March 11, 2025

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2 Chainz Bracing For <i>B.O.A.T.S. II</i> Backlash

2 Chainz takes the utmost pride in his creativity; he just hopes the lyrics on his upcoming B.O.A.T.S. II: Me Time don't land him in hot water.

Deuce sat down with MTV News' Sway Calloway on Tuesday to talk about everything from his pal Kanye West to his new album — even touching on the recent rash of rappers apologizing for their song lyrics. It was something he considered when recording "Feds Watching," the first single from his forthcoming sophomore album.

On it, Chainz says that he'll "put that rocket on that mother----in' prosecutor." The song has been out since June and is climbing up the Billboard song chart. So far, no one has publicly expressed a problem with the lyric, but it was enough to make producer Pharrell Williams think twice.

"It actually was brought up. Pharrell brought it up, and then the label brought it up," 2 Chainz told Sway. "Anything dealing with harming someone like that — an official — they not goin' for it. It's almost a cuss word; you almost can't say it, because this is a government official."

There's another lyric on B.O.A.T.S. II that has Chainz worried: "I said, 'I blew myself up like a Unabomber,' " he explained, revealing a song lyric on an unspecified song.

Chainz says the lyric isn't intended to praise Ted Kaczynski — the infamous "Unabomber," who was responsible for over a dozen public bombings and three deaths — but rather to give the rapper himself a pat on the back for pulling himself up by his own bootstraps. "My creative side ...

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Ariana Grande Taps ‘Good Dude’ Big Sean For ‘The Way’ Sequel

Ariana Grande declared her crush on Mac Miller on "The Way," but on a new track, "Right There," she's got love for Big Sean.

The singer revealed to MTV News that she's hooked up with the G.O.O.D. Music MC for the track, which she considers "kind of like the sequel to 'The Way.'"

"I love it. I can't say it's one of my favorites on the album because they're all my favorites, but it's really cool and he killed it. I love his verse."

Grande and Sean have been pals for a while, but she was waiting for the perfect song to take their musical friendship to the next level.

"We wanted to have writing sessions and, like, jam together but we never found the time and we never found the right song," she said. "We were talking about a few other songs together but it just never worked out and it never was the right moment and then finally 'Right There' came along. And we were like 'Oh this is it'."

In addition to being his friend, the singer and "Sam & Cat" star is a longtime fan of the Detroit MC. "He's one of my favorites; I love him," she shared. "I can't even tell you how many of his verses in his songs I've memorized."

Well, there is actually some footage of her handful of homages to Sean floating around the Web, including her rapping "Guap" and his verse in Justin Bieber's "As Long As You Love Me." But, she says, hands down her favorite Sean verse ...

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Tomorrowland 2013: Great Guns! ‘Super’ DJs Laidback Luke, Martin Solveig Hit Stage On Day 2

BOOM, Belgium — One of the most exciting places to be at Tomorrowland on Saturday (July 27) was Laidback Luke's Super You & Me stage. DJs lined up to play there had to follow one key rule: transform into a superhero!

Before their back-to-back sets, MTV News caught up with Laidback Luke and Martin Solveig to get the inside details on everything from those unique costumes to what special surprises they had planned for the show.

"This year I really wanted to push a little bit," Solveig told us of his look. "I picked out my own character, which is a kind of Super Solveig ... with a costume. I've been working very seriously on the video and on the costume."

Though Solveig has a bunch of collaborations in the works, he didn't want to share any names yet. He did, however, open up about his collabo with Luke. "The serious premiere is now, is like in a couple hours [at Tomorrowland]; I'm going to open my set with a track," he teased before his performance. "So no more mystery, no more surprise, you know? It's called 'Blow,' and it has a whole story around it. The story is, 'How do you want me to grow, if you don't let me blow?'

"And then I have a concept for the video, which is ... going to be a bit confusing if I say [it] like this but it includes elephants and antiperspirant, which is very useful at this exact moment," Solveig attempted to explain.

"We are going to fix the whole antiperspirant problem for ...

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‘Wolverine’ Director Planning Unrated Version: Prepare For Even More Violence

When your primary superpower is stabbing people with six razor-sharp knives, it's impossible to make a bloodless film. Director James Mangold discovered that while working on the fifth film starring Hugh Jackman in the titular role of the hirsute berserker.

And with Mangold's desire to do a back-to-basics film about the brawling mutant following 2009's unfocused "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," he knew that meant getting violent.

"I was amazed that the trims we made to get a PG-13 were not devastating to the movie," Mangold told MTV News' Josh Horowitz. "The movie is mostly old-fashioned sword warfare — and arrows — so in many ways we dodged the kind of intense violence of guns."

The film is based on the character's first ever solo outing, 1982's "Wolverine" by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. In the comic book limited series, Wolverine travels to Japan to reconnect with a woman that he's fallen in love with (Mariko Yashida) and gets caught up in a war between a clan of ninjas and the Japanese crime syndicate known as the Yakuza. Wolverine's claws clash with ancient katana blades in the story, just as they do in the big screen adventure. But not everything made the final cut, Mangold reveals.

"Obviously when you get to the length we had, there will be some extras that people will see, in some kind of unrated version of the movie coming out." The film as it stands takes the hero physically further than any other; Jackman's jacked beyond belief and Wolverine's body count rises higher than ever before. The thought of ...

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Tomorrowland 2013: Nervo, Bassjackers Take Us Onstage For Day 1!

BOOM, Belgium — Spirits were unsurprisingly high on the first day of Tomorrowland, which kicked off officially on a rainy Friday.

With tickets having sold out at a rapid clip, the 180,000 festivalgoers who snagged admission had every reason to be amped about gaining entry to Europe's largest EDM event. (Those lucky enough to board one of the 29 Tomorrowland-themed flights that landed at the Brussels terminal got the festivities started early.) But dance fans that couldn't make it to Boom could still get in on the action as DJs and attendees shared their personal experience for friends and the world on their social feeds.

MTV News is on the ground and we got you a snapshot of some of the best moments from Day 1!

With its 2013 theme pegged as The Arising of Life, Tomorrowland was getting lots of love on kickoff day. We know this if only because of the sheer number of hearts that were included in tweets. (Even DJ Otto Knows showed his sweet side!)

And we can't blame them: The Tomorrowland grounds are incredibly beautiful as MTV News learned when Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike gave us a sneak peek at the highly anticipated designs for the event's 15 unique, fantasy-themed stages. In fact, with more stages than you can count on two hands, the biggest problem for festivalgoers was probably choosing which DJ sets to attend.

We also spent a good chunk of the first day in the artists' compound speaking to acts like Afrojack, Steve Aoki, Nervo, Hardwell, Crookers and Tiësto. Aoki's ...

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What’s Going On With Beyoncé’s Album?

Beyoncé has spent the majority of 2013 in full-blown promotion mode, performing at the Super Bowl, debuting a documentary, appearing in (at least) three high-profile ad campaigns, premiering new songs and, oh yeah, launching a world tour. The only question seems to be: Just what is she promoting?

According to her reps, it's not a new album. Earlier this week, they denied reports that Bey had scrapped upwards of 50 songs intended for the record, and shot down rumors that her label, Columbia Records, were growing concerned by the project's continued delays, adding that an official release date has never been set.

That may be true, though based on everything we've witnessed Bey do this year, it certainly appears as if she was setting up something. There were rumors that the follow-up to 4 was due in the spring, and her spate of early-year activity — the halftime performance at Super Bowl XLVII (which came on the heels of a Pepsi partnership), her highly-rated doc, the premiere of etc — certainly lends credence to those theories. But, as her legions of fans are well aware, all that momentum ultimately led nowhere, and spring came and went without news of an album.

And since then, there have been more soft-launches of songs, each tied to a particular advertising campaign: was teased in a Pepsi ad, and was released in conjunction with an H&M campaign. "Woman" was initially reported to be the first single off her album, ...

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‘Wolverine’ Director Reveals Which Scenes Are Ripped From The Pages

As fans have noted from early on, in the main portion of "The Wolverine" is based on the character's first standalone miniseries by Chris Claremont and "Sin City" creator Frank Miller. And while director James Mangold wanted to pull from the beloved classic, which tells the story of Wolverine in Japan, he also added another theme that fascinated him.

"I read the Claremont-Miller when it came out, and I loved it. I loved the world of it," Mangold told MTV News' Josh Horowitz . "The only thing I tried to bring to it was this idea, this theme about his immortality and about the idea of what it is to live forever."

Mangold's interest in immortality stemmed from a few sources, but the reason behind his fascination applied easily to the plight of Wolverine.

"I thought this is such an interesting aspect to this character," he said. "He's been alive almost 300 years and the exhaustion and pain of making connections with people and losing them. Not only has he been betrayed by nature and betrayed by science, but he's betrayed by love, because every time he loves someone, they end up dead or just fade away."

The film's opening — Wolverine living alone in the Canadian wilderness — was what Mangold felt most inspired to take straight from the comic book, but again, he wanted to shift it in a way that felt natural for the character. "Finding Logan in the woods alone, finding him as a ruminating alienated mountain man, I thought, was really evocative to me, the place that ...

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Will Taylor Swift, Harry Styles Romance Be Featured In ‘This Is Us’?

With childhood flashbacks, touching family moments and boy-band bonding, One Direction fans are only a few weeks away from seeing the group as they've never seen them before in their upcoming 3-D movie,

Yet, there is one thing you won't be seeing during the film, and that is Harry Styles' high-profile, yet short-lived romance with Taylor Swift, known as "Haylor."

"It gets frustrating for them at times, because suddenly stuff gets printed that isn't even true," director Morgan Spurlock says in the September issue of Teen Vogue, which features 1D on its cover. "I saw an article that said, 'Harry Styles demands Taylor Swift be taken out of the movie.' But by the time we started filming in January, they had already split up."

Spurlock's timeline seems to be correct. The brief romance heated up in December 2012 after Styles and Swift were photographed walking through New York's Central Park. Shortly following were trips to tattoo parlors, birthday cupcakes in Europe and their very public New Year's Eve kiss. Yet, the romance came to an abrupt halt just one week later, following what was reportedly a "heated argument" while vacationing in the British Virgin Islands.

Even though there won't be any relationship drama on the big screen, there will still be plenty to satisfy every single Directioner, according to , who says One Direction's real-life story plays out "better than any fictional movie ever could."

"The doc of what's happened to them over the last few years is more exciting than any ...

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Tomorrowland 2013: Watch An Exclusive Sneak Peek Of Colossal Main Stage!

BOOM, Belgium — It's finally here: Day 1 of Tomorrowland! MTV News has flown halfway across the world to experience this insane music festival firsthand. Celebrating the ninth year of the festival — which has expanded from a one-day, 10,000-person event to a three-day global blowout with over 180,000 visitors — Tomorrowland has a reputation to deliver some of the most over-the-top stage production on the planet.

The fantasy-themed event's 15 unique stages are decked out in intricate decor. Local superstars Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike were kind enough to give us another sneak peak at the highly anticipated stage designs, starting with locally sponsored Café d'Anvers.

"On this stage on Friday, you're going to find Jamie Jones; on Saturday, Cocoon; and on Sunday, Minus. The stage is hosted by Café d'Anvers, which is one of the best underground clubs in Belgium," Dimitri explained. "This is for sure one of the best places to be this weekend."

Next stop was the "Garden of Madness," a truly unique stage on a lake that will host Afrojack and his Jacked crew, YVES V with V-Sessions, and label parties Smash the House and Dirty Dutch on large interconnected floating blocks.

"This stage is designed by Daniel Ost, one of the most famous florists in the world," Dimitri said. "And this stage is actually, really floating on water. As you can see, it's humongous, and after this weekend, there's going to be nothing left of it except water, so let's hope we don't make this baby sink."

Unfortunately, it might be a rainy weekend here in Belgium. For most, ...

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