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The singer and actress is launching a social networking site through Kraft Foods aimed at women, where she and three other personalities issue challenges to members and offer ideas for cocktail parties, personal style and other fun stuff. Upumpitup's decidedly un-Mypsace but still, eh, cute.
Junior high kids visited the Old Red Museum downtown recently to learn local angles of their Black History Month education, which included area blues legends and the very African American history of Deep Ellum. They learned about Jim Crow in Dallas, which made Deep Ellum necessary to begin with, and participated in excercises like writing their own blues songs.
• Video
I admit I cracked up watching the white private school students struggle with their blues ditties like it was the music of ancient Greece. But hey, I'd rather see them struggle while learning than see the rich blues history up the street suffer a Greek fate.
Tapes n' Tapes' people sent out an email today saying that SXSW is one of the band's tour stops, too.
If you're not familiar with this annual interactive, film and music conference and festival, check the site's about page and our blog posts from last year, housed on the original, pre-Playlist mothership of all GuideLive.com blogs, Over the Top.
Confirmed acts for the fest so far include R.E.M., My Morning Jacket, Dolly Parton, David Banner, Bun B, Sia, Black Keys and tons more. Lou Reed will be the music conference's keynote speaker.
Stay tuned.
Ky-Mani Marley (from his myspace)
Listen to the music of a few Marley spawn. My picks are Stephen and Damian:
More Marley trivia you may or may not know: Lauryn Hill has five kids with former U of Miami linebacker Rohan Marley.
Hello, this could compete for Most Random Discovery of Talent for the century. Filipino singer-songwriter Arnel Pineda uploaded performances of his band, the Zoo, onto YouTube. Meanwhile, Journey guitarist Neal Schon was trolling the internet in search for a lead singer and found Arnel's dead-on cover of "Faithfully." The rest, as they say ....
The "Faithfully" cover may have been what wowed Neal Schon, but Arnel's "Don't Stop Believing" is unbelievable.
To tha beat, y'all (fortunecity.com)
That got me to wondering about where else in the vast dub-dub-dub is good listening. Do you, fellow blog user (those of you who listen to computer radio, anyway), have a favorite? What sites do you use?
Tweetie (prohiphop.com)
With Radiohead's online self-release of its new studio material, In Rainbows (one word: wow), and Madonna's abandonment of her traditional music label for a multi-album, multi-concert-tour, multi-merch, multi-baby-adoption (er, wait: I'm doublechecking ... OK, nix that last part) deal with Live Nation, the music biz continues its chaotic reformation.
I think of it differently. In my mind, this is the first time in recorded music history that the artists themselves have had a shot at defining, en masse, how their product is presented and offered for mass consumption. Think about it ...
Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hutz (Jackie Canchola)
• Listen: Hear the band of gypunkers
• Read: Mike's story about them
Tell me what you think below.
Billboard.com reports that seminal British punk band the Sex Pistols are finally acqiescing to the times and allowing Never Mind the Bullocks ... Here's the Sex Pistols to be available on iTunes beginning today.
Not that this is truly news. The band's surviving members (minus Sid Vicious, of course) re-recorded "Anarchy in the U.K." and "Pretty Vacant" for use in the upcoming Activision video game Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (the original masters were lost in a London fire many years ago), so it's not like the old farts had no clue what the internet was. It does -- especially cantankerous L.A. radio host John Lydon, known to most as Johnny Rotten -- and it's savvy enough to know how to market itself as critical cogs in rock history's annals.
But that move just isn't, well, punk. This is even less so: the reunited band will perform on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno on Oct. 30 and on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson (the Scottish host is himself a former punk rocker) on Halloween, six days after performing at a private Roxy show sponsored by Mr. Lydon's radio station, Activision and upstart cell-phone company Helio on Oct. 25. Never mind the bullocks, here's the greenbacks!
Robert Plant, left, and guitarist Jimmy Page (AP)
TELL US: What Zeppelin songs, if any, will you add to the ol' iPod? Comment below.
• Read about the band's 21st century entrance here
• Led Zeppelin's wiki entry
• Hear a little Led on allmusic.com (type the band's name into the search bar)
It's no secret that Blackout is being blackballed by some. Image-conscious radio is showing neither love nor air time to Britney Spears and her upcoming CD's hit, "Gimme More." (Yes, it's a hit: it's No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart almost solely due to digital downloads).
Yet there's a second victim: J.Lo. "Do it Well," the first single off of Jennifer Lopez's three-day-old English-language album Brave, is also being shunned by dance and Top 40 radio.
This raises a couple of issues for me. First, this is proof that radio can break and maintain a major music artist but can't kill one, at least in the short term (and especially if said artist has a reputation beyond that of just a musician). I mean, sheesh; Bruce Springsteen's Magic sold 335,000 copies in its first week with no airplay except on satellite radio, and I bet it goes platinum by early 2008 if not before. Second, radio may be at least as fickle, bloated and holier-than-thou as the major labels are. If people want to hear a song that's obviously doing at least decently -- for whatever reason and through whatever medium -- wouldn't they want to play it? Aren't they missing out on potential listeners (and, therefore, ratings points and ad revenue)?
Don't get me wrong: "Gimme More" is a horrible track, and though I haven't heard J.Lo's single yet, I'm betting that it's humdrum. But a critical part of a working capitalist economic model, even in the digital age, is giving people what they want, and radio appears to not be doing that. At least this week.
The Nov. 6 issue of PC World magazine includes its top 200 Web sites, and there are a few nifty ones of the music sort I'd never visitied before.
The mag splits up its list into 100 under-the-radar/undiscovered sites and 100 "classic" sites. On the classics list, PC groups music, movies and TV into the same category, but only two music sites made that list: allmusic.com (my personal favorite resource as music editor of GL.com) and pitchforkmedia.com, a hip music news and reviews site.
But a few on the under-the-radar list caught my eye:
• imeem.com — A Myspace-ish site, sans the sexual predators.
• musicovery.com — A music player that tailors the tunes to your particular mood at any given moment.
• singshot.com — Ok, I'm confused on this one. The magazine said the site's called singshot, but you type that in and thesimsonstage.ea.com comes up instead. I love the Sims, but I can't quite figure out this site. It seems to be a place you can post yourself singing karaoke, but ... not. Can someone clue me in?
• slacker.com — Attractive, free, easy-to-use online radio. Just click the genre you want to hear and press play.
What are your favorite music sites? Let us know. (Mike and Mario sometimes break into spontaneous dance around the office to tunes from this site ).
(Cartoon Network)
It started with Alvin and the Chipmunks waaay back in the late 1950s. It reached its peak with Gorillaz just a couple of years ago. But in this increasingly digital age, what's the future of the virtual band?
Pretty bright, it appears. The newest animated music act, Dethklok from Adult Swim's year-old animated black-comedy series, Metalocalypse, represents a fringe-frayed subgenre compared to the funk- and dub-rubbed electronic dance of the Grammy-winning Gorillaz (which, by the way, hasn't won as many as Alvin and co., whose creator, Ross Bagdasarian, won two in 1959 for sound engineering). But Dethklok's debut, The Dethalbum, sold 34,000 units in the U.S. last week and debuted at No. 21 on the Billboard 200 album chart today, making it one of the highest-charting death metal album ever in America.
That's right: a fake band is apparently more popular than most of the real ones of its ilk here (not that many death metal bands aren't already caricatures in many respects already, heh). But here's the scary part: there will be a Dethklok live tour, supposedly featuring Metalocalypse co-creator (and guitar shredder; he shows axe wielders everywhere how to play Metalocalypse's theme song here) Brendon Small and former Death/Dark Angel drummer (and Dallas native) Gene Hoglan. At least Gorillaz have given the duo some kooky ideas in that respect.
Tony Romo and Kelly, having some Salvation Army fun. (AP)
Burleson native and original Idol Kelly Clarkson is coming home for Thanksgiving to sing at halftime during the Cowboys home game. Click on the audio and find out what she was responding to when she replied, "Honey, they don't make those for big booties!" We've also got video that shows her kicking off the Salvation Army's Red Kettle campaign and being cool to some kiddos.
Jacknife Lee, the producer and frequent U2 collaborator, has a cool new Web site, appropriately enough titled jacknifelee.com. On it, he has a slew of remixes of songs from U2, Radiohead, Missy Elliot, Snow Patrol, Busta Rhymes and so on. So for those of you who like to hear a favorite artist totally deconstructed and put back together again, head over there and take a listen. One word of warning: Jack makes you hunt for the mix page, but if you click on the fifth circle from the left on the main page you should find what you seek.
(CNET.com)
My mp3 player is invaluable to me while I work out, but I really need a new one. My Samsung Nexus 50 with XM capabilities has served me well over the past year and a half. But it's a piece of technology that works better on paper than in reality — the XM only functions when the player's sitting in its craddle, so away from home, it's just a run-of-the-mill player. Recommendations? I'm looking for something workout-friendly. Just please, no iPhone ($); I work at a newspaper. And if you reccommend a particular iPod, please say why. I've resisted the i-cult up to now, but I'm willing to sip the Kool-Aid with an effective argument.
At Palladium Ballroom in April (Jason Janik / Special to DMN)
Some random person pretending to be Chris Cornell online hasn't exactly scored a friendship with the real deal. The November issue of Revolver reports in its "Blabbermouth.net Scoop of the Month" that the former frontman for Audioslave and Soundgarden was pretty unhappy with faux-Chris' online trickery and has said so via his myspace page. Support Chris (the real one) Oct. 30 at House of Blues when he comes through town to promo his new solo album, Carry On. His April show at Palladium Ballroom sold out.
