Khia, disqualified Miss Rap Supreme contestant and author of "My Neck, My Back," has launched a busload of blog beef, occasioned in part by her leaving Big Cat Records two weeks before the release of her new album, Nasti Muzik 08. She claims that the label wrote her a bad check and gave her nothing in the way of promotion. "So guess what????? Say hello to my little Jewish friend........ You know dat Im gonna laugh all the way to the bank dontcha??? Yall betta have all yall receipts, invoices and budgets together.... Cuz Im bout to sue the hell out yall assess!!!!!!" Khia also takes issue with those who haven't signed her, like Jermaine Dupri, who claimed on Hot 97 that Khia was "ungrateful" for the attention she received from being on Janet Jackson's 2006 flop "So Excited." Khia, unsurprisingly, thinks the real problem is that Dupri's gay and Jackson's menopausal. "Now run and tell dat!!!!!! Nasti Muzik 08!!!!!"
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From time to time, we round up the all-important, all-summarizing last sentences of the biggest new-music reviews. This time around, we look at the critical reaction to Beck's rush-released collaboration with Danger Mouse, Modern Guilt, which hits stores tomorrow.
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For over a year, career artists have been gracefully accepting the state of the music industry, and the possibility that sales of their new releases have little chance of topping previous milestones. Then Lil' Wayne had to go and sell over a milli of The Carter III, leaving some to wonder why they had to take a sales hit and not this gratingly-voiced punmaster. And when we say "some," we mean Usher. Word is that Usher's blaming Here I Stand's weak showing compared to Weezy on Benny Medina, the manager he replaced mother Jonetta Patton with a little over a year ago. While the "full-time grandmother" has kept herself busy by knitting booties, running a label and managing other artists, its doubtful she'd reject her precious baby's cries of "Mommy!!! Mommy!!! Make me No. 1 again!!!"
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That's Life In The Inferno Of Postmodernity Dept.
"I guess it's bittersweet, you spend half your life trying to become larger than life and the other half trying to just live a real life again." (Kanye West, responding to a Harper's Bazaar piece from last year that—incorrectly, he claims—states that the fresco in his dining room depicts him as an angel. Given that the piece in question ran in Bazaar a year ago, I'm wondering if he's going through all his clippings and spending the next few weeks serving as his own, one-man corrections department.) [kanYe West: Blog]
Why embark on a grueling tour made even moreso by the ravages of time when you can just watch the money from the licensing of your songs to jukebox musicals and fresh-faced kids roll in? Abba's Bjorn Ulvaeus basically posited this question to the British paper The Telegraph when he told a reporter there that there was no way his band would come back for the dual purposes of cashing in and acting as a "cover band" of its older material. Of course, Ulvaeus let this little piece of principle slip in the context of promoting the movie version of Mamma Mia!, in which his songs... get covered by Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan. And as any shrewd businessman knows, outsourcing is the way to go these days.
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Today's list that's going around some blogs that I read: List the albums you like most from each year that you've been alive. It sounds simple, right? But in making a list like this, you realize things about yourself, like how Aerosmith's peak for me came right around the year I was born, even though I didn't really hear them until many years later. And how 2004 was something of a weak year for my personal canon, while 1989 was a really huge year for it, one where I had to pick between Like A Prayer, Doolittle, Cocked & Loaded, Full Moon Fever, and the album I finally wound up selecting. Anyway, peruse my list after the jump—Anthony made one too—and feel free to pick mine apart/make your own, although I should warn you that it took me a while to do. (I'm usually loath to use Wikipedia as a source, but its lists of album releases were helpful to cross-reference with Amazon, as were the Pazz & Jop rundowns on Robert Christgau's site.) If people enjoy this exercise, maybe we'll do singles lists next week! Or, hell, runners-up lists, since some of these "best" decisions were a lot harder than others.
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Ed. note: Chris "dennisobell" Molanphy, our resident chart guru, looks at the upward, downward, and lack of movement on this week's Billboard charts:
If you're trying to guess what might end up as Billboard's top song of 2008, you might take a gander at this week's Hot 100, where a prime contender is still sitting in the top three after peaking months ago.
That would be Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love," the neo-diva ballad that's outlasted anything her role model Mariah Carey has released so far this year. According to Nielsen SoundScan, which released its (mostly dismal) midyear report this week, Lewis' smash is the top-selling single for the six-month period beginning Dec. 31 and ending June 29.
That doesn't necessarily make the Lewis track a lock for the year's top prize, due to some technicalities which I'll discuss momentarily. But there is one thing that makes "Bleeding Love" emblematic of 2008: it's an undeniable smash single which has proven tough for the artist to follow up.
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While the record industry may be relying heavily on adolescent talent in its time of crisis, hope remains for pop music fans of a certain age and rarefied taste who love Josh Groban, but wish he could perform an emergency root canal in a pinch. SonyBMG has signed a 35-year-old singing dentist from north London to a million-pound record deal, a prize he earned after sending them "an operatic version of the Prince anthem 'Purple Rain.' "
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"Which rock star's mother-in-law said about him this week? 'He looks like a rat but he's a good father to the kids... But he's a miserable, rat-faced man.' " [popbitch]
An opera based on an '80s remake of a '50s sci-fi classic. Conducted by Placido Domingo. Music by Howard Shore and directed by David Cronenberg, both of whom worked on 1986 classic. Currently playing in Paris and set to hit in Los Angeles in September. Well, that takes care of the what, when and who. All that leaves us is the how and the why why why? The original story is pretty melodramatic, but opera? Color me ignorant, but I didn't realize until reading the Guardian's review of La Mouche (if only it was an opera about La Bouche) that Broadway wasn't the only place good movies go to be turned into dancing and prancing. Dancer In The Dark and Lost Highway were also transformed into operas, and the New York City Opera hopes to give Brokeback Mountain the same treatment in 2013. But hey, who cares about the source material if the final product is good, right? Well, it doesn't look like La Mouche is knockin' 'em dead in Paris.
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The rumored 360 deal between Shakira and megapromoter Live Nation has apparently been signed and sealed. The deal, which will last 10 years and will encompass tours, merch, sponsorship, and recordings, is in effect immediately—except on the recorded-music side, where Shakira still owes Epic three albums (one in English, one in Spanish, and one in "greatest-hits cash-out"-ish). The deal is rumored to be worth somewhere between $70 million and $100 million, which at least sounds reasonable in the context of the other deals the company's been striking lately. [NYT]
Today's USA Today has a big piece on rock merch, talking about how $55 concert T-shirts are purchased by people who are "style-conscious and socially conscious" (oddly, the word "suckers" is not used), how being sold at Target hasn't hurt the alleged cool factor of Beatles and Rolling Stones shirts, and how the ever-annoying Katy Perry designed her merch in such a way that's inspired by (her apparent non-reading of) Lolita and "fruit motifs, especially strawberries and cherries." (Because eating them is, like, just like kissing a girl... plant!) It even finds some poor sucker to trot out the already-old-and-reliable "you can't download a T-shirt" notion! But perhaps the best part of the story is Edna Gudnersen's guide to "t-shirt etiquette," which seems to have been taken out of some sort of sidebar storage unit that was last replenished in 2004.
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Natasha Shneider, who played keyboards and sang with the band Eleven and collaborated with Queens of the Stone Age and Chris Cornell, died of cancer yesterday. "She was a brilliant, beautiful, and ballsy woman who will be missed deeply by all those who knew her. Send your loving thoughts her way in the universe," wrote frequent collaborator Troy Van Leeuwen. Shneider and her husband Alain Johannes founded Eleven with former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons in 1990, and the band recorded five albums and toured with Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Queens Of The Stone Age—all groups that members of Eleven would eventually collaborate with or join. Shneider's colorful career also included playing a cosmonaut in 2010: The Year We Make Contact and recording a song for the Catwoman soundtrack. Some clips from her career below.
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