Madonna’s new song, “I Feel So Free,” hit Brazilian radio this morning.
It’s the first track from her “Confessions on a Dance Floor 2.”
The song sounds like Donna Summer’s 70s producer, Giorgio Moroder, put it together.
I’m sure it will be a big hit on the dance floor in whatever discos still exist — they’re very popular in Europe and South America.
I FEEL SO FREE ACABA DE NASCER! pic.twitter.com/pDFfymMAwQ
— GOSTOSOS ESCUTAM MADONNA (@guiga_____) April 17, 2026
Alphaville, the German pop group, is furious with Donald Trump.
They’re demanding he take down a video from his Truth Social using their song, “Forever Young.”
They say they “abhor” his political views, and prohibit anyone from the Republican Party, starting with him, to use the song in any way.
Alphaville joins scads of musicians who’ve disallowed Trump from using their music in videos or at rallies.
It’s ironic that Alphaville has registered a protest over the song. “Forever Young” is adapted from Bob Dylan’s 1973 song of the same name. Dylan is surely livid over the use himself.
Trump is not forever young, by the way. He turns 80 in June and looks terrible.
PS Yes, Rod Stewart adapted the Dylan song, too.
Kanye West’s (Ye) planned concert at Poland’s Silesian Stadium has been canceled. The decision follows significant pressure from Polish authorities and public backlash regarding the artist’s history of antisemitic comments and past praise of Nazi ideology.
Poland’s decision to not allow Kanye to perform follows similar decisions from the UK and France. West is also banned from entering Australia.
This leaves booked shows for him in Italy, Turkey, and India.
Poland is especially touchy about the embrace of Nazis and Hitler since a great deal of the Holocaust took place in their country, especially the decimation of the Warsaw Ghetto. Kanye would do well to watch Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” if he wants to learn more about the history of music and the Nazis in Poland.
Marta Cienkowska, Poland’s culture minister, said in a statement: “In a country marked by the history of the Holocaust, we cannot pretend this is just entertainment.
“We are talking about an artist who has publicly made antisemitic remarks, relativized crimes, and profited from selling T-shirts with a swastika.”
“This is a deliberate crossing of a boundary and a normalization of hate,” she added in a social media post on Thursday according to tvpworld.com.
“Culture cannot be a space for those who use it to spread contempt,” Cienkowska said.
West’s opportunities to perform around the world are shrinking quickly after the fiasco at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. They allowed him put on two shows, one of which was on the first night of Passover.
Since then, West — a vocal and avowed antisemite — has posted that he wants “to make amends,” whatever that means.
Meanwhile, sales of his new “Bully” album have slowed down to a trickle. Sales are mostly coming from streaming, but they’re down 60% from last week to just 33,000.
Guess who’s back in action?
Stormy Daniels’ ex lawyer, Michael Avenatti.
He’s just put up a website to find work or an opportunity to pay back $6 million to his victims.
Avenatti was convicted of various crimes — including a $20 million extortion scheme against Nike and stealing $300,000 from Daniels. He was sentenced to 11 years, 3 months. He served around 4 years and was released last week.
Now he’s in a halfway house in Hollywood, eyeing a full release in September.
Avenatti at his height was on every TV talk show as the story of Stormy and Donald Trump got bigger and bigger. He seemed like Stormy’s BFF, but then it was revealed he was bilking her.
He also did some bad stuff with Nike, and wound up in prison.
But now, he says, his story isn’t over.
On the new website, he writes, in the third person: “He does not minimize what happened or ask for sympathy. He has said publicly, and means it, that you don’t end up where he ended up without making serious mistakes — and that people were hurt by his conduct in ways he carries with him. And he is committed to making things right. He also has things to say about what was done to him, and how, and why.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald was so wrong. He said Americans didn’t have second acts. Indeed, they seem to have many acts. If Fitzgerald were alive he’d now say, “Americans never go away, no matter what they’v done.”
First it was “Eddie Dalton.”
The AI invented blues and soul singer has been holding steady for weeks now on iTunes top 100 with several hits.
They were all created by Dallas Little of Greenville, South Carolina. At one point Little had ELEVEN Eddie Dalton songs on the chart. He still has more than a half dozen.
Now comes IngaRose, whose song “Celebrate Me” is number 1. She’s also AI, totally fake, quite possibly also the brainchild of Dallas Little. IngaRose is a female R&B performer created from whole cloth. She doesn’t exist but she has a dozen videos of that many “songs” on YouTube. IngaRose also has 228K followers on Instagram.
On IngaRose’s Instagram page, there is a description: “Human written lyrics, Real stories. Stems & arrangement refined using Suno. Singers who want to bring these songs to life or need a writer, reach out”
Suno is an AI platform easily found online that will create any song just by entering prompts. I typed in “smokey robinson sounds like bruce springsteen” and got a bunch of authentic sounding professional songs that could easily be played on the radio without anyone knowing the difference.
The song I made up, “Backseat Hallelujah,” even came with artwork.
So I guess the question now is, Will Spotify and other streaming platforms continue to allow AI to clog up their charts with manufactured music? For now it seems like the answer is Yes. That alone should make human artists very uneasy.
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It’s pretty much a throw of the dice to put on any Broadway play.
But how about a new play? And one with movie stars who’ve never been on Broadway?
Yikes.
But two time Oscar winner Adrien Brody, and rising star Tessa Thompson, are superb in “The Fear of 13,” which opened Wednesday night at the James Earl Jones (formerly Cort) Theater.
David Cromer, who can do no wrong, directs. Lindsey Ferrentino is the playwright.
“Fear” — based on a documentary of the same name — is not only a transfer from a UK run but also an overhaul. I didn’t see it in London, but apparently the new version is an improvement despite leaving out a few salient points.
It doesn’t matter. You want to see great actors live on stage under the guidance of an expert. With Brody, Thompson, and Cromer you get that. They should all look for Tony nominations — although I worry that the persnickety Tony nominees, who don’t like movie stars, won’t acknowledge their work.
“Fear” is the true story of Nick Yarris, who spent 22 years on Death Row for a rape and murder he didn’t commit in Pennsylvania, his home state. Nick is already a sketchy character, so the police railroading him into a confession was not a stretch. He’s put on Death Row.
In time, a volunteer comes to talk to the Death Row inmates. Her name is Jacki, and she falls under Nick’s spell pretty fast. He’s a great storyteller — sometimes Jacki questions his veracity. But he’s proven to be telling the truth, so she decides to help him reopen his case.
What happens is an intense — though often humorous — take on the searing frustration of the slow moving justice system, and how innocently incarcerated must depend on a village of strangers, and some luck, to reverse the course of their lives.
Both stars do striking work here. Thompson really commands the stage, even if her role as Jacki just lasts three quarters of the play. Brody works magic, appearing in almost every scene of the two hour, one act (no intermission) play. He gets to plumb a range of emotions that show he’s ready to take on deeper material in the future.
As for the real Nick Yarris, he was at the opening last night, sitting in a box above the audience. As wiry and electric as Brody plays him, Yarris was nattily dressed for a man who told me that he’s essentially homeless. “I live in my car,” he said, although for his time on Broadway he’s found some little apartment in New Jersey.
Isn’t he making money from the play? He says, no, that he’s giving his proceeds to the family of the woman who was raped and murdered. He feels his confession prevented her from getting justice and her family finding closure. I stood with a few others in the lobby of the Cort, and they were agape listening to this reasoning. It’s a selfless act, but Yarris can’t be talked out of it.
In the audience: Mamie Gummer, ome of the three acting Streep sisters, plus Tony and Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham, rapper and actor Common, Rebecca Hall, and Brody’s famous wife, designer Georgina Chapman, and Brody’s mother, legendary photographer, Sylvia Plachy, who told she’d seen the play three times and was “overwhelmed.”
Pop star Meghan Trainor has canceled her big tour for this spring and summer.
I don’t know much about Trainor. She always seemed nice. But she hasn’t had a chart hit in 10 years.
Her biggest hit, “All About the Bass,” came thirteen years ago, in 2014.
Exactly whom did she think was going to fill Madison Square Garden?
You can’t tour without current hits unless you’re a classic rock star. If you do, the venues had better be on the small side.
Apparently, Trainer has a new album coming out April 25th called “Toy With Me.” But she’s already released three singles into the abyss. No one knows any of that happened. If just one had been a big breakout hit, she might have had a chance to hit 5,000 seat theaters.
The singles, by the way, are good. She needs a marketing plan.
Self Magazine is no more.
Already reduced to a website, now Conde Nast has pulled the plug.
This is despite a moment in which health and fitness are more under the spotlight than ever with weight loss drugs, vaccines, and remedies of all kinds a bigger business than ever.
The magazine lasted 47 years. Its most popular era was under editor Alexandra Penney.
Conde Nast is also closing the international editions of Glamour, the magazine which is supposed to absorb the coverage being left behind by Self. There’s a report that Sam Barry, the editor-in-chief of Glamour, is leaving, according to a note she sent to her staff.
Conde Nast, once the king of kings in magazines, is in publishing freefall. Nonetheless, they’ve put all their resources and time into the ridiculous Met Gala and the upcoming movie, “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”
Anna Wintour is unbothered. She was seen last night sitting right up front at the opening of the Broadway play, “The Fear of 13,” starring Adrien Brody.
What was evident a long time has come to pass: “Law & Order: Organized Crime” is over.
Five seasons. Five showrunners. And no one knew what this “Law & Order” spin was about.
Chris Meloni played Elliot Stabler from “SVU.” Except now he was involved with chasing down various kinds of Mafia. The whole first season concerned one mobster named Sinatra, played by Dylan McDermott. The whole story was so convoluted and unpleasant that eventually McDermott was moved to another Dick Wolf show, “FBI,” on CBS.
The other storyline was Stabler being unable to express his love for Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson. The romance was written for two year olds. The whole arc was the two of them staring at each other like kids in junior high school.
When one new producer after another didn’t have a clue about the show, they brought in Stabler’s family including the Oscar winning actress Ellen Burstyn as his mother. At that point, “Organized Crime” became a violent soap opera.
In the end, NBC moved “OG” to Peacock to fulfill its series order.
It’s too bad. Dick Wolf is usually more savvy. But his first showrunner, Ilene Chaiken, didn’t even plan the first season until the last minute. I reported at the time that she hadn’t even submitted an outline or scripts. Things just deteriorated after that.
I do think Meloni and everyone else knew it was dead and not coming back then. Meloni has moved on, to an HBO show. There’s been no mention of Stabler on “SVU” in a long time. Will the Benson-Stabler romance ever be consummated? Perhaps, in a nursing home. After all, this has been going on for 25 years.
Lana Del Rey releases her rejected James Bond theme song/
The song, “First Light,” is taken from the upcoming James Bond game “007 First Light.”
Could this have been the theme to a Bond movie? Probably. But it’s here now, and we’ll enjoy it.