Guilty Pleasures
By Associated Press
Rod Stewart to
play Glastonbury Festival next year
LONDON | Rod Stewart will play the “legends” slot at Britain’s Glastonbury Festival next year, more than two decades after he headlined the music festival, the organizers said Tuesday.
Stewart, 79, said on social media that he was “proud and ready and more than able to take the stage again to pleasure and titillate my friends at Glastonbury in June.”
The rock star, who headlined Glastonbury in 2002, was the first musical act announced for the June 2025 festival at Worthy Farm in the southwest of England.
Shania Twain starred in the coveted legends slot for this year’s festival, which drew some 200,000 music fans and was headlined by Dua Lipa, Coldplay and SZA.
Stewart leaped to stardom in the London blues scene of the late 1960s, fronting the Jeff Beck Group, then joined the rowdy rock act the Faces before launching a successful solo career with hits including “Maggie May,” “Tonight’s the Night” and “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”
Stewart, who turns 80 in January, recently said he was ending large-scale world tours but added he had “no desire to retire” after six decades in music.
“I love what I do, and I do what I love. I’m fit, have a full head of hair, and can run 100 metres in 18 seconds at the jolly old age of 79,” he wrote on Instagram last week.
Glastonbury organizer Emily Eavis said bringing Stewart back was “everything we could wish for,” before the festival takes a break or a “fallow year” to allow the farmland that hosts the festival to rest.
Jury are deliberating in the long-running YSL gang and racketeering trial
ATLANTA | Deliberations are underway in Atlanta after a year of testimony in the gang and racketeering trial that originally included the rapper Young Thug.
Jurors are considering whether to convict Shannon Stillwell and Deamonte Kendrick, who raps as Yak Gotti, on gang, murder, drug and gun charges. The original indictment charged 28 people with conspiring to violate Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Opening statements in the trial for six of those defendants happened a year ago. Four of them, including Young Thug, pleaded guilty last month. The rapper was freed on probation. Stillwell and Kendrick rejected plea deals after more than a week of negotiations, and their lawyers chose not to present evidence or witnesses.
Both seemed to be in good spirits Tuesday morning after closings wrapped the previous night. Kendrick was chatting and laughing with Stillwell and his lawyers before the jury arrived for instructions.
Kendrick and Stillwell were charged in the 2015 killing of Donovan Thomas Jr., also known as “Big Nut,” in an Atlanta barbershop.
Prosecutors painted Stillwell and Kendrick as members of a violent street gang called Young Slime Life, or YSL, co-founded in 2012 by Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams. During closings on Monday, they pointed to tattoos, song lyrics and social media posts they said proved members, including Stillwell, admitted to killing people in rival gangs.
Prosecutors say Thomas was in a rival gang. Stillwell was also charged in the 2022 killing of Shymel Drinks, which prosecutors said was in retaliation for the killing of two YSL associates days earlier.
Defense attorneys Doug Weinstein and Max Schardt said the state presented unreliable witnesses, weak evidence and cherry-picked lyrics and social media posts to push a false narrative about Stillwell, Kendrick and the members of YSL.
Schardt, Stillwell’s attorney, reminded the jury that alleged YSL affiliates said during the trial that they had lied to police. Law enforcement played a “sick game” by promising they would escape long prison sentences if they said what police wanted them to say, Schardt said. He theorized that one of those witnesses could have killed Thomas.
The truth is that their clients were just trying to escape poverty through music, Schardt said.
“As a whole, we know the struggles that these communities have had,” Schardt said. “A sad, tacit acceptance that it’s either rap, prison or death.”
Young Thug’s record label is also known as YSL, an acronym of Young Stoner Life. Kendrick was featured on two popular songs from the label’s compilation album Slime Language 2, “Take It to Trial” and “Slatty,” which prosecutors presented as evidence in the trial.
Weinstein, Kendrick’s defense attorney, said during closings it was wrong for prosecutors to target the defendants for their music and lyrics. Prosecutor Simone Hylton disagreed, and said surveillance footage and phone evidence supported her case.
“They have the audacity to think they can just brag about killing somebody and nobody’s gonna hold them accountable,” Hylton said.
The trial had more than its fair share of delays. Jury selection took nearly 10 months, and Stillwell was stabbed last year at the Fulton County jail, which paused trial proceedings.
Judge Paige Reese Whitaker took over after Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Ural Glanville was removed from the case in July because he had a meeting with prosecutors and a state witness without defense attorneys present.
Whitaker often lost patience with prosecutors over moves such as not sharing evidence with defense attorneys, once accusing them of “poor lawyering.” But the trial sped up under her watch.
In October, four defendants, including Young Thug, pleaded guilty, with the rapper entering a non-negotiated or “blind” plea, meaning he didn’t have a deal worked out with prosecutors.
Nine people charged in the indictment, including rapper Gunna, accepted plea deals before the trial began. Charges against 12 others are pending. Prosecutors dropped charges against one defendant after he was convicted of murder in an unrelated case.
Drake makes another legal move against Universal over Kendrick Lamar diss track ‘Not Like Us’
For the second straight day, Drake has taken legal action against Universal Music Group, this time in Texas, over Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us.”
It follows a similar filing in New York on Monday, in which Drake alleges UMG falsely pumped up the popularity of “Not Like Us” on Spotify and other streaming services.
The two court moves have taken the bitter beef between the two hip-hop superstars to a whole new level, with the parent company of the labels for both men now pulled directly into the fight.
Tuesday’s filing in Bexar County alleges UMG engaged in “irregular and inappropriate business practices” to get radio airplay for “Not Like Us,” including making illegal payments to San Antonio-based iHeartMedia. The petition, a precursor to a potential lawsuit, seeks depositions from corporate representatives of both companies.
The filing takes aim at UMG for allegedly knowing that “the song itself, as well as its accompanying album art and music video, attacked the character of another one of UMG’s most prominent artists, Drake, by falsely accusing him of being a sex offender, engaging in pedophilic acts, harboring sex offenders, and committing other criminal sexual acts.”
The filing points out that “the song calls Drake a ‘certified pedophile,’ a ‘predator,’ and someone whose name should ‘be registered and placed on neighborhood watch.’”
The petition says Drake could sue UMG for defamation, among other claims.
A UMG representative did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the new filing. In a Monday statement in response to the New York filing, the company said the “suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue. We employ the highest ethical practices in our marketing and promotional campaigns.”
An email to an iHeartMedia representative seeking comment was also not immediately answered.
The New York petition is also a precursor to a potential lawsuit, and alleges UMG fired employees seen as loyal to Drake “in an apparent effort to conceal its schemes.”
The back-to-back legal maneuvers represent a major and possibly unprecedented escalation of a hip-hop feud, especially with the label representing two of the biggest stars in music sitting at the center of it.
Drake, a 38-year-old Canadian rapper and singer and five-time Grammy winner, and Lamar, a 37-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner who is set to headline the next Super Bowl halftime, were occasional collaborators more than a decade ago.
That changed when Lamar began taking public jabs at Drake starting in 2013. The fight escalated steeply earlier this year.
“Not Like Us,” the wildly popular Lamar single released in May, was an especially vicious moment in a flurry of dueling tracks from the two artists.
—From AP reports
