’s Bad Bunny cover is a welcome sign that masculinity is transforming

8. Bitch Better Have My Money Burned out by the album-a-year routine, Rihanna’s seventh album, 2012’s Unapologetic, was the sound of a singles artist mumbling her way through another CD in order to go on another tour. It had its moments – Stay and lead single Diamonds, specifically – but it was obvious things needed to change. Early 2015 saw her return with the creaky folk of FourFiveSeconds, a song with input from an eclectic selection of music idols: Paul McCartney and Kanye West featured, while writing credits went to the likes of Ty Dolla $ign, Dallas Austin and Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth. The campfire singalong was a red herring, not just for the direction she was going in but also for the implication the song was ushering in a new album (by this point there’d been a three-year gap between albums). February arrived with Towards the Sun, a sweet song from the animated movie Home, while March bought with it the boldly narked, Bitch Better … [Read more...] about Rihanna – 10 of the best

Just in time for Christmas, another wallet-shaking mega-box set goes on sale. Bob Dylan 1965-1966: The Cutting Edge is the latest instalment in his Bootleg Series, which started in 1991 and proved to the catalogue divisions of record labels that there was a substantial appetite for what had previously been deemed by the artist or the label to be music unworthy of release. Arguably, the Bootleg Series has been leading up to this Cutting Edge release, focusing as it does on Dylan’s most mythologised period, the sulphuric triptych of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. This was a period so creatively intense that Dylan had to disappear to Woodstock until the aftershock faded. … [Read more...] about Peak box set: how Dylan inspired barrel-scraping of the most cynical kind