“Keri Hilson Details "Healing" Moment That Ended Her and Beyoncé's Rumored Feud

“Keri Hilson Details "Healing" Moment That Ended Her and Beyoncé's Rumored Feud - E! Online” plus 2 more

Keri Hilson Details "Healing" Moment That Ended Her and Beyoncé's Rumored Feud - E! Online
What We Think of Beyonce's 'Black Is King' - The New York Times
12-time Oscar nominee Diane Warren hopes for 'awesome' win - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Keri Hilson Details "Healing" Moment That Ended Her and Beyoncé's Rumored Feud - E! Online

Posted: 15 Apr 2021 02:01 PM PDT

No drama here!

More than a decade since the leak of the 2009 remix of her song "Turnin' Me On," which featured a line seemingly shading Beyonce, singer Keri Hilson told radio host Persia Nicole that the women have nothing but respect for one another.

The remix featured Keri's collaborator Lil Wayne, as well as T-Pain. Upon release, fans speculated that Keri was throwing shade at Beyonce and Ciara, her peers in the music industry.

"Your vision cloudy if you think that you da best, You can dance, she can sing, but need to move it to the left," Keri sang on the track, which makes reference to the lyrics in "Irreplaceable," Bey's 2006 song. "She need to go have some babies, she need to sit down, she fake, them other chicks ain't even worth talkin' bout."

Despite the line, Keri said Beyonce seemed to harbor no hard feelings about her when the two met.

"She actually has introduced herself. It was a gracious moment," Keri shared with Persia in an interview that was posted on Instagram. "I appreciated it. I feel like she understood what happened, what had transpired and there was a bit of healing in that moment when we met. I take her as a very intuitive kind of soul, as am I."

What We Think of Beyonce's 'Black Is King' - The New York Times

Posted: 04 Aug 2020 12:00 AM PDT

Perhaps that's unfair; she does, after all, amalgamate them into a world of her own making. But while Black may be king, this project and all its trappings position its auteur, as the voice-over says in the film, as the "divine archetype." In that context, she raised the stakes herself.

Salamishah Tillet, contributing critic

A little over an hour into "Black Is King," Beyoncé, with tears in her eyes, places a baby boy, wrapped in a blanket, up a river inside a reed basket. Unlike the mélange of sounds — Afropop, dancehall, hip-hop, and soul — that I'd heard up to this point, the accompanying ballad, "Otherside," was such a sonic break from the high-tempo energy that I paused the stream several times. I was moved by this scene of maternal sacrifice, for even though I knew the plot of "The Lion King," I found myself hoping that this baby would survive the currents of the rushing river.

This is because that baby was never just a baby, and this story was never really simply the human version of Simba's journey into manhood, much less kingship. On the surface, this river bed scene is an update of that Old Testament story in which Jochebed, the mother of Moses, placed him in the Nile River to protect him from being killed. But, the waters here also invoke the Middle Passage, with each ripple break recalling the fateful journey in which New World slavery, and America itself, was born.

Moses has always loomed large among African-Americans seeking freedom. It is why Harriet Tubman sang the spiritual "Go Down, Moses" as a code to identify herself to those enslaved people who wanted to go with her to the Promised Land. And while "Black Is King" shares those 19th-century aspirations of equality and Black dignity, it, in our age of Black Lives Matter, knows it has to resort to mythmaking since racial justice remains as firm as the shifting sands that backdrop so much of this visual album.

12-time Oscar nominee Diane Warren hopes for 'awesome' win - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Posted: 15 Apr 2021 06:37 AM PDT

LOS ANGELES — For a dozen and more reasons, Diane Warren would be overjoyed to win a best original song Oscar for her work in "The Life Ahead" starring Sophia Loren.

A trophy for the Italian-language film's song, "Io Si (Seen)," would be Warren's first after 11 previous Academy Award nominations came up short.

"Yeah, it would be great to win. It would be (expletive) awesome," Warren said. "I feel like a team that's gone to the World Series for decades and decades, and never wins."

A triumph would be especially sweet for the veteran songwriter whose first Oscar bid was in 1988 (for the romcom "Mannequin"). The Academy Awards ceremony, originally set for February and delayed by the pandemic, airs April 25, the birthday of her late father, David Warren, and a coincidence that she calls "so cool."

"He believed in me so much he would take me to music publishers when I was 14 or 15," Warren said. "My mom would be saying, 'Why are you doing it? Why are you encouraging her? She can't make a living off that.'"

Warren, who grew up in Los Angeles, recounted her dad's reply: "She has talent. She really, really wants this."

Her gifts and drive led to success in a range of pop music genres and in film, with her past Oscar contenders including "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," by Aerosmith and featured in 1998's "Armageddon." It was a hit tune, one of Warren's many that include "If I Could Turn Back Time" by Cher. Toss out a big name — Beyoncé, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga — and Warren has likely worked with them.

She's a confessed workaholic who typically writes solo but joined with Common on the 2019 Oscar-nominated "Stand Up for Something" for "Marshall," a biopic about the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

"The Life Ahead" brought a new form of collaboration. Warren had written the music and words for the song when director Edoardo Ponti — Loren's son — realized the Italian-language film needed lyrics to match. Italian pop star-songwriter Laura Pausini was brought in for the task and shares the Oscar nomination.

Warren's music and lyrics are "amazing," said Pausini, who recorded "Io Si" for the film. The song and the movie carry the same message, "and that's the goal."

In "The Life Ahead," Loren plays the aged Madame Rosa, a former prostitute and Holocaust survivor who helps sex workers by taking in their children. She reluctantly adds an orphaned, street-tough Senegalese youngster known as Momo to her small brood, and the pair move gradually from distrust to love. Impressive newcomer Ibrahima Gueye, himself an immigrant to Italy from Senegal, plays the boy.

The third movie adaptation of the 1975 Romain Gary novel "The Life Before Us" is a wrenchingly tender story of those who live on the margins of — and largely are invisible to — society, which prompted Warren's approach to the song.

"The first thing I came up with, sitting at my piano, was, 'I want you to know that you're seen,' she said, breaking briefly into an a cappella performance. "It's so simple but it's so profound, because we all want to be seen."

The song became an integral part of the movie, heard in its translated version over the closing scene. Filmmaker Ponti gladly gives credit to Warren, who approached him in 2019 before "The Life Ahead" went into production with Ponti's legendary mother.

"I hadn't even considered having a song in the movie," he said. "She had gotten ahold of the script and something clicked for her. So when something clicks for Diane Warren, you just say, 'Absolutely, I would love a song in my movie because Diane Warren is a great artist.'"

When Warren came to his Los Angeles-area home early last year to introduce her creation, she was wearing a cast from a household accident, recalled Ponti, a writer as well as stage and screen director.

"With her broken hand and her guitar, she sang the song in my living room," he said, recalling it as a "a very bright day" in the up-and-down experience of bringing a movie to fruition.

It's a cliché, but Warren says being nominated truly is an honor. Of the many songs introduced in movies each year, she said, a mere five are singled out by the academy's music branch with "the best composers on the planet, the best songwriters, the best of the best of the best."

The other contenders include "Speak Now" from "One Night in Miami..." written by Leslie Odom Jr., a supporting actor nominee for the film, and Sam Ashworth.

Whatever happens on Oscars night, Warren believes "Io Si (Seen)" is destined to become an evergreen covered by other artists. She's seen it happen often enough, but remains far from jaded by her work's influence.

"I sit in my little room all by myself (writing), and somehow the song touches people and makes them cry and makes them feel something," she said. "It's always amazing."