All the fluffy news about those nutty celebrities
Yaa, to Mayam Bialik, Seldon’s Big Bang girlfriend Amy. This week she took to her lifestyle blog to comment on a Billboard for Ariana Grande’s upcoming album, My Everything.
Noticing the Biillboard, which features Grande wearing very little, plus stilettos (nothing but her Keds, as the old song goes). Bialik asked first, what is she actually selling? then continued:
Why is she in her underwear on this billboard though? And if she has talent (is she a singer), then why does she have to sell herself in lingerie?
There’s more but… she’s profoundly right. If Ariana Grande had any kind of chops, she wouldn’t need to sell herself to sell her music. But the truth is, how you look in lingerie is far more important to the music industry than how you sing. We live in a world were Janis Joplin couldn’t get heard and Linda Ronstadt would be told to lose some weight and dress far less modestly. We, and the music, suffer for it.
As for Bialik, she makes her living in a Hollywood were the only unacceptable sin is the sin of prudishness. Sitting in judgement sits poorly by the people she surrounds herself with, and comments such as she has made could be career killers. Good on her.
Kanye West is an idiot, full stop.
During a concert in Australia last week, West demanded – DEMANDED – that the crowd, every last person, stand up, or he couldn’t continue. He singled out a guy in a wheelchair, before realizing he wasn’t Joe Biden, and it’s not cool to demand wheelchair bound people stand.
The usual suspects, of course are outraged.
So am I, but for completely different reasons. Who the hell does this overpaid, under-talented dickwad think he is demanding anything of the paying customers?
“I can’t do this show until everybody stand up[sic],” he told the crowd (note, none of the press reports I saw indicated the grammatical error.) Oh, yea? Is that in your contract: no show unless everybody stands? If not, then shut up and sing.
Look, it’s one thing to encourage the audience to stand, but to actually single out a paying customer and demand he do so, or else I don’t sing, that’s beyond absurd.
Those people paid good money, money, unlike West, they worked hard for, money, unlike West, they don’t have an unlimited store of. West, on the other hand, was being paid a lot of that money to entertain the folk. If the folk decides he should sing show tunes while balancing teacups on his nose, then West should make like Flipper, not the other way around.
The laziest trick in entertainment journalism is combining celebrity couple names to save typing a few letters and the word “and.” Typing Bennifer instead of Ben and Jennifer is about as lazy as you can get. Worse yet is the talking heads, who throw out Brangelina without so much as a knowing blush that they sound like idiots. Heaven forbid you speak all those letters.
The worst however, the absolute positive proof that the dumbest, most unoriginal, most uncreative people on the planet all go into entertainment journalism is “Chavril.” When Chad Kroeger and Avril Lavigne surprisingly married fourteen months ago, columnists and Ben Mulroney’s alike were quick to show just how dumb, how uninteresting they really were, and quickly dubbed the couple Chavril. No more!
It appears the couple is heading for divorce. After a year-and-a-half marriage and one creepy Japanese video that bordered on kiddy porn (which is the natural outcome when you combine kiddy punk and pop metal). Kroeger has reportedly been parading around L.A. telling people “it’s over.”
Not to overly amuse in other peoples misery, but thank God to see the end of the linguistic horror Chavril.
“Hey Martha,” you imagine Willard from Iowa saying on the first of two days of the holiday of a lifetime to the big city, “lets go see that there Times Square first.” Heading out of their fancy hotel (with a coffee maker in the bedroom, for gosh sakes), over to Broadway and south towards 42nd street. “Look at all the lights,” Willard says walking south on Broadway. “Look there, that’s where that David Letterman fellow does his show.” Approaching Times Square Willard and Martha are surprised to discover it’s closed. “Closed?” says Willard. “How do you close an intersection?”
Answer: you be a narcissist TV star, and you pay to have it shut down. If Willard and Martha’s two days in the city get disrupted, well sucks to be them.
Ryan Serhant, narcissist and host of Million Dollar Listings did just that, shutting down Times Square to propose to his girlfriend. Being oh, so important, and a bended knee over dinner not obvious enough, Serhant enlisted the help of the Mayor’s office (because that’s the Mayor’s job!?!?) and the NYPD to propose to his fiancé, nee girlfriend Emilia Bechrakis.
Professional camera crew being in tow (the scene will appear on his TV show), pictures quickly made it to various media outlets. So nice for Narcissus and Emilia, but what of Willard and Martha? Oh well, they’ll get to Times Square on their next trip to New York… in the next life.
I’m not a big Jack White fan. Nothing against him per se, just find I don’t like his voice and his production style. That said, he’s something that used to be common, but has become very rare nowadays, he’s a musician who’s in it for the music. He’s one of those guys who thinks being able to make great music is why he’s in the making music business, money is a side benefit.
This week he had an onstage rant against some of his peers. Noting that lots of acts lip synch nowadays, he turned his guns on fellow rockers The Foo Fighters who, while not accused of lip synching, do carry as third guitarist onstage to, according to White, cover up mistakes.
He then set his sights on Rolling Stone magazine, “mocking them for running articles such ’15 outfits that will blow your mind that Taylor Swift wore this month…'” Interesting, I suppose, that he didn’t note teh Rolling Stone has also become the official tabloid of the Democratic Party, but you can’t have everything in one rant.
Good on Jack White. The music business has become a joke, Rolling Stone leading the demise, and lip synching epidemic (Beyonce being the latest to be caught out in Paris this week), and should be a career ender . But he’s also dead right on bands padding the lineup, thereby saving the performers your paying to see from actually having to create music while performing is just as dishonest.
It reminds one of the old Brittany Spears line, when asked by a young fan what was the hardest part of her job, she answered “singing and dancing at the same time.” So she eschewed the singing bit, farming out the job to an MP3 file, and upped her ticket price so you could watch her dance. It’s what they all do, when there not sitting around wondering why their business is dying.
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but surely that is coming.
will be available November 4th.
This morning I woke up to a third downloadable song from the new Bob Seger album, 
. Those who pre-ordered on iTunes got Detroit Made and You Take Me In when they pre-ordered, and this morning got the Steve Earle song The Devils Right Hand. Frankly, I’ll take the Steve Earle version over the Seger by a wide margin (which is convenient as it’s on Copperhead Road, an album everyone and anyone should own).
U2’s new album, Songs of Innocence, is now available to 
feels like a folk album, and pressed I might even call it so. But the Virginia quartets fifth album in as many years has such gritty, rock hard guitar playing throughout that folk seems inadequate. Yet the songwriting sensibilities, the vocals and the lyrics often seem downright folk.
If the title track is any indication, this will be a “Holy Mother of God!” album. The song, video below, is the best thing I ever heard out of Bonamassa, possibly the best new song I’ve heard in years.
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