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Grammy CEO Harvey Mason jr. released a lengthy statement after BTS announced that they won't be participating in the 2027 awards.
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Grammys CEO Defends New Asian Pop Category After BTS Says They Won’t Participate in 2027 Awards
Jul 30, 2026
Earlier on Monday, BTS announced that they would not be submitting their colossal comeback album, ARIRANG, for the 2027 Grammy Awards. The supergroup’s decision arrived after the introduction of a Best Asian Pop Music Performance category and sent shockwaves across the music industry.
Hoping to mitigate the situation, Grammy CEO Harvey Mason jr. took to social media seeking to clarify that the new category was not intended to single out K-pop artists.
“I am saddened to hear that BTS has chosen not to participate in the Grammy Awards process this year, but as a music creator, I understand and respect their decision,” Mason said. “I do want to clarify something that seems to be getting lost in the conversation. The Asian Pop category was created to celebrate the depth, diversity and extraordinary growth of pop artistry coming out of Asia. The spirit of this new category is to shine a dedicated spotlight on these important artists. More categories mean more artists’ work is recognized. It’s never to divide, but to expand who is recognized by our 15,000 Grammy voters.”
Mason stressed that submitting music in Asian Pop does not exclude an artist from also being considered in the more coveted general categories such as Record of the Year, Album of the Year, and Song of the Year.
“As we continue to expand the reach, our membership and our awards, regardless of geography or language, I want to emphasize that we will continue to listen to the global music community and work to honor and celebrate all the artists whose music moves the world,” Mason said.
In their post announcing their withdrawal from consideration for the 2027 awards ceremony, BTS wrote: “We decided not to participate in the Grammys this year.” The message, which was shared by each member across their individual Instagram accounts, added: “We hope music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided into region or language.”
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Kanye West settled a lawsuit filed by Lauren Pisciotta, who worked as his assistant from 2021 to 2023.
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Kanye West Settles Sexual Assault and Wrongful Termination Lawsuit With Ex-Staffer
Jul 30, 2026
Kanye West has reached a settlement with his former assistant, Lauren Pisciotta, who accused the artist of sexual assault, sex trafficking, and wrongful termination.
The settlement was reached on July 23, according to court documents obtained by USA Today, and Pisciotta must now file a dismissal request within 45 days. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. When addressing the settlement, Pisciotta’s attorney, Arick Fudali, told the publication, “The matter has been resolved.”
A representative for West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In June 2024, Pisciotta — who worked for West from 2021 to 2023 — sued the rapper, claiming sexual harassment, breach of contract, and wrongful termination. In a previous statement to Rolling Stone, West’s legal representative called Pisciotta’s allegations “baseless” and accused her of engaging in “blackmail and extortion” after he rejected her sexual advances.
“She was terminated for being unqualified, demanding unreasonable sums of money (including a $4 million annual salary) and numerous documented incidents of her lascivious, unhinged conduct,” the statement sent by West’s publicist claimed.
Over a year after the initial lawsuit, Pisciotta filed an amended lawsuit that included new accusations against West, also known as Ye, of stalking, sexual battery, sex trafficking, and false imprisonment. “Ye subjected Ms. Pisciotta to obscene comments about her body, demanded she wear tight fitting clothing, groped her on a regular basis, forced her to watch Ye perform sexual acts with other women, sent her sexually explicit pictures and demanded she do the same, and repeatedly demanded that she join his sexual encounters, which she refused,” the lawsuit obtained by Page Six claimed.
Pisciotta also claimed that “on one occasion, Ye attempted to vaginally penetrate Ms. Pisciotta with his fingers” and that West “orally raped her without her consent.” In another amendment four months after the initial filing, Pisciotta added an allegation that West drugged and sexually assaulted her at a Sean Combs studio session.
Ever since West went on an antisemitic tirade in fall 2022, the artist has faced a wave of lawsuits filed by people who worked with him from ex-Yeezy employees, teachers at his failed Donda Academy, and musicians claiming sampling disputes. In March, West was found liable by a jury Wednesday after a man said he was seriously injured during the controversial gutting of the rapper’s $57 million Malibu mansion in 2021.
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Lennon in 1965
Mark Hayward Archive/Redferns/Getty Images
Surprise: The Beatles Have a 1965 John Lennon Song That Nobody’s Heard Before
Jul 29, 2026
Some good news the world doesn’t get every day: There’s a brand new John Lennon song from 1965 that nobody knew about until now. It’s a home demo called “Little Girl,” a previously unheard tune on the upcoming Rubber Soul Special Edition, which arrives on October 2. Nobody had any idea this song existed — it’s never been bootlegged or even rumored.
“Little Girl” is a real mystery. How did it stay hidden until now? “Yeah, it was surprising,” producer Giles Martin tells Rolling Stone. “It was one of those things that came from the Lennon Estate — I think it was Sean. It was one of those things where they say, ‘Oh, and then there’s this.’”
It’s a fragile, gorgeous, bittersweet little tune, just John and his acoustic guitar, sighing in Buddy Holly mode. He sings, “Little girl, I’ve come to say/That this has been a lovely day/I love you.” The song was discovered on a Lennon tape reel; Martin edited two sections together for the 2:17 Rubber Soul version. It’s reminiscent of “I’m Only Sleeping,” especially when he sings the “I love youuu” hook. It’s mind-blowing that this song exists.
It’s strange “Little Girl” didn’t show up earlier, given how deep they’ve gone into the Beatles vaults before. But that always happens whenever the Beatles do an archival project like this. On the Revolver box in 2022, there was a stunning acoustic demo of “Yellow Submarine,” with John singing lonesome lyrics about his childhood — it shattered everything we thought we knew about that song. On the White Album 2018 edition, there was the four-part harmony version of “Good Night,” with all four Beatles singing together — a devastating beautiful performance, but one that sat unheard in the vaults for fifty years.
Giles Martin wasn’t even certain of how unknown “Little Girl” was. “Like with all that stuff, I wasn’t sure whether people knew about it or not, or whether it was on YouTube,” he says. “Quite often I’ll find something and go, ‘This is amazing.’ Then someone goes, ‘Yeah, it’s on YouTube. Everybody knows about that.’ I’m always the last person to know.”
But nobody had any hint of this one. (“If you didn’t know it existed, then no one knew,” Martin quips.) It’s a major surprise. As Martin says, “I listen to that and I go, ‘Yeah, this is really interesting,’ apart from, ‘It’s another song that would have made the album.’ There’s an insatiable desire for something more. But I think it’s good to see all of the pencil drawings before you see the picture.”
Nobody seems to know when the song comes from. You can tell it isn’t any earlier than summer 1965, because John tweaks a hook from Paul’s “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” which was recorded in June and released in August on Help! (He turns “had it been another day” to “if you’d asked me yesterday.”)
It’s especially shocking since the Beatles were feverishly scrounging up new songs for Rubber Soul. That’s the whole backstage drama behind the sessions — the Beatles went into Abbey Road in October 1965 with a deadline to crash out an album in four weeks, in time for Christmas. Except they had hardly any finished songs. So they were desperate for material. They wrote seven of the songs in the final week.
But that’s how Rubber Soul turned out so loose and experimental — they were ready to try any crazy studio idea. “It’s not as though, as you know, there was anything they held back, as far as demos go, or anything like that,” Giles Martin says. They even tried jamming in the blues instrumental “12-Bar Original,” which they wisely axed. (A three-minute edit was on Anthology 2 in 1996, which was more than anyone needed.)
“Some people will say, why didn’t you put the ’12-Bar Original’ on it?” Martin says of the new edition. “But well, it’s not very good in the first place, and it’s on the Anthology. And it’s not really linked to the album they were making at the same time. But ‘Little Girl’ hasn’t been heard, so it makes sense.”
The Beatles were foraging high and low for scraps, right down to the wire. “Michelle” is a throwaway that Paul wrote in his teens, to impress Liverpool art-school girls by pretending to be French. But he dusted it off for Rubber Soul. The deadline pressure got so frantic, their engineer Norman Smith pitched them a tune. Hell, the lads got desperate enough to draft Ringo into songwriting duty — “What Goes On” became his first credit ever. Asked in 1966 what he contributed, Ringo said, “About five words.”
But that makes it an even bigger mystery — how did “Little Girl” slip through the cracks? It might have come too late to make the cut for Rubber Soul, but that’s pretty late, considering that John and Paul were writing right up to the final hours. The night before the album was due, they still needed two more songs, so John showed up with “Girl” and Paul with “You Won’t See Me”—two of their best. (Always competing, these two.) They also refurbished “Wait,” a leftover from Help!, which gave them a full fourteen songs.
So how did John let a song like “Little Girl” go? In the Rubber Soul liner notes, legendary historian Kevin Howlett notes that there’s only a tiny clue of the song’s existence until now. John jotted down a version of these lines on a postcard, found in the book The John Lennon Letters, edited by Hunter Davies. It’s a postcard that George Harrison got from a Japanese fan, dated 1965 or 1966; on the back, John wrote the lines, “Little girl I’ve come to stay/And this time I just have to say/I love you.”
These lines are part of a longer verse in the mode of “Ticket To Ride” or “I’m a Loser,” about a woman who leaves him. The lines are so clumsy, it’s no surprise he never used them. (“When a girl begins to become a problem/Pretty soon the girl must go/When they’re gone you find at last you love them/Pretty soon you want to know.”) But it seems he salvaged just a fragment of the fragment.
“Little Girl” is still a work in progress with unfinished lyrics — John mostly just sings “I love you” and “la la la,” just to pin down the tune. John and Paul always believed in placeholder lyrics, to help remember their melodies. In the early days, they didn’t have any recording devices, and neither could read music, so they needed verbal cues they’d recall the next day. Paul explains in the 2021 Hulu documentary 3, 2, 1, with Rick Rubin. “Coming from Liverpool, there’s a lot of sort of Irish Celtic influence, and the Celts never wrote anything down. It’s the bardic tradition. So that’s our excuse. Me and John used to say, ‘It was the bardic tradition!’”
“Little girl” is a phrase that John sang briefly in “Twist and Shout” and “Thank You Girl,” then more prominently in “I Feel Fine,” where it’s the hook in the middle eight, and “Run For Your Life.” But there’s no connection to any of those songs. The first song Paul ever wrote was “I Lost My Little Girl,” right after his mother’s death. (“Fairly obvious,” he admitted later.) For John and Paul, teenage boys who lost their mothers, it was a secret trauma they shared. In the Get Back sessions, John and Paul played “I Lost My Little Girl” together, even though nobody else (not even the other Beatles) could have known what it meant to them.
A closer connection might be John’s favorite Brian Wilson song: “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” a single that the Beach Boys released in late 1965, days before Rubber Soul came out. “It’s GOT to be a hit,” John raved in Melody Maker at the time. “It’s the greatest record I’ve heard for weeks. It’s fantastic. I hope it will be a hit. It’s all Brian Wilson.”
It also has a hint of “It’s Only Love,” a song that made the cut for Help! and ended up on the U.S. version of Rubber Soul. It’s a tune where John is singing cliches so saccharine, he spends the whole song trying (and failing) not to snicker. But he can’t deliver the line “Just the sight of you makes night-time bright” with a straight face, and that goes double for the next line, which is “Very bright.” That’s the kind of song he was determined to quit writing on Rubber Soul — it’s why he wanted to aim higher in “Norwegian Wood” and “In My Life.” He’s reaching there with the melancholy tune of “Little Girl.”
If “Little Girl” was too late for Rubber Soul, that might explain the melodic link to “I’m Only Sleeping,” on Revolver. (When John sings “I love you,” it’s uncannily close to how he sings the word “sleeping.”) He might have just decided to rework this scrap into a stronger song for the next album. That’s how fast the Fabs worked. They were already used to cramming out material at the last minute, when they got to deadline time. A year before Rubber Soul, on Beatles for Sale, they got caught short the night before the album was due, so they stayed up all night bashing out quickie oldies covers. (For any other band, we’d call this “filler.” But their filler beat almost anyone else’s keepers.)
The Beatles had no idea Rubber Soul was a masterpiece while they were making it. They were just racing to cobble an album together. But like everybody else, they were shocked when they heard the results. The lads spent the rest of their career assuming that any last-minute whim they dreamed up would be touched by that same Rubber Soul stroke of genius. And because they were the Beatles, they were maddeningly right.
It might seem insane that a John Lennon song like “Little Girl” could remain a secret for so many decades, unheard and unsuspected. But that’s the essence of how the Beatles worked in the frantic creative frenzy of their youth. They cranked out music so fast, dropping masterpieces like crumbs, always driving hard to the next song. That’s why the world is still catching up with fleeting moments they left behind decades ago. And that’s why the Beatles’ story keeps on evolving and mutating through the years — every time you think you’ve heard it all, there’s always more. “Little Girl” took all these years to come to light, yet it’s worth the wait. Still, you don’t regret a single day.
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Afroman performs onstage on day two during 2026 Tortuga Music Festival at Fort Lauderdale Beach Park on April 11, 2026 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
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Afroman Sues Officer Who Raided His Home, Sued Him, and Lost
Jul 29, 2026
Afroman has filed a lawsuit against one of the officers who raided his home in 2022 and later sued him after he turned footage of the botched raid into music videos. The musician, real name Joseph Edgar Foreman, won the highly publicized defamation lawsuit brought against him by officers at his local sheriff’s office.
The civil suit filed in Adams County, Ohio on Monday, July 27 and obtained by Rolling Stone, accuses Brian K. Newland, one of the officers involved in the case and defamation lawsuit, of malicious prosecution, abuse of process, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and tortious interference with contract.
In the summer of 2022, at least nine officers from the Sheriff’s Department in Adams County raided Foreman’s home on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping. Following the raid that left his home ransacked, they found neither drugs nor any evidence of kidnapping. No charges were filed. Foreman turned footage of the raid into a series of music videos that went viral, over which the officers sued him in 2023 for defamation and false light, among other claims. In March, the officers — who claimed they were owed $3.9 million in damages — lost the suit.
His win at trial became of symbol for freedom of speech. The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio filed an amicus brief calling the suit a “meritless effort to use a lawsuit to silence criticism … of government actors.… There is nothing the First Amendment protects more jealously than criticism of public officials on a matter of public concern.”
During his explosive testimony, Foreman said, “All of this is their fault,” he testified. “If they hadn’t wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit, I would not know their names … there would be no songs, nothing.… They’re suing me for their mistake.” At the trial, Foreman claimed the officers stole money from him during the raid, and when he went to pick up the seized cash, it was $400 less than what was recorded in sealed evidence bags. Newland testified that he miscounted the money and denied stealing the money.
In a July interview with Rolling Stone, Foreman pondered why his story went viral. “The more powerless human being has been violated by these types of governments, not necessarily having a solution. This was a case in time when a powerless man won against powerful government officials.”
The new suit filed by Foreman is seeking at least $150,000 in damages, which includes at least $25,000 for attorney’s fees and costs. Attorneys for Foreman and Newland did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
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Willie Nelson Voices Concern About ‘Data Centers Invading Our Land’
Jul 29, 2026
Willie Nelson is speaking up against the ongoing construction of data centers across the United States. The musician released a statement on social media condemning the “loud, water thieving, light polluting” hubs that are “invading our land.”
Nelson wrote that he hails from the Texas town of Abbott and he still has “home there with farmed land where I can still see stars at night. And now our community, like many others, needs to fight against data centers invading our land.”
“The last thing we need is a loud, water thieving, light polluting, data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter),” he continued. “The strength of rural America has never come from big industrial footprints. It comes from generations of people, open spaces, local businesses, and a connection to the land. All of America deserves thoughtful stewardship that doesn’t steal farmland (where our essential shared-food is grown) and small family farmers’ livelihoods, and not data centers that only destroy the environment around them.”
He concluded, “Whoever controls food and water, controls the masses. Let’s not allow our own demise or give up control over necessary resources in the U.S. and especially in Abbott.”
It’s unclear if Nelson is targeting a specific data center near Abbott, which is south of Dallas, although there are numerous announced plans for the Dallas-Forth Worth metro area. In May, a Gallup poll found that seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, with 48 percent strongly opposed. Only seven percent of people polled were strongly in favor.
Nelson has a long history of speaking up about issues that matter to him. Last year, Nelson showed the video for his 1986 song “Living in the Promiseland” on tour in support of immigrants, and he celebrated the 40th anniversary of Farm Aid last September.
“Family farmers are the heart of this country, and we depend on each other for good food and strong communities,” Nelson said in a statement. “For 40 years, Farm Aid and our partners have stood with farmers, supporting them to stay on their land even when corporate power, bad policies and broken promises make it harder to keep going. This year, we’re proud to bring Farm Aid to Minnesota to celebrate the farmers who sustain us and to fight for a food system that works for all of us. Family farmers aren’t backing down, and neither are we.”
Nelson will release a new book, The Last Leaf, on Nov. 10 via Penguin Press. It marks Nelson’s first book since 2023’s Energy Follows Thought: The Stories Behind My Songs. As prolific Nelson has remained with music — he’s already released 11 albums in the 2020s — he’s almost kept pace with the pen as The Last Leaf is his sixth book this decade.
The musician’s most recent album, Dream Chaser, arrived in late May, just a month after he turned 93. As usual, Nelson will spend the summer on the road with a lengthy amphitheater tour that culminates Sept. 26 at the latest iteration of Farm Aid in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
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©2026 ROLLING STONE, LLC. Published under license.
©2026 ROLLING STONE, LLC. Published under license.