Mariah Carey’s new mouthpiece Roger Friedman has confirmed yesterday’s rumor that the “real first single” from Mimi’s delay-plagued, yet still forthcoming Memoirs Of An Imperfect Angel will be a cover of Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is.” (In case you missed it, the new line on the Eminem dis track “Obsessed” is that it was just a “summer trifle,” and not a real lead single from the album, despite it having an expensive video and it being called a single by Mariah’s camp. This couldn’t be because it hasn’t hit the Billboard Hot 100′s top 10 in the five weeks that it’s been out, could it? Cough.)


Anyway, Friedman’s item is worth reading, if only to provoke giggles when he gets all Andy Rooney on the “stage names” of “Obsessed” producers Tricky and The-Dream, not to mention when he drops the decree that “Carey’s album, is, as they used to say, ‘what the kids want.’ Plus, it’s got stuff for the slightly older crowd.” Of course, that laughter might turn to tears when you realize that, yes, he gets paid to basically serve as a semi-credible mouthpiece for his bigwiggy pals. (Remember when he was all about the super-spendy boondoggle that was the Social@Ross series? Good times!)


Mariah Wants to Know What Love Is: Covers Foreigner [Showbiz 411]
Foreigner – I Want To Know What Love Is [Dailymotion]

Clive Davis-adoring gossip columnist Roger Friedman has been given his walking papers by Fox, thanks to his posting about watching a leaked copy of Wolverine, a big potential moneymaker for the company’s film division, last week. The fact that this furor erupted after his column was published—and not at some point beforehand when, presumably, editors would be going over his work and tailoring it to house style—explains a lot about his general hostility toward facts. [Gawker]

Clive Davis-adoring gossip columnist Roger Friedman has been given his walking papers by Fox, thanks to his posting about watching a leaked copy of Wolverine, a big potential moneymaker for the company’s film division, last week. The fact that this furor erupted after his column was published—and not at some point beforehand when, presumably, editors would be going over his work and tailoring it to house style—explains a lot about his general hostility toward facts. [Gawker]

Clive Davis-adoring gossip columnist Roger Friedman has been given his walking papers by Fox, thanks to his posting about watching a leaked copy of Wolverine, a big potential moneymaker for the company’s film division, last week. The fact that this furor erupted after his column was published—and not at some point beforehand when, presumably, editors would be going over his work and tailoring it to house style—explains a lot about his general hostility toward facts. [Gawker]

Clive Davis-adoring gossip columnist Roger Friedman has been given his walking papers by Fox, thanks to his posting about watching a leaked copy of Wolverine, a big potential moneymaker for the company’s film division, last week. The fact that this furor erupted after his column was published—and not at some point beforehand when, presumably, editors would be going over his work and tailoring it to house style—explains a lot about his general hostility toward facts. [Gawker]

Clive Davis-adoring gossip columnist Roger Friedman has been given his walking papers by Fox, thanks to his posting about watching a leaked copy of Wolverine, a big potential moneymaker for the company’s film division, last week. The fact that this furor erupted after his column was published—and not at some point beforehand when, presumably, editors would be going over his work and tailoring it to house style—explains a lot about his general hostility toward facts. [Gawker]

“Rob is probably the single strongest songwriter in pop and rock right now, the leader in his generation.” That’s Rob Thomas he’s talking about there, in case you were wondering. [Fox 411]

Rick Rubin may soon be removed from his post as guru of the future at Sony Music, after an expensive tenure in which he waxed poetic about the potential of subscription models despite consumers’ chronic allergy toward them, produced a high-profile album for another label, and moved the company’s headquarters to the ergonomically pleasing, and more expensive, CAA headquarters in Beverly Hills. Note that this item does come from the often factually challenged Roger Friedman, so the real story may just be that he’s moving down the hall. But then again, did anyone really think that nouveau street teams and feng shui would have any effect on people not buying records anymore? [Roger Friedman]

Last week, Fox gossip and avowed Warner Music Group enemy Roger Friedman was pooh-poohing rumors of an affair between Madonna and existentially troubled Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, saying that the whole thing was just a publicity stunt dreamed up by their shared manager Guy Oseary. But now that Madonna’s been named in the divorce papers served to A-Rod by his wife Cynthia, Friedman has picked up his poison pen and written a bizarre item about the “affair of the heart” between the two maybe being the culprit behind A-Rod’s groin injury in April, which landed him on the DL but apparently didn’t stop him from attending Madge’s Roseland show. Friedman’s so peeved, in fact, that he’s even backtracking on his claims that tickets to Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet Tour are selling like hotcakes!

What’s interesting about all that is Madonna moved her base of operations from London to New York for this “Sweet and Sticky Tour,” opting to rehearse every day in Brooklyn, of all places. This is a little odd, considering the tour begins in Great Britain on Aug. 23 and doesn’t come to America until Oct. 4 at the New Jersey Meadowlands.

According to her Web site, Madonna.com, there are plenty of tickets available in most major American cities, including New York and Boston. Apparently, all this publicity — a lot of which this reporter admittedly thought was being generated to sell tickets — has not helped much at all.

Quite a change from the claims of this tour “[outpacing] Madonna’s last tour significantly” that he was making two weeks ago. Either he’s not someone you want to scorn, or maybe his assistant finally checked out Ticketmaster? At any rate, watching Friedman’s worm turn in real time is yet another reason why I want this story to never ever end. (And here is another one.)

Did Madonna Injure A-Rod? [Fox 411]

Fox 411 columnist and amateur American Idol conspiracy theorist Roger Friedman has a new maligned music-industry heavy that he wants to prop up: The megapromoter Live Nation, whose feelings apparently got hurt by yesterday’s New York Post item on Madonna’s somewhat-soft ticket sales. In his latest column, he accuses one “Warner M. Group” of planting stories to make Madge–and, by extension, Live Nation, which signed her to an expensive deal last autumn–look bad! But while he’s defending his friends, he goes way beyond the bounds of his usually slippery relationship with reality.

Quoth Friedman, or whatever Live Nation mole put the Post-sized bee in his bonnet:

So let’s clear up reports from Tuesday that her big fall tour isn’t selling out. With the sole exception of Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium, the Sweet and Sticky tour, I am told, will outpace Madonna’s last tour significantly.

Indeed, Dodger Stadium is the only venue Madonna hasn’t sold out. Of course, the show isn’t for five months. The fact that she’s sold half the stadium now for November is pretty darn impressive

Well, first off, it’s the Sticky and Sweet Tour, but that can easily be blamed on copyeditors who don’t feel like slogging through Friedman’s paeans to his pals too closely. The real falsity here is Friedman’s assertion that Dodger Stadium is “the only venue Madonna hasn’t sold out.” Yesterday I did a little Ticketmaster searching for Madonna’s shows in Boston and Houston, and found available seats at both dates; repeating that experiment just now revealed similar results. (I just did a plain old search, without any wiggling around for VIP seating or secondary-market offers.) Is there another definition of “sold out” that I’m not aware of? Or does he not care about those markets, since later on he puffs up his chest and says, “She’s already sold out four shows at the Garden and out in New Jersey at what used to be the Continental Airlines Arena — now the Izod Arena. She’s also sold out most of her venues in Europe.” (Not to mention that it’s the Izod Center, but again, the copyeditor assigned to this story was probably weeping by this point.)

Friedman also whines about the evil Mr. M. Group not promoting Madonna’s shaping-up-to-be-a-dud Hard Candy properly:

Meanwhile, a better question to ask is why can’t WMG cough up a follow-up single to “4 Minutes”? That is, assuming they would want to. “Hard Candy” is full of candidates such as “Miles Away” and “Give It to Me.”

But WMG hasn’t had made a move. By contrast, Mariah Carey — whose sales have outpaced Madonna’s considerably — is already on her third single from her contemporaneous release, “E=MC2.”

Two things: One, I do believe that part of the reason Mariah’s on the verge of releasing her third single from E=MC² was that “Bye Bye” was kind of a flop; and two, apparently he forgot about the video for “Give It To Me,” which has actually been spotted by this writer on MTV, of all places. But that’s OK, because it’s pretty forgettable.

Squatting at yourself in front of a mirror, Madonna? Is this leftover footage from “Hung Up”?

Anyway, Friedman also claims in the piece that Live Nation is on the verge of signing 360 deals with Nickelback and Shakira, but given that he claims that Nickelback’s hits include “The Reason,” we can assume that maybe he thought he heard “Nickelback” when what he really heard was the name of another band with a kinda-dumb, three-syllable name.

Is Madonna Being Sabotaged? [Fox 411 via Coolfer]
Earlier: Madonna’s Ticket Sales Give Live Nation Something Else To Suck On

An update on David Cook’s album sales: “It sold 885 copies this week (all digital), or about half of what would be required to make the digital albums chart.” Which means, I guess, that Cook doesn’t count as a “new artist” by SoundScan standards, since he didn’t appear on that 150-album chart either (No. 150, Tierra Cali’s Enamorado De Ti, sold about 600 copies). And as a side note, David Cook hater Roger Friedman has moved on to mumbling about the greatness of the Carly Hennessy album, saying that she’s taken an “odd route” to the Idol stage. [Earlier]

Yesterday, the always-quick-on-the-uptake Fox News writer Roger Friedman posted a story about David Cook having an album out prior to his American Idol appearance, a fact which Friedman presumably noticed because said album, Analog Heart, topped the Amazon MP3 store’s charts this past weekend. (It’s since been pulled.) Friedman even got a little outraged about Cook being a “ringer,” which is pretty funny given that every other singer left in the competition this year has either put out an album (Carly, Brooke) or been on some sort of TV show (Syesha was on The One, Jason was on Cheyenne, and David Archuleta was on Star Search). But the fact that Friedman is just now getting peevish about the sanctity of American Idol‘s contestant pool makes me wonder if one of the record-biz bigwigs he pals around with has put a bee in his bonnet about the possibility of the grunge revivalist Cook beating out the lip-licky Archuleta, who’s seemed to be this season’s chosen one from the start.

It’s no secret that Friedman is buddy-buddy with the recently shoved-aside Sony BMG executive Clive Davis; Friedman has devoted many a pixel to praising the aging exec and his Grammy-party-hosting old-biz ways. (A recent example: Friday’s news that Sony BMG had bumped Davis aside prompted Friedman to say “the record business is just about over… with Clive removed from the picture on a daily basis, the end is one step nearer.”) While it’s unclear whether or not Davis’ new position as “chief creative officer” will result in him being as involved with Idol winners’ albums as he’s been in previous years, it’s not too much of a stretch to think that Davis, whose most recent success has come with the blandly spooky Leona Lewis, would be unnerved by Cook’s not-all-that-edgy “edginess,” especially when a) he wasn’t so into Kelly Clarkson’s attempt to take a similar tack and b) the (perhaps delusional) promise of teenpop money from David Archuleta’s screaming fans seems so close.

My guess is that this will all come to a head on the Idol season finale, when Cook is forced to mug his way through the treacly coronation song while Archuleta smiles and wets his lips throughout his performance–you know, sort of like what happened last year, only this time I’m pretty sure that David Cook will actually sell albums once all is said and done.

‘Idol’ Singer a Ringer? David Cook’s Album Already Out [Fox 411]
David Cook — “Analog Heart” Pulled from Amazon.com! [rickey.org]
David Cook’s Analog Heart Pulled From Amazon [MJ's Big Blog]