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Actress and sometimes-singer Brittany Murphy died this morning after suffering cardiac arrest in her Los Angeles home. According to TMZ, Murphy’s husband Simon Monjack called 911 around 8 a.m., after her mother discovered her lying unconscious in the shower. She was rushed to Cedars-Sinai hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival.
Murphy was best known for starring in films such as Clueless, 8 Mile and Girl, Interrupted, but she was also an aspiring singer. Murphy kept a MySpace Music page (last login: June 10), and generated buzz last year when she revealed that she’d been working on her debut album with the help of Max Martin, Timbaland and Paul Oakenfold. (She provided plenty of steam for Oakenfold’s pop-electro hit “Faster Kill Pussycat,” from 2006’s A Lively Mind). More »
Posts Tagged ‘Max Martin’
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Brittany Murphy Dead At 32
Highlights
Backtracking: Ace Of Base ‘The Bridge’
Backtracking is our recurring look back at some of pop’s forgotten albums. Because, dammit, Miley Cyrus needs to start respecting her elders.
Ah, Ace Of Base. Only in the reactionary, post-grunge 1990s could Americans have briefly embraced such a pop phenomenon. Something about the reggae-inflected synth hooks and icy detachment of the Swedish quartet—siblings Jonas, Jenny and Malin Berggren, and their pal Ulf “Buddha” Ekberg—had us going bonkers for The Sign (or Happy Nation, as it was titled outside the U.S.).
And yet, when AOB’s sophomore album The Bridge was released in 1995, we tossed these supposed heirs to the ABBA throne out in the cold—despite The Bridge being a set of pop jams far superior to their first offering. More »
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Have A Listen To Allison Iraheta’s ‘Just Like You’ Song Clips
“Technology sucks! (Sucks!) I wish I could change all your numbers, put your phone underwater,” belts big-voiced Allison Iraheta in her Gary Glitter/”Rock and Roll parts 1 & 2″-leaning Just Like You album track, “Robot Love.” That one’s sandwiched between two glossed-up Max Martin numbers, the single “Friday I’ll Be Over U” and the very MM-style ballad “Just Like You.”
But, as is often the case, it’s the best track that gets relegated to the end of the album—the Kevin Rudolf co-penned “Beat Me Up” (catch it below at 5:32 in). More »
Music
Hey, Everybody: Backstreet’s Back With Max Martin
“Bigger” is the first collaboration between the turn-of-the-millennium boy band and the man who co-wrote “I Want It That Way” for them since 2005, and it’s pretty awesome in an effervescent way; it opens with some delicate guitar strumming, then opens up into a chorus that floats along on a string of rapidfire “la la la la la”-ing. And there’s a guitar solo! I wonder when we can declare those officially “back”? Uh, no pun intended. Clip after the jump. More »
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No. 40: Max Martin And Dr. Luke Infiltrate Rock Radio
One of the stranger turning points in recent pop history occurred around 2004, when songs like Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” signaled a full shift in white Top 40 toward uptempo guitar rock, completing the trend that had begun a few years earlier with Avril Lavigne’s first hits. It felt like a regime change from the bombastic synth pop of the Britney/Backstreet era, and it would’ve been, if not for the fact that the same producer, Swedish pop mastermind Max Martin, was behind both “…Baby One More Time” and “Since U Been Gone.” Along with songwriter and co-producer Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, Martin reinvented his signature sound with a campaign of chugging guitar riffs and shout-along choruses that shared more musical common ground with Fall Out Boy than Jessica Simpson, although his hits remained the sole province of Top 40 radio.
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Clear Channel Gives Your Mersh Rock Correspondent A Considerate Gift
Many people find it hard to tell the great from the godawful when it comes to 21st-century mainstream rock. To help figure out which is which, here’s “Corporate Rock Still Sells,” where Al “GovernmentNames” Shipley examines what’s good, bad, and ugly in the world of rock and roll. This time around, he celebrates the return of modern-rock radio to his home city of Baltimore with a look at the newest crop of artists to hit the rock charts, and reveals superproducer Max Martin’s stealth assault on the corporate-rock airwaves.
