The Toronto rapper released his remix today, ahead of Drake's 'FOMO' releasing on streaming platforms.

Casper TNG

Billy Eff is the Content Director for Rolling Stone Canada. An award-winning journalist and columnist, he has previously contributed to outlets including VICE and Urbania. A passionate advocate for underground music and a musician himself, he has conducted several hundred interviews with artists and industry professionals across a wide range of styles and genres over the past 15 years. He is based in Montréal, Québec.

Toronto rapper Casper TNG has jumped on Drake’s “Quebec,” releasing his own remix of the track today.

The remix keeps Drake’s original production, with Casper taking over the record with his own verse and matching the Toronto superstar’s flow. The track was released September 30, just as Drake prepares to bring his FOMO project to streaming services.

Drake first released “Quebec” as a standalone video on YouTube on September 19 after previewing the song as part of his FOMO rollout. The track includes a direct reference to the province, while its accompanying video features aerial footage of Montréal. Drake confirmed this week that a batch of songs from the project will arrive on streaming Thursday, October 1.

One of Canadian rap's brightest futures, Casper TNG was named as one of Rolling Stone Canada's inaugural Future of Music artists. The Toronto rapper released his debut album Draft Day in August following the breakout success of “The Market,” his collaboration with 100Bandplan. The track was certified Gold in Canada and helped lead to Casper signing with Universal Music Canada in March.

He has also launched PuzzL Music Collective in partnership with Universal Music Canada in June. The label’s first releases include music from K Money and 100Bandplan.

After postponing their scheduled fall tour earlier this mont, Toronto dance-rock duo Death From above 1979 has announced a new album titled Private Lives, out on January 29, 2027 on Last Gang/MNRK.

The band also shared the album's title track, with a video starring Danish actor Kim Bodnia. “The song ‘Private Lives’ is a declaration of privacy in an era of overexposure. We are compelled, often by one another, to share our most intimate moments and quietest thoughts. To what end? More often than not, to be part of a cheap consumer feedback loop,” the band says about the abrasive track.

The new record is the follow-up to 2021's Is 4 Lovers, and includes a collaboration with Brazilian-Canadian indie-electro outfit CSS on “Mystery.”

The Canadian run of their North American tour begins in Waterloo on February 24, followed by Toronto's HISTORY on February 25 and London on February 26. Ottawa has been added for February 27, before the band heads to Montréal's Théâtre Beanfield on March 1 and Québec City on March 2.

The western leg includes Winnipeg, Red Deer, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Victoria between March 20 and 27.

Death From Above 1979 is also celebrating 25 years as a band. Their debut album, You're a Woman, I'm a Machine, was released in 2004 to much critical acclaim in the indie scene and gaining a devoted audience, thanks to songs like "Black History Month" and ''Romantic Rights''.

Céline Dion kicked off Paris Fashion Week with a bang, making a surprise appearance at L’Oréal's runway show beneath the Eiffel Tower.

The Québec superstar appeared at the end of the brand’s annual Le Défilé on Monday, September 28, stepping onto the runway in a dramatic black Schiaparelli gown before launching into her 2002 hit “I’m Alive.” She was joined by several of L’Oréal’s celebrity ambassadors, including Viola Davis, Eva Longoria, Simone Ashley and Aja Naomi King.

The performance came as Paris Fashion Week kicked off for the Spring/Summer 2027 season, and as Dion is already dominating the French capital with her long-awaited return to the stage.

Dion began a 26-show Paris residency on September 12, marking her first major concert run since stepping away from performing amid her battle with stiff-person syndrome. Sixteen shows are scheduled through October, with another 10 planned for May 2027.

In the weeks surrounding the residency, Dion has been photographed in looks from major fashion houses and has increasingly become a fixture of Paris’ celebrity and fashion scene. Dion has been Loréal Paris' brand ambassador since 2019, and the company is one of the presenting partners of her current residency.

Taylor Swift has always loved a story. It’s what has set her songwriting apart for 20 years now — and what she has used to maintain her almighty superstar status. Both in her work and in the presentation of it, Swift has woven strong narratives of heartbreak, success, redemption, torture, and glory where all of the pieces fall into place and it’s easy to root for her.

With her latest album, The Life of the Showgirl, Swift presented a sequined tale of triumph. Finally, finally, the girl who spent her whole life trying to put the feeling of love into words had changed the prophecy by getting engaged (and now married) to Travis Kelce. Professionally, Swift was at her peak, too. She’d just bought back her masters with the earnings from her historic Eras Tour, an all-encompassing career feat that inspired the project.

But there’s no debating that the musician’s 12th album was her most polarizing yet (yes, even more than the 2017 LP, Reputation). Some critics and fans alike didn’t appreciate the execution of the “showgirl” idea sonically or thematically. But hate it or love it, Showgirl was the perfect way for Swift to revel in her success — and set the stage for her next show-stopping move.

That’s why it’s so confusing that the expert storyteller decided the show wasn’t over when she released The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore with four bonus tracks. One of the strongest elements of the original album was that Swift delivered a tight 12, and only 12, songs. “There’s not a 13th, there’s not other ones coming,” she said last year. “Every single song is on this album for hundreds of reasons, you know, and you couldn’t take one out and it’d be the same album. You couldn’t add one. It’s just right.”

Now, there is suddenly more to the story with the addition of “Patient Zero,” “Cleveland!” “Pink Clouding,” and “Babylon.” Unfortunately, as many fans have pointed out, none of the songs add to the narrative set forth in Showgirl.

Swift said she wrote the bonus tracks last year following the success of the album. “We just wanted to reflect and take in how grateful we were for the moment we were in,” she said, referring to the project’s collaborators, Max Martin and Shellback. That moment found Swift newly engaged, yet her lead single back, “Patient Zero,” looks back at a past relationship. “Pink Clouding” also reflects on a former flame, but without the regretful yearning that made “Ruin the Friendship” a standout. Meanwhile, “Cleveland!” takes the gushing over-the-heels joy from “Honey” and “Wood” and adds an almost spiteful twist. And then there is the new curtain-closer, “Babylon” where Swift hands out more pearls of wisdom over an acoustic cut that would fit better on Folklore or Evermore. In fact, all four songs sound like they were plucked from previous albums like Midnights or The Tortured Poets Department. With these four tracks, she has not only confused the story of Showgirl, she’s also muddled that of Taylor Swift™.

Swift is a known mastermind, who has planned her next career move years in advance, and she’s been celebrated for her expert marketing power moves. But where does the showgirl go from here? The Encore has unleashed more questions about Swift’s next chapter rather than offer a clear path forward.

On Sunday, Swift premiered the cinematic music video for “Patient Zero” at the 2026 MTV VMAs. It’s a chilling thriller, and one of her most impressive visuals to date. Was that the point of it all, to highlight her full-throttle pivot to film? We know that the musician has a directorial debut on the way with Searchlight Pictures. Maybe she finally found the time to finish it, and that’s why she worked on the Toy Story 5 soundtrack.

The Encore could also just be a way for Swift to get her 12th album back into the conversation, just in time for the first round of voting for the 2027 Grammys. One would expect the singer-songwriter to submit the project for all of the major categories, including the coveted Album of the Year and Song of the Year. It’s unclear whether Swift will submit both “The Fate of Ophelia,” which became Swift’s longest-running Number One song atop the Billboard Hot and her new shining single “I Knew It, I Knew You” for Song of the Year — the songwriting-focused Grammy she has yet to win.

Swift has spent the last six months riding on the high of “I Knew It, I Knew You.” The song dominated on country radio — and led the musician to drop a ton of Easter eggs hinting at her big return to the genre. She could honor her songwriting legacy with a country music return timed to the 20th anniversary of her debut in October. Now that would be a great story.

Jay-Z on September 13, 2026 in New York City.

After the woman who accused him of rape fully recanted her allegations in a sworn statement last Thursday, Jay-Z is hoping her reversal can revive his California-based extortion and defamation claims against lawyer Tony Buzbee and his law firm.

In a new petition for rehearing first obtained and reported by Rolling Stone, the rapper and entrepreneur, whose legal name is Shawn Carter, is asking a California appeals court to reconsider its recent refusal to reinstate his extortion and defamation lawsuit that a lower court dismissed last year. He says the woman’s new retraction, first reported by Rolling Stone, amounts to “explosive new evidence” that should allow his “meritorious claims to proceed” in Los Angeles County Superior Court, where he first filed them two years ago.

“Jane Doe’s declaration proves that discovery would yield evidence supporting Carter’s claims. Fairness and due process require this court to grant rehearing,” his new appellate filing argues.

In the woman’s sworn declaration, signed Thursday in her home state of Alabama, she said her sexual assault allegations were false, that she had never met Carter, and that she had disclosed certain “mental health conditions” to one of her lawyers before Buzbee’s law firm publicly named the Grammy-winning rapper in her lawsuit in December 2024.

“Shawn ‘Jay-Z’ Carter never raped me. I have never met or spoken to Mr. Carter. Mr. Carter never engaged in any inappropriate conduct toward me whatsoever,” the woman wrote in the 11-page declaration filed in Manhattan federal court as part of a separate malicious prosecution case brought by the rapper.

“There is no truth to any of my claims against Mr. Carter,” she continued under penalty of perjury. “I understand my false accusations have caused Mr. Carter immense pain, suffering, and damage that can never be fully undone.”

In his petition for rehearing, Carter says the California appeals court relied heavily on the idea that Jane Doe dropped her rape lawsuit against him on Feb. 14, 2025, to “protect herself from harassment and invasion of privacy.” He argues that her new declaration tells a different story.

The woman now says she agreed to dismiss the rape case after telling her lawyers she had “doubts about [her] claims,” and after one of the lawyers allegedly traveled to Alabama to have her sign the dismissal papers. The sexual assault case was ultimately dismissed with prejudice under an agreement in which Carter promised that neither he nor his agents would contact or interact with her.

“I never received any threat from Mr. Carter or anyone acting on his behalf,” the woman said in her new declaration. “No one at the Buzbee Law Firm or any other law firm ever told me about a possible settlement of the New York Lawsuit. I did not authorize a settlement.”

Carter’s petition argues that Buzbee sought to dismiss the lawsuit against Carter not to shield the woman from harassment, but “to protect himself” from a pending sanctions motion. “Carter asks only that he have the opportunity to prove his case through limited discovery on remand,” the petition states. “If the discovery shows what he expects, then the case should proceed to trial where a jury can decide who is right.”

In the appeals court ruling, the panel upheld the lower court’s dismissal of Carter’s claims by finding that Buzbee’s demand letter was sent in anticipation of litigation. It said the trial court correctly concluded Carter failed to show Buzbee made statements about the woman’s claims with actual malice.

“The record contains no evidence Buzbee accused Carter of raping Jane Doe while knowing those statements to be false or with reckless disregard as to whether they were true. To the contrary, Buzbee submitted declarations showing his firm’s and [a referral firm’s] investigations led him to subjectively believe in the truth of the accusations,” Associate Justice Anne Richardson wrote in the unanimous ruling from California’s Second Appellate District.

Carter first sued Buzbee in late 2024, alleging the prominent Houston lawyer knowingly advanced false claims when he sent a demand letter in early November seeking money to resolve allegations that Carter had raped Jane Doe. By then, Buzbee’s firm had already sued Sean Combs on the woman’s behalf, alleging that a second, unidentified male “celebrity” also sexually assaulted her that night. Weeks later, after Carter declined to engage with the demand, Buzbee amended the complaint to explicitly name Carter as that celebrity, making him a co-defendant with Combs.

Regardless of what happens with Carter’s attempts to revive the extortion and defamation claims, the billionaire entrepreneur is pressing ahead with the New York-based malicious prosecution claims against Buzbee and his firm. He dismissed the Jane Doe from the action last week, but he still argues her lawyers should have known her allegations “were contradicted by publicly available information, internally inconsistent, and unsupported by any credible story or investigation.”

Attempts to reach Buzbee on Monday were not immediately successful. Reached by email last Thursday, the lawyer defended himself. “We have multiple lawyers (at least four) who dealt with Ms. Doe long before she met me. She gave the exact same story to each. If for some reason now she is claiming she lied to us and the court, that’s new information,” he wrote. He previously told Rolling Stone that “sending a basic demand letter prior to filing suit is not and will never be ‘extortion.’”

One of Buzbee’s lawyers argued in a Friday filing in New York that Doe’s retraction was a “bought-and-paid-for declaration,” though she offered no evidence to support that assertion. The lawyer said Carter and his attorneys knew the new recantation contradicted Doe’s prior sworn testimony and noted that Carter’s legal team had previously described her as “an unreliable witness” with “several mental health disorders,” raising serious “concerns about her credibility.”

“In sum, there is no evidence that when the Buzbee Parties relied on Jane Doe’s multiple declarations they knew her to be a perjurer. Carter and his attorneys lack the same excuse,” Buzbee’s lawyer, Jessica N. Meyers of Sheppard Mullin, wrote in a letter to the court.

In a Sept. 1 motion to dismiss Carter’s malicious-prosecution claims, Buzbee’s camp called the lawsuit “improper” and “abusive.” They argued that filing a civil complaint on behalf of a Jane Doe alleging sexual assault did not amount to misconduct. They added that any inconsistencies in the woman’s recollection were not necessarily suspicious, particularly given her claim that she had been drugged and raped more than two decades earlier, when she was 13.

Mighty Sparrow at New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1998.

Mighty Sparrow, the undisputed king of calypso music who singlehandedly elevated one of the most intensely flavored genres of the Caribbean into an unprecedented level of artistry and global popularity, died on Sunday. He was 91.

His daughter, Karen Francisco, announced the musician’s death, adding that he died after a “brief illness.” “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Trinidad and Tobago’s Calypso icon, Slinger Francisco, known to the world as ‘The Mighty Sparrow,’ Francisco wrote on social media. “He was an institution in the entertainment industry, well admired for his skill and finesse as a singer, songwriter and mentor; beloved by many.”

The winner of countless Carnival Road March and Calypso Monarch competitions, he leaves behind a prodigious discography that traces the transformation of calypso from its folk roots in the Fifties to the progressive, jazz-inflected splendor of the Sixties to the funky soca of the Seventies and Eighties.

Born Slinger Francisco on July 9, 1935 in Grenada, he moved with his family to Trinidad — the birthplace of calypso — when he was one, and began performing with a steel band as a teenager. But just like other Caribbean giants such as Puerto Rico’s Ismael Rivera and the Dominican Republic’s Johnny Ventura, Sparrow’s restless creative persona transcended the limits of the dance genres that blossomed around him. The Fifties were the perfect decade for his imagination to take flight, as calypso enjoyed a brief spell of international popularity, with Harry Belafonte’s Calypso becoming the first LP to sell 1 million copies.

A formidable singer, Sparrow could switch from vociferous anthems of racial defiance to comical tales of carnal excess and tender declarations of longing. As a songwriter, he possessed a novelist’s understanding of Caribbean lore, with tales of obeah spells and sexual encounters that end up in chaos and disaster.

On “Bikini Girl” — obsessively attracted to a girl at the beach during a night party, he doesn’t realize until the end that she’s Dorothy, his own fiancée — he sounds both goofy and endearing. And even though early hits like “Big Bamboo,” “Congo Man,” and “Sell the Pussy” took calypso’s double entendre spice into new extremes, Sparrow softened the vulgar implications of the lyrics with an irresistible aura of bonhomie and charm.

Much like plena in Puerto Rico, early calypso functioned as a musical newspaper of its time; on 1960’s rollicking “Ten to One Is Murder,” Sparrow recounts being attacked late at night by a gang of knife-wielding men. But the success of both his recorded output and frequent gigs at local Trinidad hotels — captured for posterity in several live albums — inspired the singer to expand his sound.

Released in 1968, Calypso Carnival may well be the finest album of his career — a timeless Caribbean classic. Backed by the dazzling arrangements of longtime collaborator Ron Berridge and his jazz orchestra, Sparrow found the perfect vehicle for his larger-than-life storytelling. This is progressive calypso, complex, and cosmopolitan, as the tracks leap out of the speakers with the propulsion of a tropical hurricane. The sexual metaphors are downright surreal on “Jook for Jook,” while the brassy chorus of “Jane” could wake the dead with its raucous groove.

The following year, he released Sparrow Meets the Dragon, a collaboration with Jamaican bandleader Byron Lee and his group The Dragonaires. It opens with “Maria,” a calypsofied cha cha that underscores Sparrow’s willingness to experiment with other styles. The pair reunited in 1975 for the excellent Sparrow Dragon Again, with a smoldering reading of “Obeah Wedding,” one of Sparrow’s biggest hits. Overall, the Seventies signaled the singer’s apex, even recording an album for Warner Bros. with producer Van Dyke Parks: 1974’s atmospheric Hot and Sweet.

Just like his frenemy and lifelong calypso rival, Lord Kitchener, Sparrow embraced the emerging soca sound, adopting the new style’s pulsating beat, use of synths, and strong soul influence. His melodic sweetness remained intact, as demonstrated on “Soca Man,” a tune off 1984’s King of the World.

Sparrow eventually settled in New York, where he remained active in music. In 2008, he recorded “Barack the Magnificent,” in support of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and 2020 saw the release of Live at 85!, a 2019 concert.