The video for Robbie Williams’ throwbacky “You Know Me” conceptually flips around the title of the crooning 9/11 conspiracy theorist’s new album, Reality Killed The Video Star. Only here it’s the video that’s killing anything resembling reality, with Williams using an extended dream sequence as an excuse to dress up in a bunny suit and flit around like he’s late for a very important date with a choreographer and a batallion of backup dancers. The video, and five of my favorite things about its way-too-short three minutes, after the jump. MORE »
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The Five Best Things About Robbie Williams’ “You Know Me” Video, Aside From The Obviously Amazing Rabbit Suit Robbie Wears
The nimbus of his fame
The Michael Jackson Séance: A Live-TV Experiment That Will No Doubt Be As Revelatory As “The Mystery Of Al Capone’s Vault”
So much for this being it: Tomorrow night, the British cable channel Sky 1 will broadcast a séance in which psychic Derek Acorah attempts to contact Michael Jackson from the great beyond. The interdimensional chat, which will apparently be held “on an island… in a secret location familiar to Jackson” for the purposes of extra paranormal gobbledygook clogging up the transmissions, will be broadcast live. Acorah is a TV pro, hosting TV shows and embarking on tours in the UK, so I’m sure that something will happen during the telecast even if nothing really does, you know? After the jump, the Vaseline-smeared promo for the telefestivities. MORE »
year-end analysis
Amazon Beats The Christmas Rush, Crowns Neko Case As 2009’s Best
Twangy spitfire Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone was selected by Amazon.com’s editors as the best of 2009, while U2’s No Line On The Horizon was the online retailer’s best-selling album this year. That’s according to a just-released year-end package that jumps the “happy new year” gun by quite a few days. Sure, boosting these albums now will probably be great for the holiday sales, but it’s too bad that publishing the list now means that the likes of R. Kelly’s Untitled and Shakira’s She Wolf didn’t get their critical due. Oh wait, there are no pop-as-pop albums on the editors’ list anyway. Silly me! Top 25s for both lists after the jump.
THE GOOD: It sure is fascinating to see the sales demographics of Amazon out themselves via the Bestsellers list—U2, Susan Boyle, Diana Krall, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan make up the top five, while younger-skewing top-selling 2009 releases like the Hannah Montana soundtrack, Eminem’s Relapse, and the Black Eyed Peas’ The E.N.D. land at Nos. 16, 24, and 25, respectively. At least all generations can agree on Green Day (No. 6)! And it’s nice to see Case’s editorially beloved album performing well on the sales side, too (No. 11).
THE BAD: In addition to Boyle’s pre-order mania landing her at No. 2; two albums on the bestsellers list have been released in the past few weeks: Michael Bublé’s Crazy Love (release date 10/9, No. 9) and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Night Castle (release date 10/26, No. 12). That sort of implies a low bar for high sales, methinks.
THE WHAAAA? This might be a wild and crazy question to pose, but is Steve Martin’s banjo album really the best of its breed to come out this year? MORE »
videodrone
Mini Viva Shine A Bright Light
The second single from the Simon Fuller/Xenomania-masterminded pop duo Mini Viva is “I Wish,” a lush, longing track that has more than a passing resemblance to Girls Aloud’s “The Loving Kind.” It’s certainly not a groundbreaking track, but it is bouncy enough to make me want to find someone to synchronizedly dance with. (Although I think the only being around who’d be up to the challenge is my dog…) [Brightcove via The Chemistry Is Dead / Official site / Earlier] MORE »
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No. 35: Hampton The Hamster, “The Hampsterdance Song”
The Internet giveth, and it taketh away (your sanity). MORE »
100 and single
Such Great Hoots? Owl City Is A Rare Boy-Pop Chart-Topper
Back in 1997, when I was a critic for CMJ, I led off my review of a new album by vintage Britpoppers the Sundays with the following sideswipe at another band:
“In the five years since their last album, [the Sundays] watched the Cranberries swipe their sound and turn it into three obscenely popular and dreck-filled albums.”
I can’t front: I had a soft spot for the Cranberries’ light-as-air Top 10 smash “Linger.” But I could never get past the fact that the Sundays, a better band with one major alternative hit to their name (the downy, warm-blanket 1990 Modern Rock chart-topper “Here’s Where the Story Ends”), had failed to cross over to the U.S. Top 40 while Dolores O’Riordan rampaged across my radio dial. The ’Berries weren’t awful, just… a little undeserving, and massively benefiting from someone else’s sound.
This week—unless he’s too busy counting his Twilight soundtrack money or canoodling with the missus—Ben Gibbard is probably feeling something similar. It’s got to be a bit galling that Owl City’s “Fireflies,” the new No. 1 song on Billboard’s Hot 100, is a candied replica of a sound he and Jimmy Tamborello codified six years ago.
Again, I can’t front: on a Top 40 radio dial awash in Black Eyed Peas’ faux-hop and Miley Cyrus’s shrill Autotunage, “Fireflies” is a nice contrast. But it’s basically The Postal Service for Dummies, and it’s mystifying how easily it shot to No. 1 during the same decade when “Such Great Heights,” which some of us consider one of the best-written pop songs of the ’00s, didn’t even grace the Hot 100.
But you don’t have to be a Gibbard fan to still find Owl City’s feat bizarre. Because even if you’ve never heard of the Postal Service, “Fireflies” represents a head-scratching rarity: a No. 1 hit by a solo white guy with no other radio format to call home. MORE »
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No. 38: Say Anything, “Got Your Money”
This is the last time we’re gonna take down a rock band for mishandling a rap song, we promise. MORE »
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No. 40: Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, and the Wu-Tang Clan, “For Heaven’s Sake 2000”
At least when Limp Bizkit made rap-metal, they had a vague understanding of what “rap” was. MORE »
somethin 4 the weekend
CMJ: Unbadged
This week is the 29th running of the CMJ Music Marathon, in which bands and bloggers and media-types and music-biz bees (and even a few people who don’t fall into any of those categories) run around New York in search of free/sponsored beer, late nights, and the chance to say that they saw a band with 45 or so other people in a dank New York club. (A scenario that is often romanticized far out of proportion. But I digress.) Perhaps it’s because my tastes have shifted away from provincial “indie,” or because of the economy’s clamping down on budgets for big trips, or the simple fact that the Internet has so many damn media outlets it’s easier to cocoon into your own news cycle than ever, but news out of the festival seems sorta muted. MORE »
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No. 41: Vanessa Hudgens, “Sneakernight”
How do you combat a nude photo scandal that’s threatening to take over the public’s perception of your still-fledgling entertainment career? If you’re Vanessa Hudgens, you sing about wearing… shoes? MORE »
