From time to time, we like to round up the all-important, all-summarizing last sentences of the biggest new-music reviews. After the jump, we look at other publications' reactions to last night's Video Music Awards, the "meh"-ness of which we are still trying to process.
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Oh HI! It's dickdogfood. I welcome you to Idolator's liveblog of the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards. Now before I became a quasi-anonymous commentator legend, I was known as Michael Daddino. (I still am, in certain obscure circles.) Once, during that long-gone era, I watched 24 hours of MTV and wrote about it on the internet in real-time; thus the concept of the liveblog was forged in the smithy of my soul. And today I return to my old stomping grounds, all Proverbs 26:11-style, to point and laugh at...well, what's it going to be today, kiddies? What's it gonna be? Contrite Britney? Egotasmic Kanye? The JoBros making their inevitable Fleet Foxes move? Nickleodeon crossovers? Candidate cameos? Overrehearsed spontaneity? Underwhelming medleys? Regrettable covers? A smidge of actual entertainment? Yes, we are likely to get them all: the stars will it so. The handwringing and the laughter begin after the jump.
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Sure, in the long run, "which artists had to take moonmen home from tonight's Video Music Awards ceremony" is probably a meaningless statistic on the level of, say, "almost-no-hitters in Mets history," but admit it, you want to know if Paramore beat out Fall Out Boy or if both of them got robbed by Linkin Park I MEAN COME ON YOU GUYS—uh, I mean, full list of winners after the jump.
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We have about 52ish hours until Britney Spears trades on her recent notoriety to open the 25th-anniversary installment of MTV's Video Music Awards, and like last year, you are all invited to watch with Idolator as we break down the goings-on—and, maybe, break down—in real time. So do come back at 8 p.m. ET for the pregame show and the live broadcast, which starts at 9! Sadly, I will not be handling live-blogging duties as a) I was only given a red-carpet pass, and not access to watch the broadcast being simulcast; and b) even if I did high-tail it back to my hotel room really really fast, the damn thing doesn't air on the West Coast until 9 p.m. PT. But I've handed over the task to someone who's more than capable: Our own Dickdogfood, who pioneered the art of the MTV liveblog all the way back in 2001, which is like forever ago in Internet time.
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Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who's contributed to many of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of Blender:
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Last fall and winter, chart fans noted the return to the radio of a style that, until recently, was pretty unfashionable on Billboard's Hot 100: pure-pop female singer-songwriters.
Strummier and sunnier than their Lilith counterparts in the '90s and closer in kinship to California's post-Joni ladies of the '70s, two gals with hard-to-spell names led this '07 boomlet with a pair of Top Five smashes: Colbie Caillat, with "Bubbly," and Sara Bareilles, with "Love Song." The surprise success of American Idol's Brooke White, who seemed every week to be channeling Carole King, only fueled the theory.
Trouble is, neither Caillat nor Bareilles has had an easy time following up those easy-listening hits. Caillat has fared respectably, with a No. 20 followup ("Realize"), but not spectacularly. And Bareilles is completely stalled, with "Love Song" still leading the Adult Contemporary chart but no followup—on the Hot 100, or anywhere—all these months later.
So, new theory: maybe pop fans weren't latching onto these ladies' earthy-girl personas at all, but their sound.
Which brings us to Jason Mraz. He makes a big move into the Top 10 this week and, just in time for fall, proves the bedroom-girlypop sound can still hit big in 2008, even if the act in question possesses an extra Y chromosome.
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Scott Weiland hasn't had all that great of a year, but what better way to turn things around than with a solo album—especially one that allows the names "Sheryl Crow" and "Steve Albini" to appear in the same sentence of a press release? Which is why he's releasing Happy In Galoshes, which hits stores Nov. 18. Wait a second. Happy In Galoshes? Is he really that into protecting himself from the elements? Does he eschew slippers for a nice pair of Totes in his off hours? Or is there another meaning lurking inside those letters? We asked the automated oracle known as the Internet Anagram Server for its interpretation of Weiland's album title, and it gave us a few clues as to his post-Velvet Revolver artistic direction.
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Each week, dozens of songs and albums from up-and-coming (or just plain unknown) bands debut on the world's music charts. Some of these bands will never be heard from again; some may become the next little thing. That's why we have Chuck Eddy exploring the world beyond the Billboard 200, where he'll look for diamonds in the MySpace rough. This week, his roster of up-and-comers includes hip-hop of the hillbilly and horror persuasions, old-school punks, fresh-faced Warped Tour types, and yet another act that Jack Johnson needs to apologize for.
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So Ann and Nancy Wilson haven't really been too pleased that the folks in charge of the music at the Republican National Convention have decided to turn their 1977 song (and current plastic-guitar staple) "Barracuda" into a rallying cry for GOP vice-presidential nominee/unavoidable topic of Internet discussion/overly self-impressed speechifier Sarah Palin, who was affectionately (?) called Barracuda during her high-school days. (Earlier today, they released a statement saying that they'd sent the GOP a cease-and-desist notice telling them to stop playing the damn thing. Of course, that didn't stop the Republicans, who played the song again after John McCain accepted his party's Presidential nomination tonight—and this decision fired up Nancy Wilson so much, she rang up Entertainment Weekly's Whitney Pastorek to say, "I think it's completely unfair to be so misrepresented... I feel completely fucked over." Keep in mind, you're talking about a song that's been covered by Fergie here, so you know that it takes a lot to offend!
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Crammed in near the comics and horoscopes today is a plea to the syndicated advice columnist Ask Amy from a reader who calls herself "Hearing Mediocre Music." HMM writes that she's recently started dating a musician, and she's crazy about him; she's swooning so hard for him that she starts hearing silly love songs whenever he's around. Which is probably for the best, since when she hears her beau's music, she's not all that thrilled! "The problem," Hearing writes, "is that I'm not crazy about his music. It's not bad; it's just not very original." Not original? Who does HMM think she is, a critic?
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Those of you who have been following the run-up to Sunday's Video Music Awards as closely as I not only have my sympathies, you have confirmation of your suspicions: Britney Spears, she of last year's botched show opener and this year's elephantine teaser ads, will once again appear in the telecast-opening bit, although everyone involved is going to really great pains to say that this won't be a performance, but rather a chance for her to "say hi to [her] fans" (her words) and supply the telecast with yet another "opening not to be missed" (MTV's words) in a year when the noxious "starpower" of Katy Perry and Nicole Scherzinger just isn't cutting it as far as mainstream turn-the-dial appeal goes (my words). I swear, if this whole thing is a ruse for her to show up and make out with Perry without saying anything else, I just give up.
When I saw the SoundScan charts this morning, I felt kind of bad for Slipknot. The masked metallers haven't been having the best string of luck recently, and now their album All Hope Is Gone was narrowly beaten out for the top spot on the album tally by LAX, the new album from tormented name-dropper the Game. How small of a margin did they lose by, you ask? Try 13 sales. Well, apaprently I wasn't the only one who felt bad about this: Slipknot, upon seeing this statistic, gathered up its brooding rage and did what any red-blooded American would do: They demanded a recount from the SoundScan folks. You can probably guess what happened next.
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Surely I'm not the only one who thinks that, at this point, the whole "band releasing a new song through Guitar Hero and/or Rock Band" angle is kind of played out, even if other media outlets are willing to lap it up like it's a dish of slightly melted vanilla ice cream. I mean, the seal has been broken. People are going plastic instead of going platinum. Big whoop. If you really want to get creative with your distribution methods, why don't you go back to the wax-cylinder route? Or 8-tracks? Plastic guitars are almost... quaint at this point. Now, that's not to say that I'm not interested in the newest song by the Smashing Pumpkins, which comes out next month in a bundle with "1979" and "The Everlasting Gaze." (You know—it's what us olds used to call a "b-side.") It's called "G.L.O.W.," after all, and anyone who had a TV that pulled in crappy syndicated channels 20 years ago knows that those letters can only stand for one thing.
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Far be it for me to call anyone lazy (I have a couple of editors who'd like to introduce me to the concept of a met deadline), but while it's certainly excellent that the Library of Congress is honoring Stevie Wonder with its second Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, please note that the first winner, from last year, was Paul Simon. Perhaps it's a coincidence that Simon, in accepting his Album of the Year Grammy Award in 1976, for Still Crazy After All These Years, thanked Stevie Wonder for "not making a record this year," but both men dominated the Grammys during the '70s. Simon nabbed AOTY twice, in 1971 (for Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water) and '76, as well as being nominated in 1974 for There Goes Rhymin' Simon. And of course Stevie won three times: 1974 (Innervisions), 1975 (Fulfillingness' First Finale), and 1977 (Songs in the Key of Life). What, then, might this mean in terms of future Gershwin Prizes? Let's take a look.
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As part of Idolator's continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Michaelangelo Matos breaks down top-ten lists from every genre imaginable. After the jump, he sifts through two rundowns of jungle singles that hint at where the genre's been and where it's going:
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