Idolator

Last night's BMI Urban Awards in Los Angeles honored the Jacksons for "lifetime achievement," and featured Lloyd singing "I'll Be There," which sadly has not shown up on YouTube yet. Of the six Jacksons who performed with the singing group, Michael and Jermaine were missing, a fractured state that caused reporters to ask where the self-proclaimed King Of Pop was—and Marlon to crack that he was "in Egypt riding a camel or something"—but no questions about the wherabouts of Jermaine. Sure, his current stretch of reality-TV appearances makes him a bit less of a mystery, but don't reporters know that it's unsubtle sibling-related snubs like these that make the full-on reunion they're craving less and less of a possibility? You'd think every entertainment reporter out there was an only child, I tell you. [AP / YouTube]

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. More »

Thanks to soulbounce for reminding us of Jermaine Dupri's assertion that the Jackson 5 would show up at his Atlanta club Studio 72 on New Year's Eve. The footage of what happened is above, and you will probably not be surprised to know that while Michael couldn't clear his calendar, Jermaine was there. And yet the DJ—who, as it turns out, was Dupri himself—still dropped "Billie Jean" into the set heralding the other Jacksons' meeting and greeting the crowd! What, he couldn't have spun a sped-up version of "Do What You Do" to give one of the Jacksons who actually showed up a reason to smile? More »

Everybody's getting back together this year: The Smashing Pumpkins, Rage Against the Machine, the Spice Girls—heck, even Al Qaeda has reassembled to put on a bunch of secret shows throughout Pakistan. So it was only a matter of time before Michael, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, Jackie, Randy and Squiggy decided to cash in on the craze: More »