Names and faces
Bob Dylan, Kesha and St. Vincent have reimagined popular love songs to honor the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community, and the singers are doing it by switching pronouns. The six-song album, Universal
Love, was released digitally Thursday and includes Benjamin Gibbard of alternative band Death Cab for Cutie, singer-songwriter Valerie June and
Kele Okereke of the indie rock group
Bloc Party. Dylan reworked “She’s Funny That Way” into “He’s Funny That Way,” singing lines like “I got a man crazy for me.” Others have changed the pronoun of the classic song in the past, but they were mainly women, including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Liza Minnelli, Etta James and Diana Ross. Kesha, who has a large gay fan base and has been a longtime supporter of equal rights for the LGBTQ community, closes the album with “I Need a Woman to Love Me,” a spinoff of Janis Joplin’s “I Need a Man to Love Me.” Gibbard re-recorded The Beatles’ 1960s hit, “And I Love Her,” to create “And I Love Him.” “Universal Love,” available on streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, was produced by MGM Resorts and is distributed through Sony Music’s Legacy Recordings. “We believe projects like this will help all of us reach a point where seeing the world through the lens of people who happen to be different from us becomes natural and commonplace,” said Phyllis James, MGM Resorts’ chief diversity and corporate social responsibility officer.
Bollywood star Salman Khan was convicted Thursday of poaching rare deer in a wildlife preserve two decades ago and sentenced to five years in prison. The busy actor contends he did not shoot the two blackbuck deer in a western India preserve in 1998 and was acquitted in related cases. He appeared in court for the ruling in the western city of Jodhpur and is expected to be taken to a local prison while it could take days for his attorneys to appeal the conviction and seek bail. Four other stars also accused in the case — Saif Ali Khan, Sonali Bendre, Tabu and Neelam — were acquitted by Chief Judicial Magistrate Dev Kumar Khatri. They were in the jeep that Salman Khan was believed to be driving during the hunt. Tabu and Neelam both use just one name. Khan had been sentenced to prison terms of between one and five years in related cases before being acquitted by appeals courts for lack of evidence. The blackbuck is an endangered species protected under the Indian Wildlife Act.