Even in the MP3 age, there are CDs worth searching out—and that require the search. "O.O.P., We Did It Again" is dedicated to great albums that are criminally out of print, and that aren't necessarily likely to become available anytime soon.
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This may be super-last-week of me to mention, but I admired Philip Sherburne's recent Pitchfork column about what he sees as a current malaise in dance music. For one thing, it's a piece whose main body (the stuff Sherburne wrote, not the quotes beneath it) you can read and substitute your own proper nouns into: it's apt about a lot more than just dance music right now. What's most interesting, though, is the light it sheds on dance music as a business.
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Nas' new album, which was stripped of its epithetastic title in the months leading up to its release, took the No. 1 spot on this week's album charts, selling 187,000 copies in its first week out. The album, which leaked earlier this month, had a first-week total that was a little more than half of the 355,000-sold mark achieved by Hip-Hop Is Dead a year and a half ago. Nas is Nas' fourth career No. 1.
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The Jonas Brothers! They're everywhere, and they're going to be in even more places very soon, what with their recent booking on the MTV Video Music Awards and their Tiger Beat-ready mugs gracing the cover of the new Rolling Stone. (Nice that the editors gave a tip of the hat to last year's Efron shirt-tug in the cover photo.) Now, obviously we've been covering the boys' ascent since they first got sucked into Disney's pop machine. So why is there something about all this JB love that seems a little, well, weird, even though it's synced to the Aug. 12 release of their next album, A Little Bit Longer?
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Let's say you're sent to cover the Country Thunder festival for your local Wisconsin newspaper and Jessica Simpson is slated to perform. Would you expect your portrayal of the audience's reaction to her performance to launch dozens of stories and blog posts around the globe?
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From time to time, we like to round up the all-important, all-summarizing last sentences of the biggest new-music reviews. Today's entry is by the Wayne Coyne-inspired pop-country outfit Sugarland, whose album Love On The Inside comes out in a "deluxe fan edition" today and a plain old edition in a week. (That's one way to keep the people coming back to the record stores, I guess.)
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Fresh off last year's coronation of the Klaxons as the best band in Britain, this year's Mercury Prize nominations feature quite a range of popular music, from summer jam tournament runner-up Estelle to a few acts that will send you scurrying to Google.
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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 lists of dance tracks picked by two different segments of the British populace:
From time to time, we like to round up the all-important, all-summarizing last sentences of the biggest new-music reviews. Today's entry is the much-blogged-about Florida band Black Kids' Partie Traumatic, which hits stores tomorrow.
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MTV has announced that it's opening nominations for this year's video music awards to the fans, presumably because July and August are low-traffic months for Web sites all over the planet and they need to boost the traffic to MTV.com somehow. Eight categories will have their nominations receive "help" from the clicking hordes: Best Male Video; Best Female Video; Best Hip-Hop Video; Best Pop Video; Best Dancing In A Video (apparently the word "choreography" is too syllable-filled for Generation TXT); Best New Artist; Best Rock Video; and Video Of The Year. Given past online skirmishes between crazed fans, it looks like the final category is going to play host to a bloody, yet well-coiffed, showdown between the Jonas Brothers and Tokio Hotel. But what of the other battles?
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Every week, we round up the all-important, all-summarizing last sentences of the biggest new-music reviews. Today's entry is Miley Cyrus' Breakout, which hits stores tomorrow.
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The singles charts have settled into what we hope will be a momentary midsummer slumber. And that starts with the song in its fourth week at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100.
Idolator's distaste for Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" is well-documented, but I nonetheless have to acknowledge that this blandly titillating dance-pop smash is emerging as the nation's song of this summer, its chart run perfectly timed for the season of moist, exposed flesh.
Perry seems likely to hold the keys to the penthouse for a few more weeks, unless Rihanna's "Take a Bow" regains its bullet at No. 2, or Chris Brown's gradually rising, more enjoyably summery "Forever" (up two slots to No. 4 this week) experiences a left-field surge. Otherwise, it's a wasteland out there.
For those of us seeking good news, however, the simultaneous Top 10 entry of three cool songs on three different flagship Billboard charts—Hot 100, R&B/Hip-Hop, and Country—provide a small dose of encouragement.
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ARTIST: Glen Campbell
TITLE: Meet Glen Campbell
RELEASE DATE: Aug. 19, 2008
WEB DEBUT: July 17, 2008
Most of our readership probably wouldn't claim that they prefer the smooth sounds of adult contemporary to other genres of music. But when life is a little rough and the mood is more white wine than Jagermeister, even the toughest mosh-pit veteran might tune in to the local Lite station. As a counterpoint to Al Shipley's excellent recap of the year so far in rock radio, we present the five most-played songs on Adult Contemporary radio in 2008.
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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 Vibe:
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