A number of musicians - Megan Thee Stallion, The Weeknd, Selena Gomez, J Balvin, Halsey, Jennifer Hudson, Yo-Yo Ma, Anaïs Mitchell - made TIME Magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Megan Thee Stallion and The Weeknd also made the covers.

“We were peaceful, hands up, not moving, not breaching the line. [Police] opened fire of rubber bullets and tear gas multiple times on us" - Halsey wrote after she was struck by rubber bullets and shrapnel and gassed while participating in a Black Lives Matter protest in Los Angeles on Saturday. The wounds did not brake her - “most of us were simply begging them to have empathy, to reconsider humanity and our nations history and future. The frontline did not relent. I will be returning”.

An interesting interview with Halsey in the Guardian about how the media and the public present and view women - “It’s so much greater than me – it’s a social perception of women. So fuck it, I’m gonna tell them everything that happened. I am financially independent, I have my own team, I have every resource in the world to get out of [misogyny]. I still can’t. How hard must it be for women who don’t have these resources?”. But, things can be done - at the Women’s March in 2018, she delivered a poem about her experience of sexual harassment so compassionate, angry and confessional that - “people came up to me in the street. Men. A whole demographic who’d never approached me before. Art still works! You lose faith in it sometimes”.

Halsey and Jimmy Fallon took turns on his late night show singing popular songs after running the lyrics through Google Translate. Madonna's 'Like a Virgin' became 'Unwed Woman', and Halsey's hit 'Without Me' became 'You Soft Head'.

The Guardian has an excellent article about female role models of this decade, in comparison to the ones from the noughties: "In their fallibility and resistance to commodification, the women who have defined this decade in pop look a lot more like role models than the corporate innocents sold to girls in the early millennium. […]

In the western countries, festivals were cancelled this summer due to money issues, in Asia - it's peace, well, actually lack thereof. Organizers of Clockenflap in Hong Kong, one of the most high-profile festivals in Asia, cancelled it because of the continuing protests and unrest in the city. The 60,000-capacity festival was due to run […]

American pop singer Halsey spoke of her experience of being homeless revealing that there was a time she had to consider prostitution to get money for food. She gave her speech Saturday night at the annual Ending Youth Homelessness: A Benefit For My Friend’s Place in Hollywood, where she was an honoree as a teen […]