Watch Teyana Taylor Turn Ellen Into Soul Train

Watch Teyana Taylor Turn Ellen Into Soul Train

It doesn’t happen often enough, but every once in a while, an artist will turn a routine TV performance into something special. One of those times was this morning. Last last year, the R&B singer Teyana Taylor, whose K.T.S.E. album was probably the most underrated thing to come out of the whole Kanye West Wyoming experiment, made an all-star ’70s period piece out of her “Issues/Hold On” video. And today, Taylor did something similar, performing the song on Ellen and using the show to pay tribute to the iconic ’70s music show Soul Train.

Ellen DeGeneres’ in-house DJ tWitch introduced Taylor by giving an impression of Soul Train host Don Cornelius. The set was made to look like the Soul Train set, with Taylor performing in front of a crowd of dancers. (They were clearly professionals, not the local kids who would show up on Soul Train, but still.) Taylor and her band were dressed the part, with Taylor wearing a sort of gold-lamé bellbottom jumpsuit. And there was a Soul Train line, with Taylor, DeGeneres, and tWitch all taking part. At the end, DeGeneres even presented Taylor with a gold record for “Gonna Love Me,” which is absolutely the kind of thing that would happen on shows like Soul Train. Observe:

Another music-related thing from today’s Ellen: The joke-rapper Lil Dicky came through to tease a video for a new song called “Earth.” The video, out tonight, will apparently feature people like Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, and Ed Sheeran, all of them playing animals and all of them trying to draw attention to environmental causes. Here’s Dicky talking about it and showing a clip that features Bieber and Grande’s parts:

Get ready for the intolerable internet discourse about that video! It kicks off tomorrow morning!

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