Iggy Azalea performs on stage at Park City Live during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival at Park City Live! on January 24, 2015 in Park City, Utah.
Mat Hayward/Getty Images
Wu Wooing Iggy?
Iggy Azalea was dissed by Snoop Dogg, but Wu-Tang Clan may have her back. Rumor has it Ghostface and Raekwon wanted to perform with Azalea at her sold-out show at Billboard‘s Winterfest at Sundance but their schedules didn’t allow it.
‘Big Grams’ Update
Outkast’s Big Boi and Phantogram’s Josh Carter have been talking for some time now about their collaboration on a record called Big Grams that could be out as early as this fall, and, according to Carter, the work continues. “I’m doing a lot of the production,” adding that one thing he likes about recording with Big Boi is “there’s no formula or barrier with how we work. We’re just letting things flow.” He describes the results as “darkadelic.”
Iggy Azalea Beefs With Steve Madden Over ‘Gross’ Photos
Queen Latifah Plays Bisexual ‘Empress’
Does Queen Latifah enjoy toying with media interest in her sexual orientation? At the 2014 Grammy Awards, she officiated a mass wedding with gay and straight couples during Macklemore & Ryan Lewis‘ performance of “Same Love.” This spring, she’s starring in and executive-producing HBO biopic Bessie about “The Empress of the Blues” Bessie Smith, whose bisexuality was an open secret in the ’20s and ’30s. The movie made an under-the-radar splash at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 23 when HBO hosted an intimate dinner at Table One in Park City, Utah, to celebrate it. Guests — including the film’s director Dee Rees (Pariah), HBO Films president Len Amato and Bravo’s Fashion Queens host Bevy Smith — buzzed about a buffed-up Mike Epps in a nude scene.
Jess Glynne’s Open Water Nightmare
Jess Glynne, the 25-year-old English singer who is featured on Clean Bandit‘s breakout hit songs “Rather Be” and “Real Love”, tells Overheard that, back in 2009, she came close to having a scuba-diving experience similar to the ill-fated couple in the 2003 film Open Water. Glynne explains that during a five-month travel excursion through Asia, Australia and South America with her best friend Phoebe, she was “stranded at sea” during a dive to check out Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. She says that the boat that dropped them into the deep had a difficult time finding the singer’s dive party after they surfaced. “For about an hour; us and our leader were pooing our pants in the middle of the ocean,” Glynne says. “I thought the end of me was going to be a shark eating me up!”
Clean Bandit Puts Classical Music In The House With ‘Rather Be’
Yuna is a Cumberbabe
With the Academy Awards ceremony on the horizon, Overheard asked Malaysian singer Yuna to name her favorite movies of 2014, and she chose Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. “I love movies that make you think, critically, like Interstellar, and I also love movies that are so pure and honest like Boyhood.” And although The Imitation Game didn’t make her list, Yuna does admit that she has a secret desire to hang out with the film’s leading man Benedict Cumberbatch for a day.
The Wombats’ Glitterbug Girl Becomes Real
English indie rock band The Wombats are set to release their new album Glitterbug in April, and lead singer Matthew Murphy says that, weirdly, life has come to imitate the songs he wrote for the album. After the band’s second studio album This Modern Glitch came out in 2011, Murphy started to spend a lot of time in Los Angeles. “I guess these ‘stopovers’ formed the inspiration for Glitterbug,” Murphy says. During this time, he started writing songs about a fictional woman from Los Angeles. Then weirdly enough, in Los Angeles, he ended up dating a woman strikingly similar to the fictional woman in his tunes. “It felt like I had imagined someone and they became real, ” Murphy says. But it turns out this L.A. woman isn’t the female to have stolen the 30-year-old musician’s heart. “I now co-own an American Bulldog/Pitbull Mutt/Serpent Bitch from Hell and I am completely in love with her,” he says. “She dominates me daily.”
Additional reporting by Alex Gale.
An edited version of this story first appeared in the Feb. 7 issue of Billboard.