JumpinJack AJ

As for a time table, he only said he'd probably start promoting the album about a month after Bad Boys: Ride or Die came out. He didn't hint as to when it would come out, but my guess is that it would be before the end of the year (there's always a spike in albums being bought during the holiday season). Big Willie Style and Willennium were both released in November.

As I look at it, there are some simple minded mouth breathers who will always bring up the slap. As for people with some sort of platform or celebrity, they will bring this up just to get clicks/attention. Will has moved on. Most people have moved on. I haven't clicked on this kind of stuff in a long time.

It's cool to hear this side of things. So much of matches up with what Ready Rock C has shared in the past.

I wouldn't expect a music video without the interview segments. It's a short film that uses those clips to dive into the subject matter. They have the song-only version up.

I definitely prefer Dance In Your Darkest Moments over Rave In The Wasteland, but whatever.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/jul/28/cd-sales-rise-taylor-swift-collection-nostalgia-90s-oasis-bashy-metronomy-kitty-liv?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawEUfwNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdrYa4JhQEcVdvMlerI9zTzLYx8tW1sEVjnOYtKuixyvthqUCjpAHZzApw_aem_3aaj-UlS66hm3ZVRJwFL-Q CDs sales are growing. How I wish I hadn’t given my beloved collection away Compact discs provided the soundtrack to his life. Then came streaming and he couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. As CDs enjoy a mini-renaissance, our writer looks back at what he lost and, below, musicians share their memories Tom Lamont Sun 28 Jul 2024 05.00 EDT Grease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture. The Beatles’ Red Album. A flimsy single, Boom! Shake the Room, by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and a chunky double-decker compilation record, Now That’s What I Call Music! 24. I thought about these treasured objects – my first CDs, bought or gifted to me in the mid-1990s – when I read the other day that CD sales were enjoying an unexpected bounce in the mid-2020s. I felt pleased at the news of a resurgence, if distantly so, as you might on hearing something nice about an old friend you long ago lost touch with. So fans of Taylor Swift are gobbling up special-edition copies of her albums on CD? Overall sales of the format are higher than they’ve been in decades? Great! Good for good old CDs. It made me think of being 10 years old, newly in possession of a plasticky portable stereo that had (I still remember the glamour of the phrase) a disc reader under its press-open lid. With CDs in a CD player, you could boom and shake your room on infinite repeat without stopping to rewind. You could digitally programme the Red Album to skip And I Love Her, that buzz kill, and reorder the soundtrack of Grease to prioritise Beauty School Dropout, as heaven surely intended. You could randomise the order of a Now compilation, putting yourself through a daring Russian roulette: Ugly Kid Joe (the sonic equivalent of an empty pistol chamber), then PM Dawn (another empty chamber), then Bryan Ferry (bullet through the head). I was a child. I wouldn’t have known or cared about the bigger-picture changes happening in the music industry in terms of clarity of sound, manufacturing or distribution processes, what the shift towards a digitised, copyable archive of sound would mean in terms of piracy. Back in the 90s, I saw only the enormous new potential for control. I could take a carefully orchestrated album of 11 or 12 tracks and turn it from a multi-course meal, one dish progressing to the next, into a messy, free-for-all buffet. To this day, I can picture the horror on my friends’ faces when I played them a custom rearrangement of Oasis’s second album: She’s Electric, She’s Electric, She’s Electric, Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova, Roll With It, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Cast No Shadow, She’s Electric, Some Might Say, She’s Electric. View image in fullscreen Taylor Swift, whose special-edition copies of her albums on CD have contributed to a resurgence of the format. Photograph: Claudio Furlan/AP To my generation, born at the same time as the CD in the early 1980s, teenagers by the time this was a globally dominant product, we felt like we had our format, a rejection of the massive, licquorice-y vinyl owned by our parents, a clear advance on the cassette tapes cherished by older siblings and cousins. For some reason, I never saw CDs as precious, fragile or collectible objects, even though plenty of my friends did. As far as I could tell, there were four types of CD collection in the 1990s: the Pile, the Rack, the Cabinet and the Archive. Mine was a Pile, a collection kept in no sort of order, with glossy inserts and booklets that were always scuffed and had their staples coming loose. Those who Piled like me knew all too well the dreaded butterfly effect when you failed to put a disc back in its rightful case. One day you’d decide to play Portishead by Portishead, removing from the stereo the double A-side of I Believe/Up on the Roof by Robson & Jerome that had been in there before. Who could say where the case for that double A-side had got to? Easiest to sling the disc in the open, inviting Portishead case.Quick GuideNot dead yet: CD stats After a few rounds of this you’d be opening The Score by the Fugees to find the soundtrack from a Levi’s ad. You’d want to dance to Setting Sun by the Chemical Brothers and have to settle instead for I Am, I Feel by Alisha’s Attic. As someone with a Pile, you were likely to start mislaying cover slips and lyric booklets pretty quickly. One advantage of this was that the front panes of the CD cases became little windows. Wrongly housed discs were slightly easier to find. Compared with the Pile, the Rack was a halfway house towards respectability, a realistic attempt at order. Made of dark, matt-finished black plastic or a clearer acrylic, the CD racks and carousels of my youth allowed collectors to sweep a glance over a load of case spines at once, scanning for (say) the strip of white and bright orange that signified the Trainspotting soundtrack or the warmer, orangey-white that meant Blur by Blur. Related to the Rack was the Cabinet, usually towering and made of wood, with the tell-tale shelves that were just too small for paperback books. The Cabinet was ascended-to by collectors when the number of discs they owned became too much to be contained by factory-moulded plastic. When the novelist Colm Tóibín said recently that “home is where the CDs are”, he can only have been thinking of a Cabinet-sized collection, beloved, built up over time, a massive bloody pain to transport. The last type of collection was the Archive, a shrine-like version of the Cabinet that was kept pristine, in A-to-Z order, perhaps with additional separation of albums and singles by genre, rarity, region of release. My best friend had the beginnings of an Archive, stuffed with immaculate copies of Suede, Beck, every CD the Britpop band Mansun had ever released. I remember the day he added an obscure import copy of Ash’s 1995 single Kung Fu. This CD had come all the way to England from Japan. When we held it we did so in awe, by the farthest corners of the case, like teenaged auctioneers. Recently, I messaged him to ask what became of that treasured Ash disc. Oh (he said) he got rid of almost all of his singles years ago. They took up too much room. His import copy of Kung Fu was gone, maybe to someone else’s collection by now, maybe to someone’s bin. “I feel weirdly sad to think of you without a copy of Mansun’s Taxloss to hand,” I wrote. “I did keep my Mansun singles,” he wrote back. “Thank God.” The great shedding of CDs began, at least for me, around the turn of the millennium, when the world went online. I remember first seeing the music-sharing software Napster in action in early 2000. Using a dial-up connection, it took someone an hour to download Soul Bossa Nova (Original Mix) from the Austin Powers soundtrack. A year later, I visited a friend at a US college where the students had access to broadband. Using Napster, or one of the many equivalent pieces of file-sharing software that were proliferating at the time, tracks were downloadable in minutes. Whole albums by Gorillaz, Gabrielle, Ginuwine fell off the internet over the course of a day, like apples. Around 2004 I started consolidating my albums and my singles on a desktop computer, ripping the CDs I already owned to my hard drive and sending the contents from there to an MP3 player. It was probably because I was a Piler, never a Racker or a Shelfer, let alone an Archivist, that I found it so easy to leave CDs behind. The first four albums by Belle and Sebastian had been in heavy rotation for me for years, always in and out of the stereo. Once I’d digitised these albums (in the 2000s, the work of minutes), I hardly touched them again. In 2005 I bought a lozenge-like iPod Shuffle that was about the size and weight of a packet of chewing gum and had room for 20-odd albums. At home, the computer replaced the stereo as a music player. I had dozens of albums, secure on a hard drive, playable with a double-click. View image in fullscreen Adrian Utley and Beth Gibbons of Portishead. Photograph: Des Willie/Redferns Where did you end up, my Belle and Sebastian CDs? My Blur by Blur? My Grease and my Nows? Some of these CDs were so overhandled by the time of their abandonment, the printed lettering on top of the discs had rubbed away, the grooved inside of cases had chipped or gone, and the plastic faceplates were grazed and foggy. Did I give the Belle and Sebastians away? Did they end up in landfill, with my friend’s abandoned Ash and Suede singles? I know the Belle and Sebastians didn’t make it as far as my last bin bag, a gathering-together of CDs belonging to me and to my wife that we gave away when we moved flats in 2012. By this point we were both listening to music through a subscription streaming service – Spotify at first, then Apple’s equivalent. Even the invisible MP3s on my computer’s hard drive had started to feel fiddly and archaic, an unnecessary burden: so, of course, the last of the CDs had to go. I made the argument to my wife that we should do a clean sweep. I took all the discs we had to an Oxfam on Kentish Town Road. I remember handing the bag over dubiously, with no faith in the resale value of the contents. What a cool thing, I told myself, as I walked away unencumbered, to own no albums… yet somehow to own every album. What freedom! What choice! I don’t know how long it took for the regret to sink in. Three years? Five? I know that I miss my pile of CDs now. I miss the fussy, fusty process of deciding to put one on, a rummaging hand, a scour for the correct disc, the colours and the fonts and feel of the plastic circles, lightweight yet at the same time heavy with associative feeling. I miss having signposted reminders of songs or records I loved during specific eras in my life. Streaming’s better, on the whole. I’ve paid out so much money in monthly subscriptions by now I have to believe it’s better. My access to new or unheard music has expanded. My diet is more varied. But something lovely has gone. Pointless denying that. Grease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture is available to listen to on Apple Music, I see. So is a 2016 album of Grease tributes, including Boyz II Men singing Beauty School Dropout. My current subscription gives me access to about a dozen volumes of Now covering 2021 to 2024. The Beatles’ Red Album is on there, with an animated tweak to the cover that renders John, Paul, George and Ringo vanishing away into nothing. As I look at this graphic on my iPhone, propped on the desk beside me, it looks as if the band are repeatedly fading into the depths of the device, there to join the pixels, the compressed data, the algorithms, the nudging search results – innovations that enrich as well as complicate today’s curation and consumption of music. View image in fullscreen Photograph: Gordon Scammell/Alamy If it meant swapping what we have today for what we had then, I wouldn’t go back. I’m too greedy for the new stuff and too impatient to be fed with music when I want to be fed. That cover of Beauty School Dropout by Boyz II Men is decent, it turns out, and I never would have listened to it were it not for this opening up of a digitised music landscape, where one discovery leads to another then another, seamlessly, more or less infinitely. Piercing through the convenience of this, though, comes the regret about my old CDs. When my primary school-age children want to put on music in our home they have to find a phone, mine or their mother’s. They have to scroll or type on a screen, press play, then wait for the mysterious rearrangement of ones and zeros that will bring Taylor or Oasis or the first track of In the Heights out of a wireless speaker. It’s an impressive process. I still find myself wanting to whistle, amazed by how far music tech has come. But there’s an absence now, some loss of connection with the initial creators of these pieces of art, some loss of awareness, too, about the spots they occupy in time and space. For my children, attentive listeners though they are, Taylor might as well be a direct contemporary of Liam and Noel. All three of them might have grown up together in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Manhattan, or Stormzy’s Croydon, or in a Kings Road boozer of the 1960s. Now that music is invisible, everywhere and nowhere, served up track by track in capsule form, there aren’t the same indicators about provenance, influence, chronology, originality. We don’t have a CD player in our home any more. There is one, never used, in our car. Perhaps I’ll stop in a charity shop the next time I pass one: buy a few CDs. Perhaps I’ll go down to the Oxfam on Kentish Town Road and see if I can buy back one or two of my CDs. If any of them are still there, I reckon I’d know them at once. The half-torn HMV label on Expecting to Fly by the Bluetones. A curved moon of acrylic missing from the corner of my Trainspotting case. I’d recognise them all, right away – old mates. Tom Lamont’s debut novel, Going Home, is out now. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply Three musicians on their love of CDs View image in fullscreen Photograph: Dennis Morris Bashy: ‘Vinyl is great but it’s very much a luxury’ British actor and rapper There’s something about the tangible nature of CDs that really appeals to me. I released an album recently, and even though it was online and people were listening to it and talking about it, it only properly landed with me when I had the CD in my hand. That physical feeling gave me a sense of completion. There’s a video of me on my Instagram opening up the CD and taking in the artwork for the first time. It’s something I really care about. I was born in 1985 and grew up at the intersection of vinyl, cassettes and CDs. The first album I bought on CD was Kiss the Game Goodbye by Jadakiss and I ended up collecting hundreds and hundreds, which I stacked up in my room like a work of art. You could see someone’s musical taste through their CDs – mine included 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Trying, Jay-Z’s The Blueprint and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill – whereas now it’s hidden away in your phone out of view. Vinyl is great but it was expensive then and it’s very much a luxury now. For young kids from working-class backgrounds, the CD was a way for us to spread our music in a cost-effective manner. So it was essential in the London grime and hip-hop scenes before social media. In 2008 I put out The Chupa-Chups Mixtape, which I pressed up on CD myself, attaching a Chupa-Chups lollipop to the front of each cover with Sellotape. I put it in barber shops and local clothes shops for people to buy and the lollipop helped it stand out visually. Then it started to take on a life of its own. People would tell their friends about it, or they’d burn up a copy to share around. Thanks to that mixtape, I ended up making the theme song for the film Adulthood. It helped me lay my foundations as an artist. Streaming has its advantages, but a lot of people are missing that physicality a CD gives you. The artwork and the liner notes and printed lyrics become an extension of the music. You can get a feeling of what the album is about, or who the artist is, before you’ve even pressed play. So I don’t think the CD format is dead or has ever died, it’s just been overlooked for a while because of the digital music revolution. I’m really glad to see it resurfacing. Interview by Killian Fox Bashy’s new album, Being Poor Is Expensive, is out now. The Chupa-Chups Mixtape can be streamed here. 1Xtra’s Album Launch Party with Bashy is on BBC iPlayer Kitty Liv: ‘CDs give you an insight into the journey of an album’ Singer-songwriter, member of Kitty, Daisy & Lewis) View image in fullscreen Photograph: Dean Chalkley I was born in the early 90s and CDs were the biggest thing when I was growing up. I used to get them for Christmas presents, and sometimes I’d go to Woolworths and choose one. I’d burn them a lot and make my own compilations. It was such a straightforward thing to do as a kid on the family computer. It would be a huge mix of anything I was listening to at the time, from Elvis’s greatest hits to Daniel Bedingfield, T Rex and then random stuff by Eminem, a combination of whatever was popular at the time with music I really loved. I remember going to my local cafe, Mario’s in Kentish Town, and if I made him a CD, he’d give me a free breakfast. I was probably about 10. Streaming platforms are good for discovering new music, but in terms of the listening experience, I think CDs are a great thing. Music has become quite disposable now, and with streaming, there is not that sense of urgency to listen to new music. If there’s a new song out, I might give it a listen later, whereas with CDs, it was like: “I’ll get the CD and I’ll put it on in the car and listen to the whole album.” Having the attention span to listen has been lost, certainly with the younger generation. I hope that will come back because when you make music, it’s great when someone else gets an insight into the journey that you’ve had making that record. Interview by Tess Reidy Kitty Liv’s debut solo album, Easy Tiger, is out now on Sunday Best Recordings, on digital, vinyl and – of course – CD Joe Mount: ‘Hidden tracks are just not hidden any more’ Lead singer/ guitarist, Metronomy View image in fullscreen Metronomy on stage at the 2009 Reading festival. Photograph: Simone Joyner/Getty Images We were a tape household and we weren’t in the first wave of people to buy a CD player, but eventually, one Christmas, my sister ended up getting a ghettoblaster with a disc player. I just remember then having to try to build a collection and feeling a bit begrudging that I already had loads of stuff on tape. The quickest route to getting a CD collection was buying magazines that had cover-mount CDs on them, and so a lot of my earliest ones were from Q magazine or Select. One, which I still have, was called Be There Now. It had Radiohead, Wire, Bentley Rhythm Ace, Talking Heads and Talk Talk. That was ’97. In the Britpop days, there were always inventive ways of making you buy more music. I remember having a Pulp CD and it had three slots for discs, but you had to go and buy individual singles to build up this collection. I never really splurged a load of money on them and I soon veered more into vinyl. A lot of the CDs I owned I still have and they’re at my parents’ house. There’s the Aaliyah record, the one with a picture of her and the red cover. I’ve also got the Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf and In Search of... by NERD. I think music streaming is not too bad, but I do slightly lament the fact that hidden tracks are just not hidden any more. It was a glory age of actually concealing things on discs. The first time I remember hearing a hidden track was on the Lemonheads’ Come On Feel the Lemonheads, which has a hidden reprise at the very end. The other thing I miss about the format is the printed artwork. I think that’s a really nice thing and people got quite creative with the different types of CD cases that they made. In terms of durability, however, CDs have never been good. When my wife and I left the first flat we shared together, she had an enormous CD collection, and I was trying to organise it all and every case I opened there was no CD in it. They were in a DJ folder, completely scratched. I very passive aggressively put all the empty CD cases in a box and she wouldn’t let me throw them away, so I had to label it “empty CD cases”. We’ve still got that! These days, you can go into charity shops and find decent albums on CD for 50p. I like doing that ahead of car journeys and enjoying the fact that you don’t need to care about them too much. You know they’ve already had their first usage and it’s like an act of recycling, like having the last crack of the scratched CD. TR

Rakim just released his new album, G.O.Ds Network: Reb7rth. A collaboration remix with them, with Jeff on production, would be perfect. Jeff and Rakim have done a handful of shows in recent years. This only makes sense and would boost interest in both of their albums. Plus, if Will's album is leaning toward modern rap, a classic Hip-Hop remix would hit the spot for those of us wanting that.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2024/07/26/will-smith-new-song-rap-work-of-art/74554958007/?fbclid=IwY2xjawERYq5leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHRxCYkeMqFvhrz_mC6piT7sgvwkvwvEQYnntynxd9NuBOruAzrohT5IpTg_aem_M6kdJEjLoX2TeaApzZn4bw Will Smith resurges rap career with new single 'Work of Art' Naledi Ushe USA TODAY The Fresh Prince is officially back in the rap game. Will Smith released the debut single "Work of Art" off of his upcoming album Friday along with its music video. The track features Smith's son Jaden and singer Russ on the vocals with the Grammy-winning rapper reflecting on the different aspects of his personality. "I am Musa, I am Jesus / I am Judas, I am the judge / I am the victim, and I'm the shooter / I'm in the Torah, and the Koran, and in the Bible / I am a shepherd / I am a leader, and a disciple," Smith, 55, smoothly raps. He also alludes to his struggle in the public eye after he slapped comedian Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards. "They tried to censor me / But then they sent for me," he raps in one section, adding in the chorus, "I am a saint, but if you touch, I am a savage." Will Smith returns to musicwith uplifting BET Awards 2024 performance of 'You Can Make It' Throughout the music video, Smith reveals to Russ that he recorded over 20 songs for his upcoming project. "'Work of Art' was the song where I found my voice. It was like 'Ah! That’s what I want to talk about,'" he says as the two become part of a museum display. Smith has been teasing his return to music in the past few months with an appearance during J. Balvin's Coachella set in April, followed by the first live performance of his song "You Can Make It" at the BET Awards in June and a surprise appearance at La Velada Del Año 4 earlier this month. Teasing his fifth album, the "Bad Boys: Ride or Die" star wrote on Instagram on July 12, "The Theme of the music I’ve been working on is 'Dance in your Darkest Moments.' Over the past couple of years I’ve had to learn a different way to be with adversity — a different way to face hard times." The actor's most recent studio album was “Lost and Found,” released in 2005. The album sold a half-million copies and peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. Contributing: Edward Segarra, KiMi Robinson

I'd expect there'd be a CD release. Most albums still get a physical release. Artists that come from an era where it was essential to release CD, cassette, vinyl, etc, typically make a point to release physical media. Since SLANG is a new label, we don't really have anything to go by. I just tried to look them up on Discogs and they haven't been entered yet.

The look and tone of the music video kind of fit what I envisioned for it. It suites the song well. I actually like interview and live performance aspects of the video. If you want the song, buy it. This is the music video. It's fitting to give it a little something extra. The comments (from what I see) are ALL positive, which is great. We all are BUYING the single, right?

I was curious if he was going to partner with a big label or do it independently, but partner with someone for a distribution deal. I have an album by The Underachievers when they did an independent crowd-funded album a few years back. Hopefully this is the partnership he needs.

Yes, I'm all for a classic remix. Don't involve the new talent. Legends only.

"Light Em Up" from the Bad Boys: Ride Or Die soundtrack and "You Can Make It" are available. "Work of Art" hasn't been released. We've only heard it from his live performance the other day.

https://apnews.com/article/ll-cool-j-qtip-phife-dawg-eminem-85d1ccddf93d76c36653a11b5b8408ea LL Cool J relearned ‘how to rap’ on his first album in 11 years, ‘The FORCE.’ Here’s how FILE - LL Cool J performs during the MTV Video Music Awards in Newark, N.J., on Sept. 12, 2023. The rapper-actor will release “The F.O.R.C.E.,” his first album in 11 years. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File) 2 of 2 | This cover image shows “The F.O.R.C.E.” by LL Cool J. (Def Jam Recordings/Virgin Music Group via AP) BY MARIA SHERMAN Updated 12:12 AM EDT, July 12, 2024 NEW YORK (AP) — The Grammy award winning rapper-actor- author LL COOL J will release his first new album in 11 years, “The FORCE” in September — 40 years into his hip-hop career. Not that he hasn’t been making music in that time. “I’ve always tinkered around in the studio here and there,” he told The Associated Press over Zoom. But over the last two or so years, inspiration really struck. He started working with a producer and pursuing music-making more seriously. Then he hit a roadblock. “I just felt like the tracks that this producer was giving me were better than the songs that I was writing,” he said. Then the late Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest came to him in a dream. “He told me, ‘Yo, man, that new music you’re working on is great, man.’ But he had a look on his face like a Cheshire cat, like he was lying to me,” he says. It was a wakeup call — and something told him to call A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip to work together. The move worked: Q-Tip produced every track and made all the beats on “The FORCE,” which will be released Sept. 6. LL COOL J describes the process of making his 14th studio album as “going back to the drawing board and learning how to rap again ... making sure I was really inspired by the things I was saying. That’s why there isn’t a lot of fluff on this album.” “The LeBrons, the Stephs, the Jordans and the Kobes, they all go back to the drawing board, they always try to make themselves better” he continued. “I wasn’t trying to do trendy, and I wasn’t trying to recapture anything I did before.” “The FORCE” is an inventive rap record, informed by LL COOL J’s lengthy career, touching on various themes, like the power of self-motivation (“Passion”), full-force swag (“Murdergram Deux,” a long-awaited collab with Eminem ), not-safe-for-work sensuality (“Proclivities” featuring Saweetie) and cautionary tales, as evidenced in the lead single, “Saturday Night Special” featuring Rick Ross and Fat Joe. Particularly effective is the one-two punch of “Huey in the Chair,” — a reference to a famous photo of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton — what the rapper describes as “taking a stand for what you believe in,” into the funky downtown beats of “Basquiat Energy,” a celebration of the namesake artist’s innovative spirit. The rapper says the American icons share an ability to “express their personal truths,” something he aimed to do on this album. In that way, “The FORCE,” which stands for “frequencies of real creative energy,” became an unofficial mantra for the release. “That’s what we wanted to present to the world,” he said. “It’s about wanting to vibrate at a high level.” And following the 50th anniversary of hip-hop last year, LL COOL J says he “wanted to show people that artists that have had long storied careers, so to speak, can make modern contributions to hip-hop that have a major impact. I hadn’t seen that done before. It was another challenge: Can I create something that sounds new and fresh?” He’s not leaning into fads here — expect to hear rappers actually rapping — but no one should consider this a play at nostalgia. The album is stacked with features, even beyond Ross, Fat Joe, Saweetie and Eminem: Snoop Dogg, Sona Jobareth, Busta Rhymes, Nas, Mad Squablz, J-S.A.N.D. and Don Pablito are among them. “The one thing I wanted to do is, I wanted to meet people where I’m at now. I wasn’t trying to be preachy,” he said. “I’m not trying to tell people necessarily how to live. I did want to express with people where I’m at artistically at this point in my life and give them that. And then they can take that and do whatever they want with it.” “The FORCE” Track List: 1. “Spirit of Cyrus” (feat. Snoop Dogg) 2. “The FORCE” 3. “Saturday Night Special” (feat. Rick Ross and Fat Joe) 4. “Black Code Suite” (feat. Sona Jobarteh) 5. “Passion” 6. “Proclivities” (feat. Saweetie) 7. “Post Modern” 8. “30 Decembers” 9. “Runnit Back” 10. “Huey In Da Chair” (feat. Busta Rhymes) 11. “Basquiat Energy” 12. “Praise Him” (feat. Nas) 13. “Murdergram Deux” (feat. Eminem) 14. “The Vow” (feat. Mad Squablz, J-S.A.N.D., and Don Pablito)

Great performance. He seems so happy to be performing and the crowd is showing crazy love. In the past, he tended to push his vocals too much when performing live, but he seems to let his voice fall in a normal place for himself here, which I really like. "Work of Art"... I need to hear a studio version pumping through the speakers. The lyrics are something to unpack and spend more time with. The production is fitting for the times. I'll personally always favor a more traditional sound. I think I'd like a studio version better than hearing a live recording. I just hope it's the only song on the album with that kind of sound and feel.

https://ew.com/will-smith-set-for-andrea-bocelli-30th-anniversary-concert-8677471?utm_campaign=entertainmentweekly_entertainmentweekly&utm_content=manual&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&fbclid=IwY2xjawD-0aFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHTbXG11zCdbLmn-cRJCqbVUv59OIa9J2dkLj78q2cznuqiAhsyYmrmbNRg_aem_nmNtf1RbEY6js8VO10kxYg Will Smith will appear with Andrea Bocelli at singer’s 30th anniversary concert Let’s hope they perform “Wild Wild West” together. By Wesley Stenzel Published on July 12, 2024 04:22PM EDT Andrea Bocelli will soon get jiggy wit it. Will Smith has joined the lineup of Andrea Bocelli 30: The Celebration in Tuscany. The three-day event will take place July 15, 17, and 19 at Teatro del Silenzio in Lajatico, Bocelli’s hometown. There’s no word yet on what capacity the Fresh Prince will participate in — Entertainment Weekly has reached out to Smith’s representatives for clarification, and a rep for the concert had no further details to offer. Will Smith and Andrea Bocelli. DAVID LIVINGSTON/GETTY IMAGES; ROBERTO RICCIUTI/REDFERNS/GETTY If you haven’t booked a flight to Tuscany to see Big Willie back-to-back with the Italian tenor, fear not — the concert is being filmed by director Sam Wrench, the filmmaker behind Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour documentary. His doc capturing the performances is set to hit theaters in the fall through Fathom Events. The star-studded event will also see appearances by Shania Twain, Ed Sheeran, Russell Crowe, Jon Batiste, Sofía Vergara, Christian Nodal, Katharine McPhee, Queen’s Brian May, and Johnny Depp. Bocelli also announced a new collaborative album, Duets, on Friday. The project will feature a mix of old and new duets with other prominent artists, with Twain, Karol G, Marc Anthony, Gwen Stefani, and Chris Stapleton recording new songs with Bocelli. Older tracks with Stevie Wonder, Dua Lipa, Jennifer Lopez, Ariana Grande, Celine Dion, McPhee, and Sheeran will also be included on the album, which will release Oct. 25. After almost exclusively focusing on acting for the last two decades, Smith has reignited his musical career with a new song, “You Can Make It,” which he performed at the BET Awards last month. The “Summertime” rapper also released “Light Em Up” with Sean Paul from the Bad Boys: Ride or Die soundtrack last month, and made a surprise appearance during J Balvin’s Coachella set, performing “Men in Black” in full Agent J garb. Smith’s musical ventures have been few and far between since his movie stardom solidified in the early 2000s. He did have two songs on the 2019 Aladdin soundtrack, and he’s occasionally recorded features for other artists like Jaden Smith, Logic, Nicky Jam, and Joyner Lucas. His last proper solo singles, though, came 19 years ago with “Switch” and “Party Starter” from his 2005 album Lost and Found. Now, Smith is hinting that a new album may be on the horizon, with “You Can Make It” as the lead single.

Yeah, this got me hype. In the past, he'd say something vague about music when dropping a video. With the success of the new song, the live performances over recent months (plus Jeff is out touring with Paula Abdul and New Kids), he seems ready and focused since he has an album well in the works. He better come through.

It's late in the game to say that, but I hope everyone on this board BUYS the single instead of just streaming it. Keep the momentum going. Let FP know we really want and appreciate the new music.

The album is out digitally! CD and vinyl available next month.

New single / music video!

The article talks about how the song is doing well on Gospel/Christian charts (which is awesome), but it only states that he's working on the album. It doesn't say that it's a Gospel/Christian album.

Yes, after hearing all that modern music in the film, it was great hearing a Run DMC song during a climatic moment. It perfectly set the tone for the moment.