SAMPLEDThis week in music: Usher and Chris Brown hit the road, the BET Awards crowned a new generation, and the Village People lost a voice
Four stories from the last week: a tour launch, an awards night, a courtroom verdict, and an obituary.
A lot happened between Sunday and Thursday. Here are the four that mattered.
Usher and Chris Brown finally started the tour
The Raymond & Brown Tour kicked off, and it is the co-headline package fans have been asking for since the announcement. Early reviews from opening night describe a fast, hits-forward run — Usher leaning into his eras catalog, Chris Brown filling the arena with choreography and pyro. The Star Tribune review (opens in a new tab) called it entertaining, if uneven in spots, and Billboard published the full setlist (opens in a new tab) for every song across both sets. The tour discourse online has been messier than the actual show, which is usually a sign the show is working.
The 2026 BET Awards belonged to the honorees
The BET Awards (opens in a new tab) went down and the moments people are still posting are not the trophies — they are the tributes. Lauryn Hill was honored, Janet Jackson (opens in a new tab) presented the Icon Award to Teyana Taylor in a full-circle moment that broke the internet, and Druski hosted a show that kept moving. NBC News wrote up the tribute (opens in a new tab), Billboard covered the Janet-to-Teyana handoff (opens in a new tab), and The Hollywood Reporter has the full winners list (opens in a new tab) if you want to see who actually took home hardware. Watch the Janet clip. Then watch it again.
A Los Angeles jury hit Chris Brown with a $13 million verdict for a 2020 dog attack
While the tour was rolling, the other Chris Brown story of the week landed in a Van Nuys courtroom. On June 30, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury found Brown and his company Black Pyramid LLC liable for roughly $12.9 million in damages to Maria Avila, a housekeeper who was mauled in December 2020 by Hades, a 200-pound Caucasian Shepherd kept at Brown's Tarzana home. The case — captioned Patricia Avila v. Chris Brown on the docket after Maria's sister filed the original complaint — was tried in front of Judge Huey P. Cotton, and this was actually the second try after a mistrial on June 16 for juror misconduct.
The complaint, filed April 13, 2021, alleged Brown later had the dog euthanized, which plaintiffs argued destroyed evidence. Variety (opens in a new tab) and Billboard (opens in a new tab) both have the verdict; the BBC (opens in a new tab) has the international writeup; Rolling Stone (opens in a new tab) covered Avila's testimony from the stand; and NBC News (opens in a new tab) has the original 2021 complaint. The docket itself lives on UniCourt (opens in a new tab) — filed in the Van Nuys Courthouse East, Personal Injury – Other Personal Injury.
Tour night one and a jury verdict in the same week is a lot of headline for one artist. Both are true, both are on the record, and both are going to shape how the next leg of the tour gets covered.
Victor Willis, the cop from the Village People, died at 74
Victor Willis — the original lead singer of the Village People (opens in a new tab) and the voice on "Y.M.C.A.", "Macho Man", and "In the Navy" — died at 74. The New York Times obituary (opens in a new tab) walks through his career; the BBC (opens in a new tab) and Fox News (opens in a new tab) also confirmed the news. Willis co-wrote most of the group's biggest songs and spent the last decade of his life fighting to reclaim the publishing on them, which is its own lesson for anyone reading this blog: own your songs while you are still around to enjoy owning them.
The through-line
One tour launch, one awards show, one courtroom, one obituary. Different corners of the same business — and all four are reminders that live performance, catalog ownership, and what you leave behind (both on record and on the docket) are still where the real money and the real memory live. Check back next Thursday.