Pop & Hiss

Teyana Taylor wanted to address the matter right away — and to make it clear that she wasn’t to blame.

“Please don’t be mad at me,” the R&B singer said as she came onstage Friday night at Staples Center, almost 24 hours after her new album was supposed to have been released.

As preparations for this weekend’s BET Awards were underway at L.A. Live on Friday, the network drummed up hype for its annual broadcast with its multiday BET Experience.

Now in its sixth year, the festival returns at a moment when an onslaught of similar events catering to R&B and hip-hop fans has stolen some of its thunder.

As a teenager, Dan Reynolds already had doubts about his faith. A decade before hitting the pop mainstream as the singer for Imagine Dragons, he was writing songs about his conflicts with religion and was uneasy witnessing the struggle of his gay friends to live openly within the Mormon community.

Hurray for the Riff Raff frontwoman Alynda Segarra is looking forward to her band’s Saturday slot at the second Arroyo Seco Weekend festival in Pasadena this weekend. It’ll be an opportunity to try out a couple of new songs and perhaps to rock a bit harder than the band has to date.

Chrissie Hynde and Terry Hall have known each other since 1979, when the Pretenders frontwoman contributed backup vocals to a song from the self-titled debut by Hall’s band, the Specials.

Or at least that’s when they think they met.

“God, I can’t remember exactly,” Hynde said on the phone this week. “Can you, Terry?”

“No,” replied Hall, who was also on the call.

“Look at all that chocolate out there. I’ve never seen this many black folks in one place,” Anderson Paak said at the Smokin’ Gooves festival last week.

The genre-stretching performer was midway through his set of adventurous R&B when he stopped to survey the sea of mostly black and brown bodies that packed the Queen Mary waterfront in Long Beach for the sold-out, day-long blowout.