After being sidelined by an ailment that sent her to the hospital, Janet Jackson is ready to return to the road: Her Rock Witchu tour resumes tomorrow night in Uncasville, Conn. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like she had a change of heart about her stage costumes while in the hospital, which is a shame. [MTV]
Janet Jackson had to postpone her concert in Montreal last night after being rushed to a local hospital shortly before showtime—so close to curtain, in fact, that some concertgoers were inside Montreal's Bell Centre when news of the postponement came down. "That's never happened before in Bell Centre history," a spokesman for the show's promoter said. Hey, at least something sorta-historic came out of this tour, right? [National Post]
There's still a month or so left on the Janet Jackson/LL Cool J tour (get psyched, Connecticut!), but if the music industry were to have what seems to be its way, the Oct. 22 Dallas date would be both acts' music biz retirement party.
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Today is the day to get all nutso about eights, or, maybe to just get nutso, if you have Olympic and/or Jonas Brothers and/or Boredoms-drum-extravaganza fever. (Woe to the person who's suffering from all three.) All the eight-related hoopla got me to thinking about how the eighth track on many an album is a hit-or-miss proposition; particularly on longer albums in the CD era, it serves as something of a midpoint, and albums become unfocused and maybe stick their not-as-good tracks in there. For example: track eight on Appetite For Destruction, for example, is the OK-but-not-great "Think About You," while track eight on Nevermind is the relatively irritating to my ears "Drain You." And not to be all lazy-Google-research about this, but the phrase "track 8 is my favorite" only has 22 hits on the search engine; spell out the word "eight," and you're down to four.) Anyway, I decided to root through my collection and find some outstanding examples of an album's eighth track—eight, in fact. They're unordered, although the last one on the list is probably my favorite (and I found an amazing live version of it, to boot). Feel free to add your own!
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A Federal appeals court has thrown out the FCC's $550,000 fine against CBS for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl halftime show four and a half years ago. The court pointed out that Jackson's breast was exposed on television for 9/16 of a second, and thought that the FCC's $977,777.78 per-second rate for bared cleavage was the result of the agency acting "arbitrarily and capriciously" and that since the image was fleeting, it wasn't worthy of being fined. [AP]
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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Today's completely dubious claim about why an arm of the music industry might be hurting comes from Wired's Scott Thill, who wrote in response to R.E.M.'s new, ad-agency-created video for "Man-Sized Wreath": "Music videos aren't dead, they're just dying, and they're dying because of bloated videos like 'Everybody Hurts.' When fans can use their favorite songs to make their amateur films without fear of losing their comparatively miniscule cookie jars, then the new age of promotional video will be here at last." Say what?
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Janet Jackson has some ambitious plans for her upcoming tour. "My true goal is to try at least do every single that I've ever had. So, I've got to figure out a way to fit this in two hours, and yet give them enough of each song so that they don't feel hungry for more of that song in particular." Wow! If we generously qualify "single" as songs with American-released videos (and ignore some airplay-charting B-sides), that's still more than 30 tracks. Seeing as how she's probably too proud to just ignore everything she's done since the wardrobe malfunction, I've got five post-Rhythm Nation 1814 (the singles on that and Control are unfuckwithable) songs that she might think about just yelling the title of in the middle of a medley.
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Hey, remember that Janet Jackson album that came out a few months ago? Debuted at No. 1, swiftly dropped off the charts afterward? No? Well, apparently Island Def Jam, Janet's label, is trying to put it out of its collective mind, too. During a conference call about her upcoming tour, she told reporters that there probably wouldn't be another single from the album: "We started off with 'Feedback' and the label and myself haven't quite seen eye to eye since the 'Feedback' single so they've kind of basically stopped all promotion. I'm trying to figure out a way to say this, but just to say it and to be quite honest, they just stopped all promotion whatsoever on the album so I don't think you're going to hear another single off this album." I guess Island Def Jam has figured that 392,000 copies sold is as good as it's going to get. (For its part, a label rep told Billboard that while IDJ hasn't "experienced the results [it] would have liked with this new album," the people over there "respect and support Janet.") What happened, Janet?
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Once again, we celebrate the last posting day of the month with Rule Of Sevens, in which I make a bunch of seven-item lists in an effort to wipe the slate of the past 30 or 31 days clean. Today's first installment is inspired by a UK car insurance company's rundown of great songs to drive around to, which is topped by the Killers' "Mr. Brightside" and somehow contains both Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out For A Hero" (which I swear is completely "borrowed" wholesale on the new Hold Steady album) and Survivor's "Eye Of The Tiger" (which seems more appropriate for stop-and-go traffic, but maybe that's just me). With gas prices soaring and the general crumminess pervading the world at large, the need for escapist music during routine, yet increasingly expensive, trips to the grocery store is higher than ever, so this perpetual passenger (who always kicks in for fuel) brings you her seven picks for songs you should crank up on your own personal radio after the jump.
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The rise of groomed-from-birth-to-be-a-star David Archuleta, the premiere of the Danny Bonaduce-hosted TV show where stage parents compete to be the least crazy ones, and the recent travails of such former child stars as the Spearses and [insert recent TMZ featuree here] have got me thinking a lot lately about the upside to being a child star, for both the parents and the children. Sure, the paydays can be decent in the short run, but the long-term effects can be deadly, from the dreaded, unshakable feeling of having peaked way, way early in life to the current state of celebrity culture, in which any D-lister of yore has the "opportunity" to humiliate themselves on TV and keep their names in the press. Well, yesterday's New York Post story on the current travails of the Jackson family—one is currently bagging groceries at Vons; another is a boomerang child—only served to further my suspicions about the sanity anyone who wants to make their kids a star. Namely, they're crazy.
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Pause the DVR, because a case of flu-related sniffles will keep Miss Jackson from dropping menstrual science on this week's edition of Saturday Night Live. Attn. producers now scrambling for a last-minute replacement as Lorne Michaels fumes: Bo Bice should be free by the weekend. UPDATE: Looks like SNL has gone the non-Bice route and tapped Mimi instead. [MTV]
Janet Jackson was told by America or TMZ or someone that she was totally Chubbo City, lost a ton of weight she didn't need to lose, and now has a book coming out so you can help perpetuate size myths in the privacy of your own, Cheeto-filled home. Will it involve wrapping youself in those weird leather things she likes to wear? Or maybe, you know, dancing? She really dances a lot. You should try dancing! Or exercising. At all.
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Janet Jackson's Discipline took the top spot on this week's albums chart, selling 181,000 copies in its first week in stores. Which is a somewhat impressive number in recent-record-sales terms, but consider this: In October 2006, 20 Y.O. entered the chart at No. 2—and it sold 296,000 copies. Of course, trying to compare the recorded-music sales landscapes from then and now is like trying to compare a regular hunk of cheese to one that's been gnawed by a thousand disease-infested rats, but it's probably worth pointing out, given that I've heard "Feedback" a lot more in public than I heard that terrible song from 20 Y.O. that featured Khia and that served as the album's lead single.
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Idolator
