NEWS
Kurstin x Grohl: The Hanukkah Sessions 2021: Night One
Courtesy PhotoFoo Fighters leader Dave Grohl and producer Greg Kurstin rebooted their “Hanukkah Sessions” project on Sunday night (Nov. 28) — the first night of the Festival of Lights — with a bone-crunching, black metal take on Lisa Loeb‘s gentle 1994 ballad “Stay (I Missed You).” After running through eight covers of songs by Jewish artists last year, including tracks by the Beastie Boys, Drake, Mountain, Peaches, Bob Dylan, Elastica, The Knack and the Velvet Underground, the demonic duo roared back with a fresh take on Loeb’s signature song for the first entry in this year’s edition.
“Welcome back to the menorah, y’all. Let’s kick it this year’s Hanukkah sessions with one of Dallas, Texas’s favorite Jewish daughters,” Grohl wrote alongside the pair’s low budget video for the song. “So put on your coffee shop spectacles and your Betsey Johnson dress and HAVA listen to this…”
The clip opens with Grohl rocking a vintage mid-1990s flowered dress and chunky glasses as he croons the song’s gentle opening riffs. It’s just a Rickroll-style head fake, though, as the camera zooms in Dave’s agitated, shaking face bellowing the chorus in his best black metal scream for a completely unexpected, delightful tonal shift. Your Hanukkah never rocked so hard.
Loeb appreciated the effort, tweeting out that Grohl and Kurstin did a “great job,” and also shouting out the singer’s smart sartorial choice of a vintage Betsey Johnson dress.
NEWS
Say what you will about the UMG defamation lawsuit over "Not Like Us," but it hasn't been difficult for Drake to stay on top in any case. Whether you think the industry is trying to take him down or people dismissed him as their champion, you're probably missing the big picture.
According to Hip Hop All Day on Twitter, the Toronto superstar became the first rapper to surpass 5 billion streams on Spotify in 2025, continuing his stretch this year as the most streamed rapper on the platform. Others aren't too far behind, but these continually impressive commercial numbers are hard to knock off.
Of course, there are a few reasons for this. One of them is the OVO mogul's recent collab album with PARTYNEXTDOOR, $ome $exy $ongs 4 U. Both the Billboard Hot 100 success of the solo cut "NOKIA" plus rapid sales for the project as a whole translate to a whole lot of engagement on the digital streaming platform.
Another driving factor behind Drake's numbers is the anticipation for his next album (albeit with no release date), which he recently confirmed he's working on during a gambling livestream with Adin Ross. As such, we imagine a lot of die-hards are probably coming back to their favorite catalog material to prepare for their wildest dreams – if they weren't already bumping The Boy nonstop to begin with.
Even Kanye West is giving the 6ix God his props these days, even though his long-standing beef with Drizzy is constantly a subject of his flip-flopping tendencies. "This is the biggest victory in music history, right here," Ye said of the UMG lawsuit. "I'm never finna call Drake out of his name. I'm Team Drake, 100 percent. And Team Kendrick, and Team All Of Us... Kendrick needs to be going at UMG at this point. [...] Like, let's stop aiming all this at each other. You have no idea. Everything is worth everything for a moment like this. Where we stop going at each other and we go at the slave masters."
Will Drake be successful and impactful with this? That's up to the court to decide, and up to the industry and its artists to reckon with following their decision. But in the meantime, that Spotify revenue is looking beefy.
