Drake confirms fan fears over future tour dates
The news comes after fans noticed tickets for the affected dates had been removed from ticketing platforms days ago.
'We are actively working on rescheduling these dates along with adding some additional shows,' Drake's representative told Rolling Stone AU/NZ.
'All tickets for the affected shows will remain valid for the new dates. Refunds will be available for those who prefer, but please note that as these shows are sold out, any refunded tickets will be released for sale,' they added.
'We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience. Drake and the entire team have had an incredible time doing these shows and are excited to return soon. We look forward to sharing the rescheduled dates with you as soon as possible.'
Drake had been scheduled to finish out his final two Australia dates in Brisbane on March 4 and Sydney on March 7, followed by two concluding New Zealand concerts in Auckland on March 15 and 16.
The 38-year-old 'One Dance' rapper had originally kicked off his Oceania tour on February 4, days after his rap rival Kendrick Lamar won five Grammys for his chart-topping Drake diss track 'Not Like Us.'
During his first stop in Australia, the rapper assured fans he was 'very much alive.'
'My name is Drake. I started doing music in 2008,' he told the audience. 'I come all the way from Toronto, Canada. The year is now 2025, and no matter what, Drizzy Drake is very much alive and that's all thanks to you. I love you.'
Days later, however, Lamar 'finished Drake' with his brutal performance of the diss track at the 2025 Super Bowl.
Still, Drake went ahead and slammed his rap feuds on his new album $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, released within a week of Lamar's Super Bowl halftime show.
In the 21-track album's song titled 'Gimme a Hug,' Drake called out 'rap beef' and people hoping for his downfall.
'They be dropping s*** but we dropping harder s*** / F*** a rap beef, I'm tryna get the party lit / Tryna get the party lit for the b****es,' Drake raps in the second verse, seemingly in reference to his ongoing beef with Lamar.
'Using you for promotion, truer words had never been spoken,' the 'God's Plan' artist says in another line, likely in reference to his lawsuit against his music label, Universal Music Group — to which Lamar is also signed — over its release of 'Not Like Us.'
'Funny how it's only b**** n****s that are waiting on the boy's obituary / 'Cause if I die, it's these n****s that become the sole beneficiary,' he adds.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Taylor Swift fans lose it over all the hidden details in Travis Kelce snaps that reveal their intimate home life
Taylor Swift 's devoted fans have been dissecting new photos her boyfriend Travis Kelce shared to his Instagram on Thursday, finding subtle hints about the pair's home life. The football star, 35, posted a carousel of images from his summer with the singer, 35, marking it the first time he's featured Taylor on his social media. And fans were quick to note a number of hidden details, showing just how close the power couple have become since going public with their romance in 2023. Among the details was the presence of Taylor's private younger brother, Austin Swift, 33, indicating a growing closeness between their families. In one image Austin was pictured bonding with the Kansas City Chiefs legend and his brother Jason Kelce, 37. In another picture, Austin was seen on a fishing trip with Travis and a friend in the woods. Eagle-eyed fans also noted that Travis' phone background is a photo of him with Taylor. In yet another image, fans spotted Taylor's longtime BFF Ashley Avignone and Este Haim, signaling Travis's growing closeness to Taylor's inner circle of friends. They also pointed out that the slideshow contains 13 photos, a nod to Taylor's well-known lucky number. The first image in Travis' carousel shows the pair matching in white, with him wearing a hat that says 'captain' and her rocking a matching one that says 'first mate.' Travis also shared the images in July, coinciding with the second anniversary of their initial meeting in July 2023, when Travis famously attempted to give Taylor a friendship bracelet with his number. The images also use Taylor's signature photo filter, which Travis has discussed on his podcast previously. After Travis surprised fans with the post, they quickly took to the comments to discuss all the different hidden details. 'The lock screens on their phones on slide 3,' one wrote. '13 slides…we see you.' 'Me looking at Travis' phone background.' 'Ppl bout to zoom tf in on that lockscreen lmao,' another wrote. 'IS HE USING HER SIGNATURE FILTER,' someone questioned. '13 pics too omg.' 'THE LOCK SCREEN my heartttt.' '13 pics in the photo dump.' 'Thirteen photos - nice touch!' Other pictures show the couple out for dinner, clowning around in the snow and skating on an ice rink. They also took photos with different groups of friends, one of which includes NFL reporters Charissa Thompson and Erin Andrews and their respective partners. Kelce's older brother Jason, mom Donna and dad Ed also feature in the Instagram dump. 'Had some adventures this offseason, kept it 100,' Travis captioned his post. Kelce and Swift have enjoyed a more low-key offseason together than last year, with the pair only making a handful of public appearances since the Chiefs' Super Bowl defeat to the Philadelphia Eagles in February. The most noteworthy of the lot came when Taylor made a surprise cameo at her man's 'Tight End University' event in Nashville last month, where she took to the stage and performed her famous 'Shake It Off' song. On a subsequent edition of his New Heights podcast, Travis explained that they had been cooking up a plan to 'have some fun' for some time. But his older brother Jason was among those who were shocked when footage emerged of the pop sensation on stage. 'Tay Tay showed up!' Travis said. 'We were in Nashville, she grew up in Nashville - she moved there when she was younger - and we had this planned for a while that we were going to have some fun with the tight ends. He continued: 'I won't say when the idea came up but we were there at "Tight End & Friends" and we knew that there was a professional like Kane Brown, who could just figure it out. 'He's a pro, he's been on stage a million times, he's not shy at all by any means... Tay just went up to him and the band and was like: "Hey if you guys are down, I'll go up there, play a song and see if we can pop the roof off this place." And sure enough...' Travis revealed that before going out to perform, Swift was backstage writing sheets of music for the band. 'I don't know, I'm not a musician but she was making sure that the band and everybody (knew it). And then just went out there without practicing and it was pitch perfect and just killed it,' Travis continued. 'She's so good with everybody and making people feel comfortable. And absolutely rocked the stage yet again, it was awesome, man.' Travis was back on the practice field on Tuesday as the Chiefs began their preparations for the new NFL season. From Tuesday until August 13, the team will be based at Missouri Western State University in St Joseph - around an hour north Arrowhead Stadium. There, Travis and the other 89 players on the roster will stay in dorms on campus for the duration of camp. That means three weeks without seeing their partners and families. For Travis, that means three weeks without seeing Swift.
Reuters
7 hours ago
- Reuters
Grammy-winning jazz musician Chuck Mangione dies at 84
July 24 (Reuters) - American two-time Grammy-winning jazz flugelhorn player Chuck Mangione, best known for his 1970s cross-over hit "Feels So Good," died this week at age 84 at his home in Rochester, New York. The prolific musician and composer - whose career spanned five decades and 30 albums - died in his sleep on Tuesday, a local funeral home said. "Chuck's love affair with music has been characterized by his boundless energy, unabashed enthusiasm, and pure joy that radiated from the stage," his family said in a statement to the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle newspaper. Mangione showed his appreciation for his audiences by sitting at the edge of the stage after his concerts, signing autographs for fans who stayed to meet him and the band, it said. Born Charles Frank Mangione in 1940 in Rochester, he was a virtuoso flugelhorn and trumpet player. He grew up in a household where his father exposed him to the jazz greats of the 1950s, including Dizzy Gillespie, a family friend who dined with them frequently. He began taking music lessons at age 8, and by the time he was a teenager, Gillespie was so impressed by his musical prowess that he gave Mangione one of his trademark "upswept" trumpets. His composition "Chase The Clouds Away" was featured at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, while his "Give It All You Got" was the theme music for the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. Mangione's biggest hit was his 1977 single "Feels So Good," which reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was nominated for Record of the Year at the Grammys. His album by the same name is a staple on smooth jazz radio stations. Mangione won two Grammys out of 14 nominations - the first in 1977 for best instrumental composition for "Bellavia," named in honor of his mother. In 1979 he won in the best pop instrumental performance category for "The Children of Sanchez." The latter, a soundtrack for the movie of the same name, also won a Golden Globe. In the late 1990s, Mangione's music attracted new fans after he played himself on the Fox TV cartoon show "King of the Hill" as a celebrity spokesman for the fictional "Mega-lo-mart," with the slogan "shopping feels so good." He also scored the music for the 1998 Valentine's Day episode.
The Guardian
11 hours ago
- The Guardian
Bounce legend Big Freedia on going gospel: ‘I never heard 'God doesn't love gay folks'. God loves us all'
On stage at Nashville Pride festival on a sweltering June afternoon, Big Freedia is her usual boisterously commanding self. She invites volunteers and the sign-language interpreter to join her and her dancers in getting down to bounce music, the relentlessly kinetic style of hip-hop for which she has become a figurehead in her native New Orleans. Then she pauses for a brief heart-to-heart with the audience. 'I don't know if y'all know this, but I started in the church,' she says. Big Freedia's forthcoming album, Pressing Onward, is a gospel record and she is keen to stress that she isn't abandoning her core audience. The gay, gender-fluid rapper and reality TV star exhorts every kind of body to shake it and is unequivocal about her support for all marginalised people; her reputation led Beyoncé and Drake to sample her on some of their most successful tracks. 'This album is for us,' she emphasises. 'It is for people who are LGBTQ and who love God.' When the beat of a new song, Take My Hand, kicks into double time, just the way a sanctified rhythm section would in church, she brings gospel catharsis to queer people in the same southern state where the US supreme court recently upheld a ban on transgender youth healthcare, at a time when LGBTQ+ progress across the US is meeting with forceful religious pushback. The week after, Big Freedia logs on to our video call to talk gospel. 'It's already an ass revival when they come to a Big Freedia show,' she says, referring to the mass twerking her shows inspire. 'And now they're coming to a Big Freedia gospel revival.' In one sense, it's a superficial distinction. Back in the church choir of Big Freedia's youth, she moved people to ecstatic dance: 'We would have lots of clapping, stomping of the feet, choreographed dancing that we would do in our robes.' The young singer, who back then could hit soprano range, showed such dedication and promise that the choir's director made her their assistant. By high school, Big Freedia was leading ensembles and envisioned that as her future. 'I thought I was going to be a famous choir director and that I was gonna be singing with choirs all around the world.' Big Freedia says she grew up feeling welcomed by the working-class Black Baptist congregation that knew her as Freddie Ross Jr – so much so that she used its name as the title of her new album. 'From the first time I walked in the doors, they put their arms around me and gave me the biggest hug,' she says. 'And they knew I was a young gay boy. I was loud and proud, even as a kid. We didn't have those moments of the pastor talking about: 'God doesn't love gay folks.' God loved us all.' She was also becoming part of a circle of rappers that were making boastful, bass-heavy New Orleans club music a vehicle for their party-starting queer and gender-expansive personae. The bounce scene beckoned. Big Freedia received assurance from her mum and other church folk that pursuing it wouldn't be sacrilegious, as long as she maintained her relationship with God – and she lets it be known, loudly and often, that she has. Before she took the stage at Pride, her team huddled and someone offered a prayer: 'God give Freedia the supernatural strength, in the name of Jesus, from the top of her head to the soles of her feet.' Big Freedia certainly isn't the first member of the LGBTQ+ community to contribute to the gospel canon. That lineage might be more widely acknowledged if generations of the music's pioneers hadn't been required to live closeted lives. 'Once you start historicising, you figure out that so much of what is sung in churches was created by, and continues to be created by, queer folks,' says Ashon Crawley, a religious studies scholar and cultural critic who draws on insight he gained as a young, Black, queer Pentecostal church musician. In her youth, Big Freedia recorded with the New Orleans Gospel Soul Children choir, but she had never contemplated her own gospel project until a 2024 session yielded the spiritually ebullient dance track Celebration. 'God put it on my heart that this is what I need to do,' she says. Big Freedia made clear to potential co-writers that she still wanted her audacious swagger and compassion to come through and that she wasn't out to convert anyone. 'I'm representing for the LGBTQ community,' she told them. 'So when they come here, the door is bust wide open and there is no judgment and you have this moment to lose it in the spirit.' Parson James, a Nashville-based pop artist who is queer and biracial, helped her craft some of the hooks. He had dealt with the homophobia of his small-town South Carolina congregation by distancing himself from the church and its music, so he was wary of returning to gospel, but he put his trust in Big Freedia's intentions. 'Doing it with someone who's so confident – you can't tell her shit – it just was amazing.' Pressing Onward has ample pop accessibility: over an 808 drum machine, Sunday Best blends hip-hop fashion flexes and brags about Black church finery. But the album is also lifted by unmistakable gospel elements: warm, reverberant eruptions of Hammond B3 organ; the taut, powerful unison of mass choir singing. Crawley sees Big Freedia's reclamation of these traditions as potentially subversive. 'It demonstrates to the church: your excluding of us doesn't have to be the end of our story; we find community with one another in ways that you both taught us how to do and in ways you could not anticipate. So perhaps you should pay more attention to the very thing that you have excluded.' Big Freedia initially planned to release Pressing Onward in June's Pride month, but in May her longtime partner, Devon Hurst, died unexpectedly of diabetes complications. She insisted on directing the choir at his funeral. The day before our interview, she closed on the house they had planned to buy together. 'My whole life has just changed within this last month,' she says. 'It has been an emotional rollercoaster, all the things that me and him had planned and the things we were doing and working on. And now I'm doing all these things by myself.' Even in her profound grief, she was willing to push the album release back only by a month. 'I need it more than anybody,' she says. 'And I know if I need it, there's other people out there in the world that need it. There's always someone who's depressed or going through a hard time. There is always someone who's fighting who they are, or fighting against a community of people that don't accept who they are. This album is not just for me – it's for the world.' Pressing Onward is released via Queen Diva Music on 8 August
