Kyle Richards blames herself for all the unwanted media attention Morgan Wade has had to put up with since forming their close friendship last year.
“She’s an artist, you know? She just wants to make music and all of a sudden she was thrust into this like, world of gossip and tabloids and traveling and having paparazzi take pictures of her,” Richards shared during an Amazon Live on Tuesday.
“She just doesn’t like any of that,” the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star added of the country music singer.
Richards, 55, explained that the “Wilder Days” singer, 29, doesn’t like “attention” or being “talked about.”
“She just wants to make music and all of a sudden I had a lot of guilt, you know, that I put her in this position,” Richards further explained.
Richards admitted that she was the one who asked Wade to perform at her suicide awareness event in honor of her late friend Lorene Shea, which subsequently pushed the singer further into the “spotlight.
“She would tell me, ‘It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.’ Of course I feel bad because it gave her anxiety, you know?” Richards continued. “Seeing these headlines, and like I said, just thrust into the spotlight brought her anxiety.”
She added, “Like myself, she suffers from anxiety, so I felt terrible to have put her in that position.”
The Bravolebrity confirmed that her close friend has “kind of adjusted” to all the media attention but said it’s “all very new to her” and isn’t “going away.”
Morgan’s performance at the mental health awareness event was captured by Bravo cameras and showcased on Wednesday night’s episode of “RHOBH.”
“She came on as a favor to me because my best friend since I [was] 7 years old passed away. She committed suicide May 1st [2022], and it was a really important event for me,” Richards explained of Shea.
“It was a celebration of life and I just wanted to bring more awareness and have suicide be more of an open conversation because it’s such a taboo topic,” she said.
“So I really wanted to do an important episode to honor Lorene and just to bring light to suicide and what it does to people and help people that are struggling.”
Richards explained that Wade’s music touches on the topic of suicide and the singer knew how much she was struggling after losing Lorene.
“I asked her [to perform] and she said ‘yes,’ she’d be happy to and she came and sang at this event as a favor to me,” she said.
The dating gossip started swirling after news broke in July 2023 that the “Halloween Ends” actress and Mauricio Umansky had separated after 27 years of marriage.
The estranged couple share daughters Alexia, 27, Sophia, 23, and Portia, 16.
Richards also has an older daughter Farrah Brittany, 35, whom she welcomed with her first husband, Guraish Aldjufrie.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were seen cruising around Kansas City, Mo. together on Monday.
The duo was photographed on a drive in the NFL star’s $400k Rolls-Royce Ghost, just hours after sharing a passionate kiss as the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve.
The couple looked a bit tired from the wild night as they made the drive across town, per photos obtained by the Daily Mail.
Still, Swift looked put together with her hair down in loose curls and her typical, every-day glam.
Meanwhile, Travis seemed to be wearing the same black beanie that he wore the day before.
According to the outlet, Swift and Kelce, both 34, were headed from one of the latter’s properties to another one of his homes, where they met up with his mother, Donna.
The tight end, who is signed to a four-year $57.25 million contract, snapped up the pricey pad in October in an effort to give him and the “Cruel Summer” singer more privacy amid their high-profile romance.
The luxe home is nestled in a gated community and boasts a waterfall, swimming pool, and mini golf course.
Although Swift has been spending lots of time in Kansas City in recent weeks, the pair are rarely spotted out together, in part because they stay in such a private neighborhood.
Although the pair didn’t post any photos from the night themselves, other party-goers shared several photos and videos from the event, showing the lovebirds getting cozy on the dance floor.
As the ball dropped at midnight, Kelce sweetly wrapped one arm around Swift’s lower back to pull her in close for a kiss.
The “Anti-Hero” singer then placed both hands on the NFL star’s face as they shared a sweet smooch.
Following the kiss, Swift wrapped both arms around Kelce’s neck as they exchanged sweet nothings.
Taipei, Taiwan – In the past few years, many of Taiwan’s largest music festivals have seen the unlikely ensemble of a shaven Buddhist nun introducing a band of five black-clad musicians whose faces are smeared blood red.
When the first riffs break through the sound system, their hard yet atmospheric music immediately sounds like death metal – an extreme sub-genre of heavy metal that emerged in the United States in the mid-1980s and is characterised by guttural vocals, abrupt tempo and relentless, discording guitar riffs.
But the beastly growl of the band’s Canadian singer is not conveying the genre’s typical lyrics of sickness. He is actually chanting genuine Buddhist mantras, blessing everyone in the audience.
Taiwan’s Dharma are probably the first band in the world to combine ancient Buddhist sutras in Sanskrit or Mandarin Chinese with the contemporary sound of death metal. Since their beginnings in 2018, they have stood out from thousands of other heavy metal bands around the world with their distinctive style, and have even had two Buddhist nuns, Master Song and Master Miao-ben join them on stage.
Last month, the band played its first overseas show – at the International Indie Music Festival in Kerala – and is ready to bring Buddha’s message further afield after receiving offers of interest from North America and Europe.
“We believe that in the 21st century, both heavy metal and ancient religions need to change,” said Jack Tung, Dharma’s founding member and drummer, a pivotal figure in Taipei’s underground music scene.
Heavy with spiritual strokes
Dharma is unique because the group subverts most people’s understanding of metal music and its fans – an obnoxious, loud genre for degenerates.
Since the 1990s, heavy metal has been often associated with Satanism and delinquency – think of the second wave of Norwegian black metal, with bands like Mayhem, Emperor and Burzum, whose alienated teenage musicians shocked the world with their behaviour – from burning churches to murder – in the name of “musical authenticity”.
For heavy metal and its subgenres, these events constituted the climax of what British sociologist Stanley Cohen described as “moral panics” in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, a 1972 study on the then-emerging British subcultures of mods and rockers. Cohen argued that moral panics were characterised by an intense feeling of fear, largely exaggerated, about a specific subcultural group that a community perceives as tarnishing its core values.
Thirty years later, with heavy metal and its derivatives underpinning music scenes in countries from Botswana to Egypt and Iraq, Dharma believes the genre’s globalised tropes can be changed into an effective vehicle for Buddhist teachings.
Founding member Tung had his spiritual awakening back in 2000, when he was greatly surprised to hear the Lion’s Roar of Buddhism “as it was completely different from the Buddhist scriptures I had heard since childhood”, he told Al Jazeera. In the Mahayana school of Buddhism prevalent in East Asia, the “Lion’s Roar” is a metaphorical principle signifying the awe-inspiring power of Buddha and the Bodhisattvas when expounding the Dharma (which means, in a nutshell, the Buddha’s teachings and practice), bringing peace and auspiciousness.
At the time, Tung was already a metalhead and a drummer and sensed a connection between the chanting style of the Lion’s Roar and the driving rhythms of a metal band. For him, death metal’s stereotypical imagery and lyrics were just an outlet to release emotions and a form of representation not dissimilar to the way Buddhism spread from India to China and other places using Buddha statues with angry features.
“From my understanding, this angry appearance was used mainly to protect monks and believers, and we think that it is somewhat similar to how death metal musicians propose their messages,” said Tung. “We hope to use the tremendous energy of death metal music to increase the power of the spells and use music and costumes to manifest the anger or protection of Buddha and Bodhisattva. […] We have not changed the essence of Buddhist scripture mantras, but rather hope to strengthen them [with death metal].”
A special kind of dedication
It took Tung about a decade from conceiving Dharma’s concept to finding the right people to form his “enlightened” band because being a member also meant being highly involved with the teachings of Buddhism.
In 2018, Tung recruited a former bandmate, guitarist Andy Lin, to start working on Dharma’s first songs, and in 2019, welcomed Canadian singer Joe Henley, a freelance writer and long-term Taiwan resident, on vocals. Prior to making his live debut, Henley spent months studying the sutras he would sing on stage under the guidance of Master Song, a devout Buddhist nun, until he entered the Three Jewels, becoming a Buddhist himself and receiving Song’s ultimate blessing to perform the sutras in public.
Master Song, who due to health reasons can no longer perform on stage with Dharma, passed their duties to Master Miao-ben and discussed the issues extensively with Tung before endorsing the band.
She hopes they may play a subtle role in spreading Buddhist beliefs among young people on the self-ruled island and beyond.
“Through music, we hope to influence the younger generation, especially those who like different music genres, as we are born equal, and no one should be abandoned because of their preferences for any specific music style,” Master Song told Al Jazeera. “We believe that faith does not necessarily have to be Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Catholicism or Islam, as it can also be the sheer belief in goodness and love for the world.”
Given the general reluctance of heavy metal fans to accept bands that deviate from metal’s well-defined style, Dharma’s successful reception in Taiwan came as a huge surprise to Henley.
“It seems that from day one, and our very first show, opening for [Swedish black metal band] Marduk, we were welcomed with open arms and minds,” he said only a few weeks after Dharma was nominated for Taiwan’s Golden Indie Music Awards, one of the country’s top music honours, although ultimately they did not win.
“In many ways, metal is just repeating many of the same tropes over and over again,” Henley told Al Jazeera. “Now, those tropes exist because, by and large, humanity keeps repeating the same mistakes. […] In reaction to that, the ultimate message of our music, to me, is that in order to change the world for the better, you need to start with the individual, which is to say, yourself. And one of the core tenets of the Buddhist philosophy is that there really is no self.”
Henley explains that what we imagine to be the “self” is nothing more than an often flawed projection of our own thoughts. “Buddhist practice is, in a nutshell, letting go of the concept of ‘you’ as you know it, in relation to those thoughts, and the answers to this lie in the sutras that we transform into the type of music that we, as lifelong fans and devotees of metal music, as well as followers of the Noble Eightfold Path, can relate to in both the theistic and musical sense,” he told Al Jazeera.
“Let go of the self, let go of the ego. Embrace your being as part of a larger collective consciousness. If this can be achieved, I believe we would have a much more peaceful world.”
Spreading the blessings
At home at least, Dharma’s new style of metal has inspired thousands of Taiwanese fans.
“Our shows developed their own culture, with fans crowd-surfing in the lotus position, prostrating themselves in the mosh pit, and it all happened completely spontaneously,” Henley explained. “We didn’t guide or push them in any sort of direction whatsoever. They did it wholly on their own. I’m not sure if that would happen anywhere else but here.”
At the same time, Henley says Dharma tries not to preach.
“We are not here to force any system of belief on anyone nor to preach,” said Henley. “We provide the message based on the teachings of the Buddha. It’s up to the individual to choose whether that message is meant for them or not.”
Physical copies of its most recent album, Three Thousand Realms in a Single Thought Moment, released at the end of 2022, were blessed by Buddhist monks to reflect positivity and good, and Master Song adds that, because Dharma’s lyrics are scriptures and mantras of Buddha and the Bodhisattvas, each time the band is paid to perform, 15 percent of their fee is donated to charitable organisations.
“Amitabha Buddha said that there are 84,000 ways to practice, and perhaps [death metal] is also one of them,” said Tung. “Therefore, we believe that Buddhism and death metal do not contradict each other, at least in our hearts – and everything starts from the heart.”
The naked star of the rock band’s 1991 album cover claims ‘permanent harm’ and child pornography.
A United States court has revived a lawsuit accusing the rock band Nirvana of publishing child pornography by using a photograph of a naked four-month-old baby on the cover of its hit 1991 album Nevermind.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday overturned a lower court’s decision that the plaintiff, cover star Spencer Elden, had waited too long to bring his 2021 lawsuit against the seminal Seattle grunge band.
Elden, the baby depicted on the cover, filed the lawsuit against the grunge rock group two years ago, alleging that he has suffered “permanent harm” as the band and others profited from the image of him underwater in a swimming pool, appearing to grab for a dollar bill on a fish hook.
The suit also claims that the image violated federal laws on child sexual abuse material, although no criminal charges were ever sought.
A federal judge in California threw out this lawsuit but allowed Elden, now 32 years old, to file a revised version. The judge then dismissed the revised suit on grounds that it was outside the 10-year statute of limitations of one of the laws used as a cause of action.
However, the appellate panel on Thursday found that each republication of an image “may constitute a new personal injury” with a new deadline and cited the image’s appearance on a 30th anniversary reissue of Nevermind in 2021.
According to the New York Times, the court also said that “the question whether the Nevermind album cover meets the definition of child pornography is not at issue in this appeal.”
Elden’s lawyer Robert Lewis said that Elden is “very pleased with the decision and looks forward to having his day in court”.
“This procedural setback does not change our view,” Nirvana lawyer Bert Deixler said after the court’s verdict. “We will defend this meritless case with vigour and expect to prevail.”
Thousands pay tribute in Dublin to the musician best known as the lead vocalist for The Pogues.
Thousands of people have lined the streets of Dublin to bid farewell to singer Shane MacGowan, the London-Irish punk who transformed Irish traditional music with The Pogues.
A marching band led his funeral procession through central Dublin on Friday as the crowd sang beloved songs like Dirty Old Town, the folk classic MacGowan and The Pogues helped make popular.
The funeral is scheduled to take place in St Mary of the Rosary Church in the town of Nenagh west of Dublin at 15:30 GMT, after which another procession will take place through County Tipperary.
MacGowan penned some of the 1980s’ most haunting ballads. He died on November 30 aged 65 after being in and out of hospital since July.
Fellow musicians last week led tributes to MacGowan, who became just as well known for his slurred speech, missing teeth and on-stage meltdowns as his drug and alcohol abuse took their toll from the 1990s on.
“Shane MacGowan, man, meant everything to me,” musician Roland Conroy told the Reuters news agency. “Irish punk rocker, he embodied everything: James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats. A poet. Just [brings] a tear to the eye. It’s a sad day. It’s a tragic day in Ireland. The world mourns.”
Prime Minister Leo Varadkar called MacGowan “an amazing musician and artist” whose songs “beautifully captured the Irish experience, especially the experience of being Irish abroad”.
MacGowan co-formed The Pogues, which fused punk with Irish folk music, in 1982. He was born in England but spent much of his childhood in Ireland with his mother’s family.
The height of his success came in 1987 with Fairytale of New York, which MacGowan sang in a duet with Kirsty MacColl to create an instant Christmas classic in which an estranged couple exchange insults.
The song, which has returned to the UK Top 40 singles chart every year since 2005 but has never made it to number one, climbed to third position in the charts in recent days with a week to go before this year’s Christmas number one is decided.
The Pogues became an international symbol of Irishness, both at home and for the country’s sprawling diaspora, with MacGowan’s contribution recognised in a slew of tributes from political leaders.
The Pogues’ 1988 song Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six, which recounted the plight of six Irishmen wrongly imprisoned for deadly pub bombings in Birmingham, was banned from British airwaves.
Mary Lou McDonald, president of the republican political party Sinn Fein, called MacGowan “a poet, dreamer and social justice champion”.
“Nobody told the Irish story like Shane. He sang to us of dreams and captured stories of emigration,” she said.
Micheal Martin, Varadkar’s deputy, said he was “devastated” by MacGowan’s death.
“His passing is particularly poignant at this time of year as we listen to ‘Fairytale of New York’ – a song that resonates with all of us,” he wrote.
MacGowan won fame for incorporating traditional Irish ballads into Britain’s punk scene in the 1980s and 90s.
Shane MacGowan, who galvanised Britain’s punk scene with his incorporation of Irish traditional ballads into that genre in the late 1980s, has died at 65.
MacGowan’s wife Victoria Mary Clarke released a statement announcing his death on Thursday, saying that The Pogues frontman, famous for haunting lyrics and his turbulent relationship with addiction, had died peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones.
“Thank you for your presence in this world, you made it so very bright and you gave so much joy to so many people with your heart and soul and your music,” Clarke said in an Instagram post, also saying that MacGowan had gone to join “Jesus and Mary, and his beautiful mother Therese”.
Born in the British county of Kent to Irish parents on Christmas Day in 1957, MacGowan was shaped by summers in the Irish countryside and was known for his innovative use of Irish traditional themes in punk music.
He won fame for songs like A Pair of Brown Eyes and his bittersweet, expletive-strewn 1987 Christmas anthem Fairytale of New York, before being ejected from The Pogues in 1991 as he struggled with substance abuse that sometimes led to erratic behaviour.
“So many of his songs would be perfectly crafted poems, if that would not have deprived us of the opportunity to hear him sing them,” Irish President Michael Higgins, who is also a poet, said in a statement.
“His words have connected Irish people all over the globe to their culture and history, encompassing so many human emotions in the most poetic of ways.”
Other icons of Britain’s tempestuous punk scene, which raged against the UK’s Thatcherite turn in the late 1970s, also praised MacGowan as a visionary artist.
Joe Strummer, the punk singer-songwriter who led The Clash and later played with The Pogues and briefly replaced MacGowan, called him “one of the finest writers of the century”.
While MacGowan embodied the hard-charging image of Britain’s punk scene — with irreverent songs, missing teeth, and an ear that was allegedly bitten off at a Clash show — his lyrics were noted for their prose and affiliation with the downtrodden.
“He has a very natural, unadorned, crystalline way with language,” Australian punk singer Nick Cave said of MacGowan, a close friend. “There is a compassion in his words that is always tender, often brutal, and completely his own.”
Taylor Swift does more than drop Easter eggs after the re-release of her albums. The musician also sends flowers to Kelly Clarkson — after every single “Taylor’s Version” album drops.
“You know what’s so funny? She just sent me flowers,” she told E! News. “She’s so nice. She did. She was like, ‘Every time I release something’—’cause she just did 1989. I got that really cute cardigan, too.”
In 2019, Clarkson suggested via X (then formerly known as Twitter) that the “Midnights” singer should re-record her work. At the time, Scooter Braun’s company Ithaca Holdings LLC acquired her former label Big Machine Label Group and obtained the rights to the masters for her first six studio albums.
Despite the advice, the “Kelly Clarkson Show” host insists Swift probably would have come up with that idea on her own too.
“I love how kind she is though,” Clarkson continued. “She’s a very smart businesswoman. So, she would have thought of that. But it just sucks when you see artists that you admire and you respect really wanting something and it’s special to them. You know if they’re going to find a loophole, you find a loophole. And she did it and literally is, like, the best-selling artist I feel like of all-time now.”
“She’s known for being such an incredible songwriter and the soundtrack to a lot of people’s lives and that’s her life. So, you should have the option of owning that,” she concluded.
Swift, meanwhile, is currently back on tour. After a brief break, she picked back up the Eras Tour concert in Argentina on Thursday night. However, it appears her new rumored beau, Travis Kelce, was not in attendance.
An insider close to the Kansas City Chiefs tight end, 34, told Page Six Wednesday that the athlete was traveling to see the pop star perform over the weekend. However, they didn’t specify which show he planned to attend.
Last month, Clarkson actually joked about Swift and Kelce’s romance, saying that the NFL panning to Swift at his games made it feel like she was watching a “Housewives” episode instead of football.
“It is hilarious how it is literally taking over the NFL for people [like me] who like watching sports,” she said at the time. “It’s like you’re watching gossip things. What about the [game] play?”
Ariana Madix’s Coachella kiss was caught on camera!
The “Vanderpump Rules” star engaged in a hot-and-heavy makeout with personal trainer Daniel Wai at the music festival on Sunday.
In footage obtained by TMZ, the Bravo personality danced with Wai and put her arms around him during a passionate kiss while watching an outdoor performance.
The duo appeared in each other’s respective Instagram Stories multiple times over the weekend.
Not only did Wai post multiple selfies of Madix, 37, cuddling up to him, but she shared a photo of the duo seemingly holding hands.
Additionally, the pair rocked matching Nikes in a social media upload shared by her friend Bradley Kearns.
Page Six reached out to Madix’s rep for comment.
Instagram users praised the reality star for living her “best” life after Tom Sandoval cheated on her for months with her former friend Raquel Leviss.
“I feel like her life has gotten 100x better since Sandoval’s been out of it,” one fan gushed, with another calling Wai an “upgrade” from the 40-year-old cover band frontman.
For more Page Six reality TV updates
“This is what happens when you lose dead weight,” a third wrote.
Madix’s fun-filled weekend comes amid news that Leviss, 28, “enter[ed] a voluntary facility for mental health counseling” amid the fallout of her betrayal, dubbed Scandoval.
“Raquel was scheduled to go in pre-reunion but decided she wanted to finish her filming commitment,” the former pageant queen’s rep told Page Six on Friday.
An insider told us that the program is a “long-haul” one and not “short term.”
Yes indeed, that was just a Kim Kardashian look-alike.
Drake sent Twitter into a frenzy Thursday after releasing the cover art for his latest single, “Search & Rescue,” which seemingly features an image of him and the “Kardashians” star in matching motorcycle helmets.
However, TMZ confirmed Friday that the mystery woman was actually an artist named Lilah, who just so happens to bare a striking resemblance to the reality TV star.
Although it seemed unlikely that Kardashian would pose with ex-husband Kanye West’s frenemy, Drake did sample her voice in the song.
In fact, Drake savagely used a clip of Kardashian speaking about her divorce from West on the 2021 series finale of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.”
“I didn’t come this far just to come this far and not be happy. Remember that,” the reality star, 42, said in the audio.
“It’s like somebody throwing a marble and hiding their hand,” West added on “Drink Champs” at the time.
Drake’s decision to reignite the feud shocked many fans given the fact the pair seemed to bury the hatchet in November 2021.
At the time, West posted a photo with Drake alongside music executive J. Prince in Toronto. He captioned the post with a “dove” emoji to emphasize the peace made between them.
However, on Drizzy’s newest album, “Her Loss,” the rapper inferred that the meeting meant nothing to him.
“Linking with the opps, b—h, I did that s—t for J. Prince,” he rapped on the track “Circo Loco.”
To which West seemingly replied in a since-deleted tweet last year.
“Enough already I done gave this man his flowers multiple times. Let’s really see who [our] real opps are in this music game. Imagine all the rappers on the same side and everyone cleaning up each other’s contracts. It’s kingdom time. Love Drake,” Ye wrote.
Meanwhile, Drake’s father, Dennis, has tried to reassure fans that “it’s just a song” and his son is “not trolling” West.
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