Don’t go looking for Keri Hilson’s synthy, dreamy new jam “I Like” on her album In A Perfect World…—currently, the song only features on the soundtrack to German flick Zweiohrküken. (How belästigt!) However, at the rate artists’ albums are being re-released with bonus tracks these days, “I Like” might be washing up on these shores soon enough.
Til then, catch the music video for Keri Hilson’s “I Like” after the jump! MORE »
The push for R. Kelly’s forthcoming Untitled has begun in earnest, with the Pied Piper of R & B inviting bloggers over to his memorabilia-crammed house for the purpose of sampling his record and announcing tour dates. There’s also a video for the Kells/Keri Hilson collaboration “Number One,” in which really good sex is compared to topping the charts; the clip embraces the romantic side of radio, with both singers cooing the words to the track while in moodily lit studios located approximately 710 miles apart from one another. Clip after the jump. MORE »
The charts are in a bit of a Dog Days slumber, so let’s try a little trivia: What’s the most oft-recurring word on Billboard’s Hot 100 over the last decade? I’m thinking of a word that appeared virtually never prior to, say, 1990 and eventually became ubiquitous. “Remix”? “Tha”/“Da”? “Dre”? “T-Pain”?
No, the most common word on the chart, pretty much every week, is “Featuring.”
This week, for example, 16 songs with “featuring” credits are on the Hot 100—17 if you count a “duet with” credit on Keyshia Cole’s latest single with Monica. (But then it goes back down to 16 if you exclude the craven Pussycat Dolls single “featuring” existing lead singer Nicole Scherzinger, a la Diana Ross in ’67 or George Michael in ’85.)
A dozen of these tracks, unsurprisingly, come from the worlds of R&B and hip-hop – genres where the team-up is standard operating procedure for both emerging acts (Drake, Kid Cudi) and veterans (T.I., Mary J. Blige). On this week’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, “featuring” appears no less than 37 times.
Back on the Hot 100, three of this week’s “featurers” are in the Top 10, and two are brand-new to the winners’ circle. Examining just these three tracks, you get a sense of the power of the featured-artist credit. Simply put, in pop music, there are friends, and there are friends. All three of these singles benefit to some degree from the name(s) to the right of the magic word. MORE »
An unnamed member of Keri Hilson’s publicity… MORE »
“Patron Tequila” is the debut single from the Paradiso Girls, a girl group masterminded by Pussycat Dolls creator Robin Antin whose most famous member was a runner-up in the short-lived CW singing/ass-shaking competitive reality show Fetch Me A Skank The Search For The Next Doll. According to various bits of Internet lore, the track was supposed to be on Keri Hilson’s long-delayed In A Perfect World…, but it was pulled from the track listing at the last minute. Which is probably not a bad thing, given that there are four big reasons it sounds like the perfectly wrong song for the current national mood. MORE »
If you’re looking for an example of good-sounding live music on TV—and I assure you, I do not write this sentence lightly—Jimmy Kimmel seems to have figured it out. It helps that, rather than having bands perform in the Late Night With Jimmy Kimmel studio, they play outdoors at the “Pontiac Garage” which, while kind of gross, does have acoustics that make it sound like actual bands are playing, instead of remixes that mute out selected tracks at random. In the above case, it also helps that Keri Hilson and Lil Wayne—and their band—play the hell out of “Turnin’ Me On.” MORE »
Do you know how long it’s been since we first wrote about Keri Hilson’s A Perfect World, which is finally coming out (maybe) on March 24? Almost 18 months. In that time, a lot of stuff has happened! But for Hilson, perhaps the most important thing that happened was the success of her single “Turnin’ Me On,” which has an assist from Lil Wayne and which sold 58,000 e-singles this week (374,000 to date). MORE »
Obviously, we need to talk about the new song that takes over the top of Billboard’s Hot 100, and the mind-blowing record it sets.
But before we do that, let’s talk about Hilary Swank.
I find Swank’s movie career totally incomprehensible: She either wins Oscars, or she tanks. Not even Meryl Streep has won two Best Actress statues, yet in under a decade Swank has gone to that podium twice, like some kind of modern-day Katharine Hepburn. You’d think that would make her one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, or at least its most respected. Sure, she wins roles in some blockbuster-type stuff (The Core) or prestige-like stuff (The Black Dahlia), but these movies are invariably flops. Swank’s successes seem to have had no impact on her career, or the way she’s regarded by the general public. She’s some kind of metaphor for the in-and-out nature of post-millennial fame.
All this leaps to my mind when I consider Flo Rida, the rapper who reaches No. 1 on the Hot 100 for the second time, with the kind of sales total that you’d think would make Lil Wayne, Kanye West or Jay-Z bow respectfully.
But if I were them, I wouldn’t. Because after all, who is this clown? How did Flo Rida become the Hilary Swank of pop music? MORE »
Keri Hilson’s eternally delayed A Perfect World… MORE »
Keri Hilson’s eternally delayed A Perfect World… MORE »
