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[chriswillman]

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[chriswillman]

‘Rocky Horror’ Music Producer Cisco Adler Talks Laverne Cox, Adam Lambert, Haters & Hardcore Fans

photo: Fox

Time is fleeting, indeed: It’s been 41 years since The Rocky Horror Picture Show made its first very fleeting appearance in movie theaters, and just a little less than that since it turned into a full-fledged cultural phenomenon via midnight revival screenings. Needless to say, most of those involved with Fox’s Oct. 20 TV-movie remake are too young to claim membership in the original cult — including music producer Cisco Adler, who, having been born in 1978, was wearing diapers when the original fans were putting on garter belts.

But when Adler says the movie and stage show are “literally in my blood,” he’s only stretching the literal a little. There’s that telltale last name: The 38-year-old is the son of Lou Adler, the rock and film impresario who brought the London stage production of Rocky Horror to America and then produced the 1975 feature film. Needless to say, maybe, the younger Adler is one of the few people in the world who never really experienced a Frank-N-Furter-free childhood. “It’s crazy how early those memories are in my head,” says Cisco. “It’s always the anniversaries that stick out, but I can remember dressing up as Riff Raff at 7 years old. I’m very proud of the patch it holds on my quilt of weirdness. Now I have the same sort of care for this franchise that my dad does — it’s the family crest.”

Executive Producer Gail Berman, cast member Ryan McCartan, Executive Producer Lou Adler, Cisco Adler, Executive Producer and Director Kenny Ortega, Christina Milian, Reeve Carney, and Victoria Justice at Comic-con. (photo: Fox)

Lou Adler appointed Cisco, who’d worked with Shwayze and other L.A. rock and hip-hop acts, to oversee the music for what ended up being called The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again. The movie’s soundtrack album goes on sale Oct. 21, the morning after the Fox premiere, and what fans of the song score will hear is very much an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” production, with no contemporizing to speak of. Which is not to say that it’s a straight remake of the movie soundtrack; Cisco Adler also has the gazillion international stage cast albums still circulating in his bloodstream as influences, too.

“Not so much for myself, but I definitely had the players brush up on certain versions before we went in and made our own version,” Adler says. “This music has been done many, many times, not just once for the film, and there are a million reference points or compass points, so you just have to choose which ones you want to go to and go. They’re great songs, so that always leads the way.” Departures from any past version were few, although “’Time Warp’ during the tap dance breakdown turns into a sort of James Brown-esque build, and that’s something that wasn’t really there before, but I think it feels right at home. It was important that anything different felt at home and on purpose and wasn’t just changing something to change it.

“Personally,” Adler adds, “I sort of went off of intuition and memory. But [director] Kenny Ortega was always very fond of the Roxy play cast version, and it was a little more boogie-woogie. So I think we definitely leaned into that. You know, the talk was always around Laverne Cox’s character being a sort of Tina Turner compared to Tim Curry’s Frank-N-Furter, which was obviously more glam/London. I think we just tried to take the music down South. With the way the guitars were attacked and stuff like that, we were looking for that sort of classic rock ‘n’ roll boogie that we all know originated in the South.”

It is interesting that, although we associate Rocky Horror with the glitter-rock era, for obvious reasons of makeup as well as music, the style of the more rocking numbers has that basic boogie. But Adler points out that that isn’t uncharacteristic of David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, T. Rex, or other Brit-champs of that mid-‘70s era. “Listen, glam-rock is Southern rock with makeup, so that’s where we went,” he says with a laugh. “You know, there’s a reason Bowie went to Muscle Shoals [in Alabama] to record.”

As faithful as the new movie and soundtrack generally are to the four-decade-old source material, the most obvious point of departure is obviously going to come with Cox, the Orange is the New Black star, as the “sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania.” You can’t exactly call any casting that happens in this role casting against gender, but the role is identified with a man with a fairly deep, if fairly effeminate, voice. So giving it to a woman, even if she’s a woman with some history as a man, can’t help but transform the role.

“She’s a force,” says Adler of Cox. “And she was already this part when she walked in the door to cut those first tracks. She was the most realized character, because she was the first cast. But her voice is super-interesting. The fact that she still has range from her male vocal range as well as this new female vocal range gave us the ability to play with that and really give context to this character being a blurred line of gender. She’s just amazing. People who hear her voice get that look in their eye and their ears perk up. She added a sort of dark thing to the vocal that I don’t think was there before; I think it added a whole bunch of other implications and notions to the character and to the lyrics. And Laverne has the most songs” — eight numbers that are mostly or entirely solo — “so the character develops over more songs than the other characters. With ‘I’m Going Home,’ we ended up keeping the take that is just a piano/vocal take from her screen test, because it was just so powerful, and she was almost exhausted and crying by the end of it. She always says that playing this part felt like she was going home. She was meant to play it.”

On the other end of the scale — character-wise, and octave-wise — is the character Janet, who gets some classic Broadway ingénue material early on and a sexual awakening later. The natural casting for that role was Victoria Justice, practically the only tween-TV star of the ‘00s left who hadn’t already told the world that “I wanna be dirty,” as Janet eventually does.

The ex-Zoey 101/Victorious star “turned out so perfect as our damsel in distress,” says Adler, “and even though she has a similar vocal quality as Susan [Sarandon], it’s definitely her own thing and her own persona. With her coming from the Disney/Nickelodeon world, and guess what, she’s singing a song called ‘Touch a Touch a Touch a Touch Me’ in her underwear — get ready, world.”

Adam Lambert is in the Meat Loaf role, which consisted of just one song (“Hot Patootie”). But if that one song was enough to make Mr. Loaf a star, maybe it’s enough for the celebrated Idol alumnus. (Or maybe not, since, unlike the definitely deceased Meat of the mid-‘70s, Lambert gets a post-death curtain call in this one to duet on the closing reprise of “Science Fiction Double Feature.”)

“Hot Patootie” is “one of the most anticipated songs, obviously, behind ‘Time Warp’ and maybe ‘Sweet Transvestite,’” Adler says. “And Meat Loaf’s performance was so legendary, and a moment in an actual moment. But Lambert came in and killed it. He’s a vocal acrobat. He’s singing with Queen on a daily basis, so he’s got the highest level of rock ‘n’ roll singer chops going right now. He came in and just devoured that song. The talent is ingrained in him — he doesn’t have to warm up, he doesn’t have to work. He opens his mouth and it comes out like that.”

Cisco was in the weird position of giving all these actor/singers, or singer/actors, their first real direction as their characters, months before cameras rolled. “I don’t think doing the movie live ever came up,” Adler says, pointing up the difference between this and other recent TV musicals like The Wiz and Grease. “So we were able to really approach it like making a record. The catch was that the casting was going on while we had already started recording, which was super-interesting. A role would get cast, and sometimes we’d have to go back and change the key to make sure it fit whoever it was. And then character development was going on in the studio, because this was the first time these people were becoming that character, and they would have to stick to it, however many months later, when they went into filming” and had to lip-sync to their earlier audio portrayal.

How relevant will fans (or detractors) find a new Rocky Horror in 2016? It’s hard to say, though a couple of the soundtrack songs have already been made available for streaming preview, and the first 25 minutes of the TV film was previewed at this year’s Comic-Con, to mostly positive fan reaction, if hardly universal acclaim. Whatever its merits or demerits, any Rocky remake arrives in a vastly different climate than the mid-‘70s. Then, sexual transgression felt truly transgressive, and not a nearly quaint trope. What tends to get lost is contemporary discussions of the musical is how deftly creator/songwriter Richard O’Brien paid tribute to the innocence, musical styles, and sci-fi conventions of a previous era before affectionately demolishing them.

In 1975, The Day the Earth Stood Still — one of the movies mentioned in the opening “Science Fiction Double Feature” number — was less than a quarter-century old; nearly twice as much time has passed between these two versions of Rocky Horror as passed between the Michael Rennie era and the first film. It’s no wonder that this new version opens with the actress singing the theme song walking past posters for the old movies being cited; otherwise, it was probably reasoned, younger viewers might not have the slightest idea what’s being sung about. If the original musical was a brilliant metaphor for the ‘50s giving way to the alien-ness of the countercultural and sexual revolution, that’s a theme that will be largely lost on millennials who’ve never known anything but the openness to “absolute pleasure” that Rocky Horror’s aliens cross galaxies to share with unsuspecting debutantes.

But maybe Rocky Horror can transcend generations sans any specific cultural context, because the pelvic thrust is the universal language.

Adler knows a few Rocky Horror fans have trash-talked the remake, sight unseen. “Of course!” he says. “And God bless them, right? As long as people are talking, I think that’s a good sign. For me personally, there was definitely trepidation, or at least a realization that there was going to be those people who hold this so dear that nothing could ever even be done after it. And surprisingly, the reactions have been amazing from hardcore fans most importantly, and the people you would think would be instantly averse to this have been welcoming. I think the more they see and the more they hear, they’re going to realize it was made for them and it’s exactly what they would want it to be.”

#cisco adler #rocky horror #_uuid:d0961484-f033-3661-97da-7a307c127646 #_wp:171920

[chriswillman]

Director Derrick Borte Talks Clash-Inspired Coming-of-Age Film ‘London Town’

photo courtesy of IFC

A decade ago, Jonathan Rhys Meyers won a Golden Globe for portraying biggest rock star of all time in the TV miniseries Elvis. At that point, as rock-star portrayals go, he might have asked himself the question once famously posed by the Clash: “What are we gonna do now?” All this time later, we have the answer: Rhys Meyers set his sights down, but hardly out, by portraying that band’s Joe Strummer in London Town, a film that opens in theaters and via video-on-demand outlets this week.

But Clash fans should be aware that Strummer is a supporting character. “The conundrum with this film is that there are people whose expectations are that this is a Clash biopic, which it’s not,” says director Derrick Borte. In structuring a cast of fictional players around real-life rockers who stand on the periphery of the action, London Town is closer to the tradition of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Detroit Rock City, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, or Heartbreak Hotel (movies that loosely have to do with the Ramones, KISS, the Beatles, and Elvis Presley, respectively), although it’s less comedic and more dramatic than those.

“I’ve heard the film described as kind of Almost Famous meets Billy Elliott, and that’s OK with me,” Borte says. “It is a sweet coming-of-age story that happens to have the Clash as part of the story.”

“Sweet” and “the Clash” may not belong in the same breath, as far as all fans are concerned, but Borte didn’t see anything wrong with pairing one of England’s toughest-sounding bands — and the sociopolitical milieu in which they developed — with the story of a naïve 15-year-old boy who finds puppy love and punk-rock simultaneously. “It is kind of funny to me that I hear things like, ‘Oh, Joe would not have been happy about this [because] it’s not gritty enough.’ I think people’s perception of how gritty and angry these celebrities are is so weird,” says Borte. “In developing the film, I met so many people that had brushes with Joe and talked about how he was a good-hearted person who they felt would really do the things he does in the film — like give all the money in his pocket to a kid driving a taxi — because he was that generous. I heard this over and over again while making the movie, which reinforced the tone that just seemed to happen with the film.”

The film centers around Shay (young Daniel Huttleston, the kid from Les Miserables), a product of a broken home who runs into destiny on a commuter train into London when a punky girl his age offers him the headphones for her Walkman, which happen to be playing the Clash’s debut album. Eventually, in pursuing both the girl and the group, he witnesses a couple of the band’s performances and eventually has a few high-spirited run-ins of his own with Strummer, who’s around just enough to become a fleeting big-brother figure for the lad.

The most immediate problem in any film that portrays famous rockers, biopic or not, is how to render the soundtrack: Should the star-playing-a-star lip-sync to the original recordings, or tempt fate with his own approximations of the singer in question? London Town wisely has it both ways, in a way few other rock films have tried.

The project was instigated at Sony Music, so access to the real Clash on the soundtrack was not going to be a major problem. And yet… “We had the rights to this music,” says the director, “but I started thinking about how false it would be to have them lip-synching to studio recordings of the Clash. So with the help of our music supervisor and producer, we decided we were going to re-record all the live stuff heard in the concert scenes, in a way that people who worked with the Clash said we nailed it. Given that these are four different guys and this is not Joe Strummer singing, I think we captured that same vibe you get from all those shows that are in Rude Boy [the 1978 documentary about the band].”

The original LP recordings are still heard in the ambient scenes where Shay puts his new records on the turntable. Fortunately for Rhys Meyers, Strummer’s voice was obviously gruff enough that he didn’t need to take Caruso-level singing lessons to come up with a suitable match.

As a fan since his own mid-adolescence, Borte wanted more than anything to make the two concert scenes feel real to Clash buffs. Beyond that, though, he was content to let a sense of magic realism take its course when it came to absolute verisimilitude.

As soon as Shay buys his copy of the band’s first album, he brings it home, puts it on, and out comes “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” — something that would have happened in America, but not in Britain. Borte knows you know that if you’re a Clash fan, but the song felt right. “That song wasn’t on the U.K. release of that first Clash record, but it was on the U.S. release,” Borte points out without prompting. “But look, if somebody doesn’t like the movie because of that, then they weren’t going to like the movie anyway. I really believe that. I had a conversation with Ray Gange, who was in Rude Boy and a friend of Joe’s and the band’s, and he came down to do a cameo in the film. He was watching the scene where Joe brings Shay to rehearsal and he said, ‘This is so freaky. This is magical. I feel like you’ve brought me back to when Joe brought me to rehearsal to meet the band for the first time.’ And he said, ‘Of course you’re gonna have self-proclaimed purists who are going to look for an inaccuracy in the film. But I was there, and you have captured the essence of the band during this period, regardless of whether or not this guitar or those shoes were part of it.’ So when somebody who was really that intimately involved with the band says we captured it, that speaks volumes to me.”

One historical element that casual fans may assume the film gets right — but hardcore Anglophiles may recognize is just slightly off — is the use of period details from what was called the Winter of Discontent in 1978-79. Borte shifted time around just a little to make sure the societal conditions that produced the Clash were part of the film, but there was also a hilariously practical element.

“The Winter of Discontent, or the dustman’s strike, was really four months later,” Borte volunteers, talking about the shutdown of city services in London. “But if you look at the footage from the period, there’s garbage everywhere. Quite frankly, the dustman’s strike was a great, convenient tool for us to use, to have trucks full of fake garbage that we could unload and cover over a 2015 car that somebody forgot to get moved from a road that we were shooting on because they forgot to get it moved. If only you knew what was underneath that garbage! We covered up literally everything from cars to various city and utility things that are obviously modern, because we had to. A low-budget film shooting in London has to be resourceful. We did not have a garbage wrangler, but I will say that I acted as garbage wrangler myself a lot, as well as an amazing art department that had garbage on standby…. Thankfully, ours was not authentic garbage, so it didn’t smell.”

A London Town screenplay was in development for eons. It felt weirdly personal for Borte, considering that he wasn’t present at the project’s instigation. He was a junior high kid in the States when he became obsessed with the Clash, roughly the same age as the boy in the movie. “It was such a coincidence that it was kind of surreal,” the director says. “I was talking to my agent one day, and he said, ‘What’s your dream project?,’ and I just kind of off the cuff threw out: ‘I’d love to find a project about a kid discovering the Clash.’ And he said, ‘There’s a project out there, believe it or not, so I’ll get you a copy of it to read.’ I loved it, got a meeting with the producers, they liked my take on it, and five or six years later we ended up making the movie.”

“I remember the first time I heard the Clash. Within a few seconds it was like, ‘This is the music that I’m supposed to listen to.’ To this day, it still has that effect on me.” Not that he understood what their music was about as a junior high kid, any more than the boy in the movie necessarily does. “As I think anyone who just starts listening to the Clash can attest to, you kind of have no idea what Joe’s saying. His lyrics were definitely kind of hard to decipher. For me it was really about the pure energy of the music. And because I wasn’t growing up in that part of England, even if I got the words right, I didn’t have that kind of knowledge of the world to know what he was talking about half the time. But it got me to want to know about these things — the politics, the social and racial aspects of what he was singing — and look these things up.”

Nowadays, the first arcane thing a lot of the younger viewers may have to look up is… the Clash themselves. “I hear from people that after watching the trailer they broke out all their old Clash and started listening to it again,” he says, “but for me it’s also a cool way to introduce young people not only to the Clash musically but also to what was going on in the world that caused this sort of music to come to life. My teenage kids and their friends really like the movie, but obviously the coming-of-age story with the teenagers is what draws them in.” Improbable as it might seem, a tender young-adult romance hook could be the ideal modern gateway drug for “London’s Burning” after all.

#the clash #london town #_uuid:9bf2573c-c832-3105-91af-a997c4bc6d7d #_wp:161138

[chriswillman]

Toni Basil at 72: Thirty-Plus Years Past Singing, But Still Cutting a Rug

Hey Toni, you’re still so fine, you’re still so fine, you still blow our minds.

Forming a human pyramid isn’t how we usually celebrate pop artists entering their eighth decade. But we’ll have to make an exception in the case of Toni Basil, the symbol of early-’80s sprightliness who slipped us a “Mickey” with her sole hit back in 1982. She turns 73 on September 22 and, if a recent viral video of her busting a move at a 2016 dance workshop is any indication, Basil fits into that Las Vegas High cheerleader outfit just as well as when she starred in one of MTV’s most famous early videos.

Basil is a one-hit wonder who’s enjoyed a successful career throughout the last 50 years. If that sounds paradoxical, it’s worth pointing out that “singer” has really been the least important component of her multi-hyphenate singer/dancer/actress/choreographer/director legacy. Like Jennifer Lopez, Basil was a dancer who parlayed that into a musical career. But unlike J.Lo, she quickly went back to her former profession, retiring from record-making after her sophomore album stiffed in ’83.

”People think, ‘Well, she’s not around because she’s not in front of the camera.’ You’re not going to be that naïve, are you?” she complained to Entertainment Weekly in 1996, taking umbrage at the one-hit wonder slur.

  It was hardly as if she could financially coast on the success of “Mickey,” which continues to be the DJ’s choice any time some ‘80s tunes are called for on the dance floor. “I don’t think my story is an unusual story for a lot of music performers,” she told an English TV interviewer recently. “But I think that since 1982, worldwide, I have probably seen less than 3,000 American dollars in royalties.”

Unknown to most pop fans who know her mostly for her work with pompons, Basil has been a virtual Zelig of pop culture — working alongside David Bowie, Elvis Presley, Talking Heads, the Monkees, Devo, Frank Sinatra, George Lucas, Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks, Bette Midler, the Muppets, Matchbox Twenty, and even Suite Life-era Zack and Cody. One of her latest credits on IMDB had her choreographing an episode of RuPaul’s TV show… which is a long way from dancing next to Annette Funicello all the way back in 1964’s Pajama Party.

Basil really did go to Las Vegas High, per the uniform, thanks to her father/s longtime gig as the orchestra leader at the Sands. She soon came to L.A. to dance in an early-/60s theatrical revival of West Side Story, the cast of which included fellow dancer and BFF Teri Garr, who boogied along with her in Pajama Party, Viva Las Vegas, and The T.A.M.I. Show.

“Boy, did I envy her!” Garr wrote in her memoir. “Toni grew up in a show business family in Las Vegas…At her apartment she had false eyelashes, hairpieces, and a waist-cincher. This level of accessorizing impressed me. As far as I was concerned, it made Toni a real show-business dancer. I was in awe of her.” Their adventures included being invited to sit in on the recording of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” then going out for a full night of drinking and dancing with all four Fabs afterward.

  Basil also hoofed it up for Bob Fosse in Sweet Charity and partnered with Davy Jones for a memorable production number in the Monkees’ Head. But her allure was enough to land her non-dancing roles in Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider; in the latter, she played a hooker Peter Fonda took a shine to in New Orleans.

Hollywood suddenly had a thirst for the counterculture, but its elders didn’t know how to service these crazy kids. As someone who knew how to keep dancing from looking musty on the big screen, Basil was uniquely positioned to start getting her own choreographing gigs.

She was well known enough by 1974 to land a cover story in New York’s After Dark magazine, and, in 1976, to be praised as “the Pavlova of the Sunset Strip” in a feature in Ms. magazine.

“I was a cheerleader,” she told After Dark, explaining her background, long before “Mickey.” “During those years doing those homecomings and football games I learned all my choreography and musical staging I was David Winter’s assistant on Shindig and The T.A.M.I. Show… When David came to New York to stage Hullaballoo, I started getting calls to choreograph. Rock had finally begun to be used on television. All of the choreographers were older people who hated the improvisational nature of rock-music dancing. I loved rock; I was disciplined; I could stage numbers too. David was the first rock choreographer. I was now the second. I began to stage dances for films. I did Viva Las Vegas with Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret. By standing in for Ann-Margret for a week, I learned the feeling of being a star in a musical number.”

That cover story coincided with Basil getting her biggest break to date, as the co-director and choreographer of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs tour in ’74. (She repeated her duties for Bowie on 1987’s Glass Spider tour.) But an even bigger turning point in the mid-’70s came when she joined a dance troupe called the Lockers, as their only white member; they performed on the third episode of Saturday Night Live and proved highly influential on hip-hop dancers to come. Fred “Rerun” Berry off What’s Happenin’ fame was a fellow member. “Toni worked hard in the early ’70s to make street dancing something people would know about,” Bowie later pointed out. Said Basil, “We did change the face of dance. We were the first street dancers that formed a group, got on television, and actually earned a dime.” Within one week, Basil noted, the Lockers opened for Sinatra at Carnegie Hall and Funkadelic at Radio City Music Hall.

She fit in just as well, if not better, as the punk/new wave era dawned. At one point she was going out with a young upstart named David Byrne (who had a thing for choreographers, since he also took up with Twyla Tharp). Their most notable collaboration was a video for “Crosseyed and Painless” that changed Byrne’s image from nerd to visually provocative nerd, as he took on the role of a jerky, forehead-slapping, Ernest Angley-style evangelist. Byrne’s label president, Seymour Stein, is quoted in a Talking Heads biography by David Bowman as having taken note of how Byrne’s romances with Tharp and Basil rubbed off on his stage moves: “Boy, it’s a lot cheaper than taking dancing lessons,” Stein joked.

  Said Basil, “‘‘Crosseyed and Painless’ started when Shabba-Doo — street-dancing star of Electric Boogaloo and Breakin’ — called my attention an insane dance group called the Electric Boogaloos, from Fresno, California… That was the first time I saw Boogaloo Sam do the moonwalk, which is really called the backslide. Michael Jackson did not create the moonwalk! I showed the audition tape to David Byrne, and he wanted to use that style of dance for ‘Crosseyed and Painless.'”

Then came the recording contract of her own, at which point, being a show-biz veteran in her 30s, she was hardly a babe in any of these woods.

“On my ‘Mickey’ video, I was the director, producer, choreographer, editor, singer — everything,” she said. “I’d made very avant-garde 8mm and 16mm films… And I had been choreographing for TV since the late ’60s, so I certainly knew how to shoot for TV. I didn’t have a calculated approach to ‘Mickey’ of Ooh, I’ll wear a short skirt in the video because will guys will like it. If you don’t like my talent, then f— you.”

The song had already been out, in another form, as a single called “Kitty” by a (male) group named Racey, written by the then-hitmaking team of Chinn/Chapman, who’d also been responsible for smashes like “Ballroom Blitz.” After being handed the song, Basil flipped the gender and, more importantly, introduced the chant.

“I was always a cheerleader and I remember the echoing in the basketball court of cheerleaders, of us, stomping, chanting,” she said. “I said I would do it if I could put the cheerleader chant on it. The record company asked me not to put the chant on because they were concerned it would ruin the rest of the tune.”

Not for 1982 audiences, it didn’t, as the song soared to number two in England and number one in America. But despite the presence of Devo as the backup band on some of her tracks, music fans were being bombarded by so much novelty and color that they didn’t seem to want any Basil tunes that didn’t offer a chant.

Since then, she’s faced the responsibility of trying to remind the public that she had the same career before and after “Mickey,” which essentially stands out as a defining but uncharacteristic blip. “People don’t connect the girl that sang ‘Mickey’ with the girl who was one of the seven original Lockers or the same girl who was in Easy Rider or the same girl who choreographed David Bowie, Tina Turner, and Bette Midler tours. It’s like I’ve led five lives,” she said — four of them in relative anonymity.

Movie fans who put on films from American Graffiti to Legally Blonde are still astonished to see her name in the credits on DVD nights across America. Tom Hanks remembered that happening as he was looking to find someone to recreate the dancing of the ’60s for That Thing You Do! “‘Her name rolled by, and I said I’d be incredibly happy to get them to look like The T.A.M.I. Show. Can we get Toni Basil? We made a phone call and she was there the next day.”

Some would look at only the pop-star part of Basil’s career and see failure, while others would look over her filmography and spell L-U-C-K-Y. But she’s not all about the discography or filmography anyway, as dancers in L.A.’s hip-hop, swing, and salsa clubs sometimes spot her out in public, cutting a rug for its own sake.

“‘You street-dance in a club, and you’re performing,” she said recently. ”Whether anybody sees me is a whole other thing. But it doesn’t matter, because it fills my void.”

#toni basil #_uuid:ed2b77f2-792d-37a4-a2fd-f0c01be8a5d3 #_wp:116016

[chriswillman]

15 Years Later: The 15 Greatest Musical Tributes to 9/11

Alan Jackson performs during the ‘A Concert For Hope’ at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On the 15th anniversary of the greatest tragedy to befall modern America, it’s worth remembering not just the heroes who responded that day, but the poets who tried to make sense out of the senselessness followed 9/11. Songwriters as diverse as Bruce Springsteen, Alan Jackson, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Taylor Swift, and the Beastie Boys echoed our brightest and most despairing feelings, some in the immediate wake of the terrorist attacks and courageous response, others after ruminating for months or years. Here are 15 of the best musical responses to that day:

Bruce Springsteen: “The Rising”/“Empty Sky” 

As the only major artist to make an entire album loosely themed around the post-9/11 zeitgeist, Springsteen makes it hard to pick a single anthem from The Rising to represent that non-glory day. It really comes down to a yin-yang tie between the despairing “Empty Sky” and almost gospel-like title track. “Empty Sky” could speak for anyone who’s recently lost a loved one to murder, mass or otherwise: “I want a kiss from your lips/I want an eye for an eye.” But “The Rising” found the barest of hard-fought hope in the dual imagery of rescuers and souls ascending. When it comes to speaking in song for these United States — the depressed America, and the aspirational America — nobody does it better.

Alan Jackson: “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)”

In the days immediately following the attacks, various existing songs were adopted as anthems, from Five for Fighting’s “Heroes” to U2’s “Walk On” to Springsteen’s eerily appropriate “My City of Ruins.” But when it came to literally addressing 9/11, it was a humble country star that was the first responder. Jackson jotted down this ballad of bewilderment in the middle of the night almost as if caught in the throes of a case of automatic writing, but what he seemed to be channeling were the stunned thoughts of nearly everyone in America (even those who did know the difference between Iran and Iraq). When he premiered the song less than two months after the tragedies, Jackson’s ability to tenderly speak to the emotions of urbanites that’d never heard of him on top of his own fan base made for one of country music’s proudest moments.

Beastie Boys: “An Open Letter to NYC”

You’ve got to fight for your right to… recover. Reacting to the terror attacks is only a part of this musical mash note, but it’s the cornerstone, noting that “since 9/11 we’re still livin’, and lovin’ life we’ve been given… Dear New York, I know a lot has changed/Two towers down but you’re still in the game.” There’ve been bigger songs of NYC civic pride since, like “Empire State of Mind,” but nothing with the sense of urgency in this rebound anthem from New York’s finest.

Taylor Swift: “Didn’t They”

You didn’t know that Swift had a 9/11 song? Don’t worry, neither do 98 percent of her fans. That’s because “Didn’t They” has never been officially released, although a leak of the demo became widely disseminated and is easily found. If you think that Swift, as a young teenager, was going to look for the sweeter side of those tragic events, think again. In verse after verse, she addresses the problem of theodicy… or, in less specifically theological terms, why God allows evil. “Didn’t they need you bad enough?” she asks the Supreme Being, after “it all came down.” “Where were you? And didn’t they pray, too?” All those songs she penned later about bad boyfriends had nothing on the one she wrote when she was angry with the Almighty.

Neil Young: “Let’s Roll” 

Over time, the aftermath of 9/11 would inspire a lot of calls to military action, from the likes of Toby Keith and Darryl Worley. This list isn’t about those. But there was an action story with a bittersweet ending embedded in the day itself, in the form of Flight 93. Just as Todd Beamer was ready to rumble as he and a few other passengers took on the terrorists on that flight, so was Neil Young ready for his own rumble, in the form of a rocker memorializing the struggle that prevented yet another massive loss of life on the ground in D.C. “There’s no more of a legendary, heroic act than what those people did,” Young said later, “not even having a chance to think about it or plan it or do anything — just a gut reaction that was heroic and ultimately cost them all their lives.” Although his response to 9/11 wasn’t quite “Ohio”-quick, Young was nearly as fast on the draw as Alan Jackson, getting his tribute to the courageous fallen out to radio in November 2001.

Suzanne Vega: “Anniversary”

In the early aftermath of 9/11, probably few people knew whether these would be events that would be brought back into the national consciousness every September or not. But on the first anniversary of the tragedies, in 2012, Vega certainly realized that for diehard New Yorkers like herself, there would be no forgetting, as she commemorated the unofficial commemoration: “Mark the month and all its anniversaries/Put away the draft of all your eulogies/Clear the way for all your private memories/As they meet you on each corner/Meet you on every street.” (Later, Vega would put together an entire compilation album of New York songwriters’ musings about 9/11, including another song she composed, “It Hit Home.”)

Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris: “If This Is Goodbye”

Nothing in Knopfler’s lyric addresses 9/11 in a specific way, but he has made clear in interviews that the song he wrote for his 2006 duets album with Harris was inspired by “those mobile phone calls from the towers—the calls to say ‘I love you.’” Listening to the ex-Dire Straits frontman and country’s most beautiful voice harmonize on this possible/likely farewell note (“Who knows if there’s a plan or not/There is our love/I know there is our love/My famous last words/Could never tell the story”), it’s easy to see why this smiling-through-tears heartbreaker has lent itself to becoming a funeral staple.

Talib Kweli: “The Proud”

Kweli’s song might be the most controversial here, as his verse about 9/11 follows a list of examples of unjustifiable in-house U.S. killings. “America kill the innocent, too,” he points out. But the hip-hop artist was not a denier when it came to the uniqueness of 9/11, and he pointed out: “We see the best examples of humanity in the face of the worst/As fire fighters, police officers, rescue workers and volunteers of all sorts fight to save lives” — not exactly anybody’s idea of a stereotypical rap sentiment.

John Mayer, “Covered in Rain”

Mayer never released a studio recording of this song, but it became a favorite via live albums, where he allowed it to stretch out at epic length. Its overt connection to 9/11 comes down to one line: “Standing by the missing signs at the CVS by the checkout line.” But that’s all Mayer really needs to do to set the context for a song in which he and his girlfriend are “drinking wine and watching CNN” and, “with the world getting colder, she spends more time sleeping over than I planned.” It’s a snapshot of a time when a lot of casual relationships became just a little more serious in the shadow of an apocalypse.

My Chemical Romance: “Skylines and Turnstiles” 

Imagine forming a future near-superstar group and the very first song you come up with is about 9/11. That’s an auspiciously ambitious start, and it’s a big part of the origin story for My Chemical Romance, as Gerard Way found inspiration, of a sort, in the horrors of that day: “It reaches in and tears your flesh apart/As ice cold hands rip into your heart/That’s if you’ve still got one that’s left inside that cave you call a chest/And after seeing what we saw, can we still reclaim our innocence/And if the world needs something better, let’s give them one more reason now.” The group didn’t survive to the 15th anniversary, but this instigating song does.

Leonard Cohen: “On That Day”

As you might expect, the master took a less overtly emotional, more zen approach to the aftermath of 9/11 (“I’m just holding the fort”), pointing out the zeal of both America and its enemies before seemingly drawing a contrast between the loudmouths and the quiet heroes: “Did you go crazy, or did you report, on that day they wounded New York.”

Sleater Kinney: “Far Away”

This frazzled rocker begins with a nursing mother getting a phone call to “turn on the TV (and) watch the world explode in flames.” A political note is struck — “The president hides, while working men rush in and give their lives” — before a note of universal dread that everyone felt in those uncertain moments is struck: “I look to the sky, and ask it not to rain on my family tonight.” No mom could have said it any clearer.

John Hiatt: “When New York Had Her Heart Broke”

Hiatt wrote this song right after being in New York as the towers fell, but, not wanting to capitalize on the tragedy, he didn’t record it until a producer convinced him to commit it to tape 10 years later. “I had mixed feelings,” he told Billboard, but “I felt like there was some distance, and time takes a little bit of the sting out.” Ultimately it’s as much of a love letter to New York and its resilience as the Beastie Boys’ aforementioned track, although Hiatt does focus on how “the daylight fell dark/F16s over Central Park.”

Mary Chapin Carpenter: “Grand Central Station”

After hearing a radio interview with an ironworker who was involved in the rescue and salvage efforts at Ground Zero, Carpenter got to thinking about ghosts. “Those first few days there at ground zero, [the worker] felt it was a very holy place,” she said. “When his shifts were over, he felt this life-force was somehow asking for his help, and when he would leave his shift he figured, whoever wants to go, I’ll take him with me, and he’d find himself just going to Grand Central Station, standing on the platform, and figuring whoever wanted to go home could just catch the train home.” Bruce Springsteen was all about the rising, but in Carpenter’s vision, the recently departed take their leave in the way New Yorkers would naturally prefer.

Eagles: “Hole in the World”

The Eagles’ comeback ballad is the only one on this list that doesn’t include even one explicit reference to 9/11 or its aftermath. But no one had to read an interview with Don Henley about what inspired it to know the answer. For years, any song with “hole” or “empty” in the title (see also Juliana Hatfield’s “Hole in the Sky”) was as likely to be alluding to the absent Twin Towers as not. As Henley explained, though, he also meant the hole in the world to refer to the absence on the home front of soldiers who lost their lives overseas fighting the wars that came about in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. The Eagles mention a Promised Land in these songs song, but even as sweet as the harmonies are, they sound a little too weary to really believe in it.

#lists #9/11 #_uuid:5918d9b0-3f0f-34b5-969c-d9bd3b18f651 #_wp:115835

[chriswillman]

2016 VMAs Highs and Lows: Lemons and ‘Lemonade’

Britney Spears performing with backup dancers in zebra-striped ensembles. (Photo: Getty Images)

Well, at least Britney Spears’s ballyhooed return to the MTV Video Music Awards was only her second-weakest VMAs performance. Compared to the debacle of 2007, her medley of “Make Me” and G-Eazy’s “Me, Myself and I” felt completely passable, though “not bad enough to be discussed around the water cooler” probably isn’t quite the comeback Spears enthusiasts were hoping for.

Its perfunctory unremarkableness left only one burning question: What wrong did Spears ever do to one of the show’s producers to merit the death-row slot immediately following Beyoncé’s? Below are some of the telecast’s best and worst moments.

LOW: Britney Spears, “Make Me”/”Me, Myself and I”

For her first VMAs performance in nine years, Spears spent half the number playing backup to her duet partner, G-Eazy … not exactly a huge show of confidence on MTV’s part in her ability to pull her own weight. Worse, Spears’s lip-synched vocals on “Me, Myself and I” — presumably recorded specifically for this occasion — sounded like they were being piped in from Mars. When she squatted behind the rapper and reached her hand through his legs, it looked like she was having trouble finding his crotch for a moment. But actual disaster was averted, and she can still whip that mane like nobody’s business, which may be good enough to sell more Vegas tickets, if not necessarily copies of Glory.

HIGH: Beyoncé, “Formation”

The closing segment of Bey’s Lemonade megamedley had her dancers seen from overhead, Busby Berkeley-style, forming the ♀ symbol. Feminism, meet marching-band precision! She dedicated her “Formation” video of the year award to the people of New Orleans.

LOW: Kanye West’s speech

Who among us has not at some point thought, “I am Kanye West, and that feels really great to say”? Donald Trump could only aspire to wing it with a stream-of-consciousness speech as meandering as West’s. One moment, it was about the troubles of “us on the inside of the TV” (and “I see you, Amber”). Then things got serious with “Last week, it was 22 people murdered in Chicago,” literally followed the next sentence by a Taylor Swift namecheck, followed three sentences later by kids dying again. But you have to give some kind of props to the first public address in history to give shout-outs to both Walt Disney and Jaden Smith.

HIGH: Beyoncé, “Pray You Catch Me”

The opening of Beyoncé’s epic Lemonade condensation also began with some overhead shots, with her angelically dressed backup dancers falling one by one (or two by two) in sudden baths of red, presumably cut down by the infidelity that is the subject of the song. If she’d stopped right there, it would have been the highlight of the night, but there were still about 12 minutes to go in her performance.

LOW: Key & Peele as hosts

MTV insisted ahead of time that the show would be host-less … and then the comedy duo were clearly the hosts of the show. Even their biggest fans knocked their mostly painful scripted patter, though, making you wonder if MTV’s refusal to acknowledge their role in the show was just a case of plausible deniability.

HIGH: Beyoncé, “Hold Up”

Did she really smash the camera, or was it just a cleverly rendered effect? Either way, with Beyoncé wielding a bat, the security probably didn’t have to work overtime to get the audience members in the front row to stay out of the way.

LOW: Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj, “Side to Side”

Competing with Kanye’s sexy gym in his “Fade” video, starring Teyana Taylor, Ariana and Nicki opened their own risqué workout facility, with Grande meriting a monogrammed pommel horse that was left rather wasted, given the disappointing lack of Olympic action in this production number. But if they gave medals for simulating oral sex, Grande and Minaj would both be champions. The number ended with the duo receiving the attention of their male dancers in a way that made even MTV’s editors blush and look away.

HIGH: Beyoncé, “Hurt Yourself”

Even without Jack White to join her, as he does on Lemonade, Beyoncé sang the F out of this profanity-filled rocker about putting the hurt back on a cheater.

LOW: Nick Jonas and Ty Dolla $ign, “Bacon“

So the big celebrity cameo Jonas promised for this number turned out to be … Joe Jonas? The idea of following Nick through a diner that eventually becomes more alive with dancing buddies had some initial promise, but by the time he joined his rapper pal on the boulevard outside, the wan payoff made us wonder if it wouldn’t have been more interesting just to follow Jonas through the Duane Reade across the street.

How many hours went into designing the camera blocking for Beyoncé’s medley? More than were spent on the rest of the show in total, from the looks of things … and none of the effort was wasted.

LOW: Rihanna’s first three performances

The idea of Rihanna as the evening’s recurring motif — a veritable medley of sequential medleys — suggested an emphasis on quantity over quality. And although she was hardly the only performer of the night to lip-sync (nearly everyone but Beyoncé did), her lack of interest in even mouthing the words, or holding up the mic half the time, could be read either as a great F-you to the pretense of miming or just a lazy inattention to all the details of multitasking.

HIGH: Beyoncé’s speech and guests

Look, we’re not saying that Beyoncé was pretty much the only good thing about this show, but … OK, we’re saying that. Anyhow: Her dedication of her final award to the people of New Orleans, and her bringing the mothers of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and Oscar Grant to the telecast, indicated that, for all her queenliness, she may have been one of the least narcissistic headliners of the evening.

Beyoncé had quite the entourage, including the Mothers of the Movement, at the MTV VMAs. (Photo: Larry Busacca/Getty Images for MTV)

LOW: Chainsmokers and Halsey, “Closer“

Maybe we all get the Song of the Summer we deserve, but if this is really a contender for 2016’s seasonal anthem, let’s hope for a less milquetoast autumn. The near-makeout session between Drew Taggart and Halsey looked more like calculation than chemistry. But Halsey did at least bring some serious underboob back for anyone who’d been missing it since the Kanye “Fade” video an hour earlier.

HIGH: Rihanna’s fourth and final performance

What? Beyoncé wasn’t the single-handed highlight of the VMAs? Against all odds, Rihanna pulled it out of the bag with a final medley that proved she can sing live and/or go utterly classy, and kill it on both counts, if the whim strikes her. When you need something to close a show that doesn’t make you wish you’d just turned it off an hour earlier, “Diamonds” are a viewer’s best friend.

#awards #lists #vmas #_uuid:e8f53fff-2041-3267-bdfb-7650e41ddd1e #_wp:99570

[chriswillman]

What's at Stake for Britney Spears's Big VMAs Comeback?

LAS VEGAS – If anyone has the right to say, “Don’t call it a comeback,” it’s Britney Spears, whose every public appearance since she bottomed out in 2007 has been labeled as the Possible Return to Form With Which She Might Finally Silence All Doubters. But however well or poorly you think she fared in any of those post-2007 appearances, none of them marked a return to the scene of the crime — the MTV Video Music Awards, site of her highest highs and single lowest low — until now.

Related: Britney Spears Sings With Jame Corden on ‘Carpool Karaoke’

On Sunday night, Spears will perform live at the VMAs for the first time since the great debacle of nine years ago. Will it be the definitively redemptive moment she’s been working toward for almost a decade… or just another night in Vegas, uneventfully transplanted to Madison Square Garden?

In recent years, she’s avoided the sacred or cursed ground that is the VMAs for the slightly less glaring spotlight of the Billboard Music Awards. In the spring of 2015, her duet on that show with Iggy Azalea, “Pretty Girls,” was largely seen as a chemistry-free whiff, but she came back to the BBMAs this year with a solo greatest-hits medley that went over far better. Clearly, she’d been in training, in the form of a Caesars Palace residency that began in 2013, and a nimble backflip in that performance three years ago made up for a multitude of lip-synching among some grouches who were expecting a lazier Britney.

Related: Oops! Britney Spears Does It Again in Latest Pop Culture Comeback

But expectations aren’t so low now, and VMAs viewers may be less primed to settle for something that seems snipped right out of her nightly Nevada set.

MTV’s producers have their work cut out for them in coming up with visual production elements that will compare with the snake, or Sapphic Madonna kiss, or schoolgirl outfit of yore. Because Spears goes into Sunday with one inherent handicap already on her scorecard: She’ll be performing “Make Me” — the song she was supposed to do on the Billboard Awards in May, before it was scratched in favor of the hits medley. Since then, it’s been unleashed on the public and already been found wanting, at least if the charts are any indication. “Make Me” currently sits at #51 on the Billboard Hot 100 in its fifth week, down from #43 last week and way down from its peak of #17. She might have a better shot at wowing the crowd if she already had a second single from her new album, Glory, teed up.

By Sunday night, fans will have already had two days to absorb Glory (or longer, if you factor in leaks). Early critical notices for the Aug. 26 have fallen in a middle ground between fabulosity and flop, as they have for most of Spears’s latter-day releases.

Related: Rating Britney Spears’s Best & Worst TV Appearances

USA Today gave Glory a middling two and a half stars, saying the album “has no intentions of deviating from her safe zone” but calls it “a worthwhile listen… Spears still falls back on old tricks that keep Glory from matching her best ’00s output; her voice is undeniably processed, and her lyrics are still strings of interchangeable come-ons. But refreshingly, Britney herself feels more present.” The Boston Globe wrote that Glory “has an unbridled energy that’s refreshing in late summer 2016, when pop-radio playlists are dominated by a hung-over malaise.” The New York Times was less impressed by “her latest attempt to reclaim her place on the pop charts, which are now crowded with younger performers who have studied her the way Ms. Spears studied Madonna. Her latest strategy is relentless and unambiguous: Stick to sexy.” The Times echoed USA Today in saying that at least Spears seems like a participant on her own album, unlike 2013’s flop Britney Jean: “She sounds more involved, more present, than she has in a decade… Yet even with her voice upfront, Ms. Spears isn’t singing anything particularly personal. It’s as if Ms. Spears can still only present herself as that most generic pop commodity: a sexpot.”

How much does the public really love a sexy mom? Spears hasn’t shied away from sharing about her kids on social media, but seemed embarrassed on an edition of “Carpool Karaoke” this week when James Corden likened her kids seeing her onstage in lingerie to him having walked in on his naked mum. At 34, Spears may already be facing the split career Madonna now has: a superstar whose old hits and persona will always prove a nostalgic live draw, but whose sexy new records seem a little too age-inappropriate for the young Top 40 audience.

Even with a stronger hit single than “Make Me…” as a teaser, Glory would have its work cut out for it in the current marketplace. Her previous effort, the much-maligned Britney Jean, has still only sold 272,000 copies in the three years it’s been out. Although even the more tepid reviews agree that Glory is more fun than the last album, it’ll take a different single to make that case to a wide radio audience.

Photos: The Wackiest VMAs Moments of All Time

How Spears would do out on the road now remains an open question, since her Vegas residency remains a safe zone. Her record for a single night’s ticket sales there was just eclipsed by Jennifer Lopez earning a million in receipts in one night for her fresh residency, but her sales were doing well enough last year — two years into the intermittent run — that she got a renewal through 2017. The general consensus has been that it’s not a bad show, as long as you don’t expect to hear her sing… and no one does. Just a few weeks ago, Washington Post columnist Julie Bone visited the revamped residency and quoted a patron as saying “I think I paid $600 to hear her lip-sync”… but Bone still loved the show, miming and all. Would arena audiences who haven’t been pumped up from hours of drinking and gambling feel as forgiving?

If you were placing Vegas odds on whether Spears will sing live Sunday night, that might come in as about a 70-1 bet. The good news for Spears is that even registering a complaint about her canned vocals feels very 2005. What the VMAs audience does want, though, is athleticism. Can she still move?

#awards #britney spears #vmas #_uuid:97f44e6a-a441-3fc9-bb86-a0e51865e6fc #_wp:97789

[chriswillman]

Rating Britney Spears’s Best and Worst TV Appearances: The Sexy, the Sleepy, and the Snaky

(Britney Spears at the 2001 VMAs during one of her most iconic awards show performances. Photo: Getty Images)

Whoopie, she’s doing it again! Britney Spears is set to perform at this Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards -- her first VMAs performance since the ill-fated one of 2007 -- with the televised debut of her new single, "Make Me." While this kind of live TV performance was a regular occurrence back in the day, she’s concentrated on her Las Vegas residency and largely shied away from the tube these past few years (aside from a greatest-hits medley at this year's Billboard Music Awards), so fans and the merely curious will be especially eager to see if she’s still got it (or got it back, given the lingering memories of a few rough patches in the late 2000s).

In advance of the tweet-storm that’s sure to greet Spears’s VMAs appearance, we’re diving into her TV catalog to pick her finest moments from over the years, along with some that might best be left on the YouTube cutting-room floor, if there were such a thing. Here, the best and worst of Brit-TV.

BEST: “Toxic” from the ABC In the Zone special (2003)

For anyone who might have forgotten just how at ease Spears can seem on a ridiculously frantic stage, this is the go-to moment from when she was at her absolute peak, finding just the right balance between relaxed sexiness and incredibly rigid choreography. No gimmicks, no guest stars, no snakes, no forbidden kisses… just a woman in red who is totally at one with her crew of flawless backing dancers. Yes, she’s lip-synching in this Gotham Hall-set clip, as she ultimately was in more of her TV spots than not — but if you can really hold that against her on this one, you probably just passionately hate dancing.

WORST: “Gimme More” at the MTV Video Music Awards (2007)

If Britney could erase just one night from her history… well, it might be that time she beat up the car with an umbrella, but more likely it’d be the evening she opened the VMAs with a performance so wan it made people forget the legend of Ashlee Simpson melting down on SNL. She was ill-prepared for such a big moment — from the lack of rehearsal to a last-minute, unflattering costume change — and she knew it before she hit the stage. The reaction was devastating: “She didn’t disappoint; she was awful,” wrote the New York Times. It “wasn’t enough to launch a dinghy, let alone re-launch the career of this ditzy disaster.” Simon Cowell opined that “she could have killed her career. It’s difficult to come back from that performance, for a while at least.” On The View, Joy Behar damned her with the faint praise every diva dreads most: “She’s a good role model, in that she comes out and shows she’s not skinny anymore.” 

BEST: “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”/”Oops… I Did It Again” at the MTV Video Music Awards (2000)

To paraphrase 42nd Street: “You’re going out there an ex-Disney kid known for sexy schoolgirl outfits, and you’re coming back an icon!” She’d already made an impact at the VMAs one year earlier, but in ‘99, she’d basically been serving as *NSYNC’s opening act in a teen-pop medley. It was at her first solo outing at the VMAs in ’00 where she instantly grew up and seared herself into our retinas, first covering the Stones in a fedora, then letting the cutaway suit drop and reveal the fleshiest of all flesh-colored outfits. And, with those copious blond locks and strong knees and athletic back, she took head-banging out of the province of Wayne’s World and made it into something like a new artform.

WORST: “Hold It Against Me” on Good Morning America (2011)

By 2011, Spears had at least gotten back into shape since her disastrous appearance on the VMAs in 2007, but the weirdly sleepy choreography in her ballyhooed GMA comeback made it seem as if she’d just rolled out of bed to do the morning show. Her biggest move was crossing her legs, during the minute or so she spends seated in a chair for no apparent reason. “Was that amazing or what?” Robin Roberts asked at the end of the number. America answered: What.

BEST: “I’m a Slave 4 U” at the MTV Video Music Awards (2001)

Mowgli’s got nothing on Britney, whose case of jungle fever climaxed in a pas-de-deux with a nine-foot snake named Banana. Far from flinching, Spears donned and doffed the Burmese albino python as if it were a feather boa. She got a little more familiar with some of the other creatures in the performance, which, fortunately, awee portrayed by human beings. Her sense of rhythm was just as captivating when Banana was offscreen, and it didsn’t hurt that she pulled off bright green better than anybody this side of the Riddler.

WORST: “S&M” with Rihanna at the Billboard Music Awards (2011)

This duet ended with the worst… pillow fight… ever. What led up to the flying feathers was nothing special, either, with Rihanna’s tropes about handcuffs and such providing one of the most tired moments in her usually lively career, and Britney not having much to add to the Kink Lite that a little bit of back-scratching pole dancing.

BEST: “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” at the American Music Awards (2002)

Britney singing live? Yes, it has happened over the years, if usually only on songs that don’t suck up a lot of breath, choreography-wise. This ballad performance was hampered by the distraction of clips from Crossroads, Spears’s first and still only non-cameo film role. But the pleasant surprise in revisiting the clip all these years later is that, despite a few pitchy notes, her live voice is not the embarrassment you might expect from how few times it’s been heard on television. Maybe it was a mistake sandwiching her between two more powerful backup singers at the end, but if she’s not yet a soul singer, she’s not bad.

WORST: “The Beat Goes On” at the World Music Awards (1999)

OK, there’s nothing truly terrible about this early Sonny & Cher cover, even if it’s obviously nothing Spears would ever include in a clip reel. Never mind the deer-in-the-headlights look she occasionally sports in one of her first screen singing appearances: Teen Brit is kind of adorbs in a Cher-homage-paying straight black wig. What sinks it is that, in 1999, she appeared to be performing in an invisible straitjacket. That wouldn’t last long. 

BEST: “Like a Virgin” with Madonna and Christina Aguilera at the MTV Video Music Awards (2003)

Of course, the finest performance in this celebrity cluster came from Brit ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake, offering a flash of skeptical side-eye in the front row. As for the women onstage, this was more of a Madonna moment than a Britney one, but Miss Spears at least established herself as a dominant second banana, versus the third place that former/future rival Christina Aguilera had to settle for. She got in the first of the two Sapphic kisses, and looked as cheerfully nonchalant about making out with Madge as she did carrying on with a snake two years earlier. She also appeared to be the only one onstage who was truly having fun. Imagine how mad Madonna must have been as the press hailed her for magnanimously passing a torch to Britney, when she clearly intended only to pass some tongue.

WORST: “Womanizer” on The X Factor U.K. (2010)

After Spears’s disastrous appearance at the 2007 MTV Awards, Simon Cowell publicly dissed her, telling Britain’s Sun newspaper: “If she had turned up and given that performance at the X Factor auditions, I wouldn't have put her through to the next round.” That didn’t stop him from having her on that very show — the pre-American, British version — three years later, where she turned in a performance that got a standing ovation from Cowell but… yeah, probably wouldn’t have advanced her to the next round in any real TV competition. A couple of years later, with Spears seeming to be past her troubled period, Cowell hired her to be a judge on the second season of the U.S. version of the show. That judgeship was short-lived, because, he said, “I kind of booked someone who couldn’t talk.”

BEST: “I’m a Slave 4 U” on The Late Show with David Letterman (2001)

The doors of the Ed Sullivan Theatre filled with blinding white light and smoke; little did the studio audience know that the entrance through which they’d come was actually a portal to heaven, or hell. Then Spears strolled down the aisle with a disarming casualness that carried over to what she did onstage, with a sense of friendly ease that belied just how serious the choreography was. When she wandered over to Dave, the spotlight stayed off him, so we’ll never know how his reaction compared to the time Drew Barrymore jumped on his desk. But if he had any sense at all, he should have been delighted, because this was Brit at her most winning.

WORST: “Pretty Girls” with Iggy Azalea at the Billboard Music Awards (2015)

To be fair, it wasn't Spears’s performance that hobbled this ill-fated duet. If anything, after some of the troubling appearances of her 2007-10 period, it was reassuring to see her look like she really belonged on a stage again here. That’s true of her as a hoofer, and also as a fashion plate: her seemingly painted-on outfit was a grabber. But the choreography didn’t really challenge her, and definitely didn’t give her any interaction to speak of with Azalea, beyond a token hand slap as they passed on the stage like ships in the night. Azalea came off less impressively than Spears, and any perceived lack of chemistry between the two was confirmed when Iggy started going off on Spears on Twitter after their single stiffed, in her predictable Iggy way. At least Spears gave off the vibe of someone who was back in shape and ready to pull off something more demanding… a promise we hope she delivers on when she returns to the VMAs this Sunday.

#mtv video music awards #lists #britney spears #vmas #awards

[chriswillman]

Catchphrase-palooza! The Origins of Lollapalooza's Name

(AP Photo/Dan Steinberg, file)

You can argue how great an impact Lollapalooza has ultimately had on rock ‘n’ roll since the festival began in 1991. One thing that’s inarguable: its effect on the English language.

Probably no suffix has gained traction in the last quarter-century quite like “-palooza.” Tracking the origins of the word and its outgrowth and myriad variations since Perry Farrell popularized it in 1991 makes for a real… etymology-palooza. (Sorry.)

Lollapalooza takes place this weekend in Chicago, having been reborn in 2009 as a geographically sedentary festival, as opposed to its original traveling circus format. One thing that hasn’t changed over the last 25 years is the delight with which people let the L-word trip off their tongues.. .or mash other words into it.

But the name didn’t seem like a great idea to everyone at the time. Marc Geiger, Farrell’s business partner in the festival, recalled his reaction upon first hearing it. In December 1990, Farrell “called my house at 1 in the morning and said ‘Geiger, I got the name!’ ‘OK!’ [With] Perry, you never know what he’s gonna come up with, and it was always exciting,” Geiger recalled a few years ago. “He goes ‘Lollapalooza.’ I remember just thinking: Nooooooo!” But he tried not to be a negative nellie about the idea. “I lived with it and I thought, OK, people are gonna remember that name the minute they hear it.”

Not just remember, but appropriate. By 1996, there’d been a “Homerpalooza” episode of The Simpsons. By 1998, Nickelodeon was dubbing a Sid & Marty Krofft marathon “Puf-a-Palooza.” Type just about any halfway-common noun into Google with “-palooza” attached—like, say, “bacon”—and odds are you’ll get thousands of hits.

For a while, the copycatting prompted enough threats from the fest’s legal team that Lollapalooza started to get an image behind the scenes as Litigi-palooza. But Farrell saw the light and put an end to that.

“I did have a happy thought in my heart to know that it has become part of the American vernacular, with all these funny paloozas,” the festival founder and Jane’s Addiction frontman said recently. “I’ll share a funny story with you. Early on, as people started to kind of use the palooza aspect of it, typical to lawyers, I was getting calls all day long from a lawyer: ‘Somebody’s calling themselves ‘Clamapalooza’ and they’re doing clams and oysters. Somebody’s doing Waterpalooza; they want to make a bottle out of it. We’ve gotta stop ’em!’ And I was at first really taken aback and I was put on my heels about it. But they were calling me all day long and I stopped and I thought about it. I said: These guys are probably making so much money trying to shut these ‘palooza’ people down. Better I should let ’em do it. Because I don’t intend on paying these lawyers all this money, No. 1. And No. 2, it’s actually advertisement for Lollapalooza. So I said, ‘You know what? Don’t bother ’em. Unless they’re calling it Lollapalooza, leave ’em alone and don’t call me.’ And you know, it really did work out.”

Of course, though he did trademark it, Farrell didn’t come up with the word. It dates back to the ’90s—the 1890s, that is—according to Merriam-Webster, although there’ve been variant spellings along the way. (In the very early 1900s, it was “lallapalootza,” per the Oxford English Dictionary‘s research, and in the early ’50s, the New Yorker ran it as “lollapaloosa.”)

Where’d Farrell come across it? Well, he’s got a story about that, though part of it appears to be apocryphal.

“Back in the day, people had paper dictionaries,” Farrell explained in a 20th anniversary video. “As a songwriter, I used to read the dictionary a lot… If I was hard up for a word, I would start thumbing through and sometimes it would trigger an idea for a song or a lyric. And laying on my back reading the dictionary, I came across ‘lollapalooza,’ which said ‘something or something great and/or wonderful.’ Then the second definition of it was ‘a giant swirling lollipop.’ And I thought about all the amazing, wonderful people I would bring together—not just the artists but the people themselves, the patrons, the people that listen to it, the punk rockers or post-punk rockers, and the rappers and all these wild people—Gibby Haynes and Ice T and Henry Rollins, man, smashing them all together. I thought, ‘This is the perfect name.’ Now, I had heard the expression once before. I don’t know what Three Stooges episode it was, but I did hear Moe say, ‘That’s a lollapalooza!'”

No, he didn’t. Well, at least according to every Three Stooges expert, he didn’t. Apparently, every short the Stooges ever made has been thoroughly combed through and no one has ever been able to find the utterance so frequently cited by Farrell (and repeated by Geiger and others). It’s not necessarily a fib-apalooza. As Michael Ray of Encyclopedia Britannica laughingly told the Chicago Tribune, “In Perry’s mind, it could have happened… [But] a good amount of time has been spent looking into whether anyone can come up with the actual episode. To the best of my knowledge, no one has actually come up with a [Stooges-related] source.”

The “Moe” part may not be the only fanciful element of Farrell’s explanation. Good luck finding Farrell’s “giant lollipop” in any current dictionary under “lollapalooza.” But it certainly set the trend for rock festivals. As the Encyclopedia Britannica editor said, “Whether it’s Sasquatch or Bonnaroo, you see people trying to set their festival apart with their own nonsense word.” Maybe that’s why HORDE, another big mid-’90s traveling fest, didn’t survive: Acronyms just don’t inspire the same cuddly loyalty.

For a while, Lollapalooza looked to be as DOA as HORDE. It went MIA after the 1997 tour and disappeared from the scene until being revived in 2003 as a strictly-Chicago (and occasionally overseas) affair. Some blame its original demise on the death of grunge, and/or the fall of alt-rock, even though it was conceived as a diverse gathering.

“We started in ’91, and by ’96 underground music was over,” Geiger told Spin. “Third Eye Blind was a cool band. Matchbox Twenty was the [expletive] next Radiohead.” When Metallica was drafted as the headliner in ’96, it was touted as a blow for inclusiveness, but a lot of non-metal-loving fans took it as time to bail. Farrell eventually realized that’d been a mistake, telling Rolling Stone, “I have nothing against Metallica, other than the fact that they were a different beast, they’re not an alternative rock group.” But they were the straw that broke the original model’s back.

At a certain point, there was no other choice, he contended. “The first five or seven years, we would have the headliner be a fresh, new artist that could draw 20,000 people or so. Now we have to go back in time, further and further—we’ve got Paul McCartney playing Coachella, for crying out loud—because there aren’t breaking groups.”

The headliners of the first few years still inspire nostalgia. In 1991, they had not just Jane’s but Nine Inch Nails, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Fishbone, the Violent Femmes, and Ice T’s Body Count. A year later, in the wake of the success of Nirvana (who never played Lollapalooza, though they were booked and canceled in ’94), you had Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Jesus & Mary Chain, Ice Cube, Temple of the Dog, and Ministry. In ’93, Rage Against the Machine, Primus, Arrested Development, and Alice in Chains were among those joining the fold, while ’94 brought about the Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest, George Clinton’s P-Funk, Smashing Pumpkins, Nick Cave, the Flaming Lips, and the Breeders, among others. The last “good” year, 1995, had Pavement, Hole, Sonic Youth, Beck, Moby, Cypress Hill, and Sinead O’Connor.

Sigh.

It’s hard to remember just how radical it seemed at the time for some of these acts to be playing to 20,000 people. All day. As Dave Navarro recalled to Spin: “In the originalTexas Chainsaw Massacre, towards the end, Leatherface is [filmed] in broad daylight, almost as if you’re watching a documentary, and that makes it that much more terrifying. Just like Nine Inch Nails, seeing them in the daylight.”

This weekend’s lineup in Chicago’s Grant Park is no collective slouch… as 2016 lineups go, anyway. The Chili Peppers, those veterans of 1992, are back, joined by Radiohead, Lana Del Rey, LCD Soundsystem, and Disclosure. Does this year’s lineup feel as relevant to you as Lolla’s national glory days, or are you happy to stick with your own personal nostalgia-palooza?

#lollapalooza #_uuid:7bb3301b-f6e0-381c-b4c7-85ac9032eb96 #_wp:47924

[chriswillman]

The Best Political Albums of All Time

Some of the subjects of Marvin Gaye’s Vietnam War-era album What’s Going On couldn’t have been more topical at the time. But that’s a title sentiment that just never gets old. What’s Going On is widely regarded as one of the best politically or socially themed albums of all time, and its message is as relevant as ever. Its title track has been covered by everyone from John Legend to Cyndi Lauper, with the most recent and timely cover coming from iconic glam-rock singer Michael Des Barres, whose hard-rockin’ version can be heard HERE.

Here’s a gallery of some other landmark albums to get you through troubled times. And once these albums have gotten you in the mood, check out this list of other suggested listening:

GIL SCOTT-HERON: Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970)

BOB MARLEY: Exodus (1977)

SYSTEM OF A DOWN: Toxicity (2001)

PETE SEEGER: We Shall Overcome (1963)

M.I.A.: Arular (2005)

MIDNIGHT OIL: Diesel and Dust (1990)

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)

THE DISPOSABLE HEROES OF HIPHOPRISY: Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury(1992)

PRIMAL SCREAM: XTRMNTR(2000)

TOM ROBINSON BAND: Power in the Darkness (1978)

PINK FLOYD: Animals (1977)

STEVE EARLE: The Revolution Starts Now (2004)

BIKINI KILL: Pussy Whipped (1993)

THE SPECIALS: Ghost Town (1981)

BRUCE COCKBURN: Stealing Fire (1984)

GANG OF FOUR: Entertainment! (1979)

DEAD KENNEDYS: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (1980)

HANK WILLIAMS JR.: Old School, New Rules (2012)

NEIL YOUNG: Living With War (2006)

JACKSON BROWNE: Lives in the Balance (1986)

NOFX: War on Errorism (2003)

MAX ROACH: We Insist! (1961)

MARVIN GAYE: What’s Going On (1971)

The soul singer felt a kinship with the Vietnam vets coming back to a divided homeland, wondering just what kind of America they'd been fighting for. He was dealing with his own estrangement, battling with Motown boss Berry Gordy, who reportedly hated the album and initially refused to release the title track as a single. The public wasn't put off, though, by a song cycle that turned out to be as accessible as any of his '60s pop hits had been. As Legend told Yahoo, "It was such a bold choice for an artist known primarily for his sweet love songs to make such a provocative album with such a strong political message. But what made it so great was that it didn't come off too preachy. He was able to make this 'message' record that was still sensual and beautiful."

PUBLIC ENEMY: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)

Chuck D has been such a conciliatory presence in hip-hop culture in subsequent decades that it’s hard to remember just how scary Public Enemy seemed to much of the watching world in the late '80s. On one side, you had the ever contentious, allegedly separatist Professor Griff; on the other, comic presence and future reality star Flava Flav. Holding down the sensible but still enraged middle: Chuck, a one-man "black CNN."

NINA SIMONE: Nina Simone in Concert (1964)

Few big stars whose work has turned political have taken a big hit to their careers for it, but Simone’s case is different. In '64, the celebrated jazz singer released an album of her Carnegie Hall concert that included the song "Mississippi Goddam," about the murder of Medgar Evers and other Civil Rights-related homicides, as well as other barbed numbers like "Go Limp" and "The Ballad of Jim Crow." Later, she would tell Ebony that "the industry decided to punish me" for her "controversial songs" and "put a boycott on my records… I wouldn't change being a part of the civil rights movement… but some of the songs that I sang, I would have changed because they hurt my career."

SLY & THE FAMILY STONE: There's a Riot Goin' On (1971)

From the year that brought you What's Going On, we also got this more pessimistic overview of the public mood from Sly Stone, taking a sudden brooding turn away from his namesake band's celebratory party music toward what music critic Robert Christgau called "the bitterest ghetto pessimism," as well as "prophetic." Although some fans were taken aback, enough got on board to make this the band's last No. 1 album.

THE ROOTS: Rising Down (2008)

How is it possible that the group responsible for the most socially thoughtful hip-hop of the last couple of decades also became the heirs to Doc Severinson? Why ask why? Any number of Roots albums might be cited as their socially conscious peak, but this relatively late — and dark! — one in their catalog is a fine one to cite as an example that "protest" music is not a relic of the '60s or even early '90s. They may be America's house band, but Questlove has a lot more on his mind than the next cue.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE: Rage Against the Machine (1992)

Not a love song or even a particularly personal reflection in the bunch. The notably profane "Killing in the Name Of" equated brutal law enforcement with the KKK… the kind of sentiment that might find favor again among some in these suddenly troubled times in Missouri. Even some conservative fans who didn't like the far-left thoughts that Rage was trying to put into your head still liked to head-bang to the band… including, famously and quizzically, Paul Ryan!

THE CLASH: The Clash (1977)

Americans didn’t take Joe Strummer's anti-Yank broadsides in "I'm So Bored With the USA" too personally, as the group would go on to great Stateside success with future equally political albums like London Calling. This was the one that firmly established that the punk movement could be about something more substantial than just figuratively spitting in the face of prog-rock, with calls to arms like "White Riot," which urged Strummer's fellow Caucasians to get as outraged over police oppression as the Caribbean immigrants he'd recently seen rioting.

U2: War (1983)

U2 proved they weren't just spiritually inclined new wave moptops on a third album that had Bono waving the white flag at warring factions in his native Ireland. The sectarian troubles have calmed down, but U2 fandom's desire to hear "Sunday Bloody Sunday" in concert never has.

BOB DYLAN: The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964)

Dylan's first entirely self-penned album spawned a title song that’s still used to represent any generation or even serious thought gap, along with tunes that addressed the self-righteousness of war mongerers ("With God on Our Side"), the plight of laborers ("North Country Blues"), and racial injustice and murder ("The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," "Only a Pawn in Their Game"). The singer has spent the subsequent 50 years trying to shed the mantle of "protest singer," but it was testament to the power of this third album that he still never quite has.

JOHNNY CASH: Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian (1964)

Your last album had "I Walk the Line" as its title song. How do you follow up a smash like that? If you're as much of a socially concerned maverick as Cash, it's by recording a thoroughly unmarketable concept album about the plight of the Native American. Wait, did we say uncommercial? Let’s walk that back, because somehow, in this very pre-bro-country era, the single "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" — about an Indian Marine who went from the reservation to Iwo Jima to drunken obscurity — somehow made it to No. 3 on the chart.

#lists #photos #slideshow

[chriswillman]

The 50 Greatest Summer Anthems Ever

It's a well-known fact that the act of humming helps alleviate the effects of severe summer heat. And if you swallow that, you may also believe it when we assure that there was an entirely scientific basis for this ranking of the 50 greatest summer songs of all time!

Before you protest, know that we left out tunes that have "summer" in the title but are really more about the spiritual dog days of winter (like Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer") or only mention the season as part of a random succession of lines (like Frank Sinatra's "I Like New York in June"). No, we were looking for songs that really get at the spirit of summer, in all its sweat and sexiness and solstice hope. Soak up the sun with us, won't you?

1. "SUMMER IN THE CITY," The Lovin' Spoonful

The agony and the ecstasy! The genius of this No. 1 smash from 1966 is how it captures the best and worst of summer—demarcated, among the working class in some sweaty towns, by the moment the sun goes down.

2. "SCHOOL'S OUT," Alice Cooper

Since 1972, the only last-day-of-class song that matters. And the soundtrack for a hundred million schoolboy riot fantasies.

3. "DANCING IN THE STREET," Martha and the Vandellas

The musical block party to end all block parties. It became a sort of de facto civil rights anthem in the '60s, even though it was inspired by nothing more noble than the sight of Detroit kids cooling off in the spray of a fire hydrant.

4. "SUMMER NIGHT," John Travolta and Olivia-Newton John

He said/she said. Or, she crushed/he lusted. Come September, whose brain cells are really un-fried enough to remember exactly how it went down, anyway?

5. "ALL SUMMER LONG," The Beach Boys

The greatest end-of-summer song, ever... re-immortalized when George Lucas used it as the final number of American Graffiti. But you don't have to wait till it's time to look back on Labor Day to enjoy a tune that invokes cut-offs, thongs (the 1960s kind), and miniature golf.

6. "SUMMERTIME," DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince

"Let the Alpine blast," indeed! That product placement may make Will Smith's 1991 hit sound slightly dated, but it was still fresh enough for the former rapper to perform at the Men in Black 3 premiere.

7. "4TH OF JULY, ASBURY PARK (SANDY)," Bruce Springsteen

Way back on Bruce's second album, he captured the magnificent allure of the carnival and pier for young lovers, in a fashion that combined the Drifters' romanticism with his then-Dylanesque wordiness.

8. "UNDER THE BOARDWALK," The Drifters

Speaking of the Drifters, they really had the under/over differential of summer down pat. You could find them escaping the stifling indoors up on the roof or down under the bustle of busy feet.

9. "CALIFORNIA GURLS," Katy Perry

Apparently there is a dress code for womenfolk in summer. Thank God Katy "Daisy Dukes, Bikinis on Top" Perry finally put it in writing.

10. "THAT SUMMER FEELING," Jonathan Richman

The wistful qualities of summer—longing for childhood, or maybe an anticipated nostalgia for the magic of right now—have never been captured in song more beautifully than in cult idol Richman's ballad.

11. "SUMMERTIME BLUES," Eddie Cochran

Oh, we can think of plenty of cures — most of them elucidated in the other songs on this list. But let's humor Eddie as he names the many, many ways that summer can bring a teenager down, not the least of which is an uncaring Congress.

12. "SUMMERTIME, SUMMERTIME," The Jamies

This 1958 song is actually the reason the falsetto was invented.

13. "GOOD DAY SUNSHINE," The Beatles

Not necessarily just a summer song — and, as we know, any day where the sun comes out in the Beatles' native country is a good-to-great one. Regardless of what season he wrote it, Paul McCartney knows better than anyone how to put a spring in our summer step.

14. "CRUEL SUMMER," Bananarama

The 1980s were cruel in so many ways, not the least of which was the cruel and unusual punishment chemically inflicted upon innocent hair. But the summers could be particularly unfeeling when it came to keeping young girls' hearts intact.

15. "4TH OF JULY," X

Another lovers' squabble, this one unresolved, in a mid-tempo ballad written by Dave Alvin for L.A.'s greatest post-'70s rock band. Are the "Mexican kids out shooting fireworks blow" there to help blow up what's left of the couple's love, or to urge them toward an explosively sexy reconciliation?

16. "HOT FUN IN THE SUMMERTIME," Sly & the Family Stone

A little bit of soul makes perspiration suddenly feel like inspiration.

17. "JUNE IS BUSTING OUT ALL OVER," Audra McDonald

This ode to suddenly emerging summer hormones is always the high-energy point of any production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel. We're partial to the version sung by McDonald in the mid-'90s in her breakout role in the Broadway revival.

18. "SUMMERTIME," Janis Joplin

So many versions of Gershwin's "Summertime," so little time. But Joplin's scorching rendition is the one we most want to give the time of day to.

19. "SURFER GIRL," The Beach Boys

OK, so every Beach Boys song that predated Pet Sounds was a classic summer song, pretty much. Brian Wilson and company found an early peak with this veneration of the quintessential Girl of Summer, an all-American yet almost mythical figure sending out her siren song from the crest of a Pacific swell.

20. "HEAT WAVE," Martha and the Vandellas

It's not the heat, it's the stupidity, of falling hopelessly in love. Or maybe the humidity. Who knows? Metaphors sometimes become reality when love gives you a case of the vapors.

21. "ROCKAWAY BEACH," The Ramones

This punk classic starts off by referring to the Drifters' "Up on the Roof" before concluding, somewhat irrefutably, that the beach is an even better place to escape the heat.

22. "SUMMER BREEZE," Seals & Crofts

A 1970s Top 40 standard to cool off by. Think of all the junior-high kids of the period who were disappointed to learn that the jasmine mentioned in the chorus was not something you can smoke.

23. "THE SUMMER WIND," Frank Sinatra

Here's something Seals & Crofts didn't tell you: That summer breeze is fickle. And it'll take your baby away without so much as a hurricane warning.

24. "VACATION," The Go-Go's

Belinda Carlisle and company didn't seem to be having any easier a time of it than fellow girl group Bananarama. Thank heaven, then, for the curative powers of waterskiing!

25. "SUMMER LOVE," Justin Timberlake

Timberlake promises his conquest that their romance will not be "just" a summer love. And, of course, nothing says sincere, undying commitment like "I'm-a freak it right."

37. "GIRLS IN THEIR SUMMER CLOTHES," Bruce Springsteen

In this gorgeously aching, underrated classic from Magic, the Boss can appreciate the aesthetics of girl-watching, but he's melancholy anyway. And how sad is that?

27. "SATURDAY IN THE PARK," Chicago

What day is it again? Wait, let's think...

28. "4TH OF JULY," Shooter Jennings

That's right, Independence Day! Waylon's son will never write a hookier tune — and neither, for that matter, will almost anyone else — than this instant country-rock classic from the early 2000s.

29. "4TH OF JULY," Aimee Mann

But if you want the most non-celebrative possible variation on America's birthday, check out the beautiful bummer of a ballad from Mann, who looks at the fireworks and, lost in her funk, can only proclaim, "What a waste of gunpowder and sky."

30. "THE OTHER SIDE OF SUMMER," Elvis Costello

Aimee Mann isn't the only one to find a dark side to the sunniest time of year. Costello's early '90s single brilliantly looks toward the flip side of summer and even cleverly has Beach Boys-style backing harmonies while he warns about "the poisonous surf." "There's magic and there's malice in every season," he concludes, and surely not even Brian Wilson would argue.

31. "SURF CITY," Jan and Dean

If you sometimes mistake this for a Beach Boys song, the sun isn't playing tricks on your head: Brian Wilson was its primary writer. "Two girls for every boy"—that's good news for Jan and Dean, but even worse news for the already-suffering female protagonists in the Bananarama and Go-Go's songs.

32. "IN THE SUMMERTIME," Mungo Jerry

Tropicalia, ho!

33. "LONG HOT SUMMER," Keith Urban

Is there any innocent physical expression a girl could do that better says "I'm into you" than putting her bare feet on a car dashboard? Keith Urban knows there is not.

34. "SUNNY AFTERNOON," The Kinks

Lazy is good, right? Surely everyone is familiar with the justifiable inertia defense?

35. "SUMMER NIGHT CITY," ABBA

This ode to the hours after dark picked up where the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City" left off, give or take a decade: At the disco.

36. "IT MUST BE SUMMER," Fountains of Wayne

Hurry, sundown... if not autumn. The singer's girl is nowhere to be found, even on Long Island Sound. And so, forlorn, he proclais: "The sun is beating me senseless/I feel defenseless like a dying lamb/I don't wan't to lie by the oceanside/Don't want to play in the sand/Can't you understand?"

37. "SUMMER OF LOVE," The B-52s

The new wave faves' anthem wasn't a paean to Haight-Asbury's Summer of Love, but rather love itself. And also, incidentally, "orange popsicles and lemonade."

38. "REMEMBER (WALKING IN THE SAND)," The Shangri-Las

We remember this girl-group lament so fondly that we even liked the Aerosmith remake.

39. "YOU TOOK THE WORDS RIGHT OUT OF MY MOUTH (HOT SUMMER NIGHT)," Meat Loaf

Speaking of girl groups, that sound was recaptured brilliantly in this Spectorian extravaganza.

40. "SOAK UP THE SUN," Sheryl Crow

It seems like Crow was trying to be a little bit ironic with this ray-soaked ode to summer mindlessness... but it's the unofficial Tanning Mom theme song anyway.

41. "IT'S TOO HOT FOR WORDS," Billie Holiday

Fortunately, she's not speechless, or this jazzy 1935 track would have been an instrumental.

42. "TOO DARN HOT," Ella Fitzgerald

Ella has a word for the heat, though, and it's darn. Since it's so doggone steamy anyway, so why not throw more Cole Porter on the fire?

43. "NEVER DREAMED YOU'D LEAVE IN SUMMER," Stevie Wonder

He prefers autumn leavers, you see.

44. "HOLIDAY ROAD," Lindsey Buckingham

Ain't no cure for the summertime blues like a road trip.

45. "SUMMER FLING," k.d. lang

The Percy Faith-style strings add a perfect touch to her tale of what can go on in a summer place.

46. "CONSTRUCTIVE SUMMER," The Hold Steady

"Summer grant us all the power/To drink on top of water towers," sings Craig Finn, pining for high school days.

47. "THOSE LAZY-HAZY-CRAZY DAYS OF SUMME," Nat King Cole

Here's one that, in the words of Paul McCartney, your mother should know.

48. "SUMMER'S KISS," Afghan Whigs

Greg Dulli pines like a mofo for his childhood summer of 1973.

49. "ALL SUMMER LONG," Kid Rock

More '70s nostalgia, this time dragging Skynyrd and Zevon into the reverie.

50. "SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER," The Happenings

For every summer-only romance among the young, there are five longer-term love affairs that are interrupted as students go their separate ways between the school years. "Have a good time, but remember, there is danger in the summer moon above! Will I see you in September, or lose you to a summer love?" If Danny Zuko is involved, blazer boys, your odds pretty much suck.

But that's not all! Here are some more from the summer honor roll:

"SUMMER BABE," Pavement

"YOUR SUMMER DREAM," The Beach Boys

"SUMMERTIME," Billy Stewart

"EVENING IN JUNE," Van Morrison

"SUMMER'S NOT HOT," Selena Gomez

"LOVE LETTERS IN THE SAND," Pat Boone

"HERE COMES SUMMER," The Dave Clark Five

"LONG HOT SUMMER DAYS," Sara Watkins

"SUMMER," War

"A SUMMER SONG," Chad and Jeremy

"SUMMER MOOD," Best Coast

"JULY, JULY," The Decemberists

"HOT SUMMER DAY," It's a Beautiful Day

"THE HISSING OF SUMMER LAWNS", Joni Mitchell

"SUMMERTIME," Kenny Chesney

"MY SUMMER VACATION," Ice Cube

"THEME FROM 'A SUMMER PLACE,'" Percy Faith

"COOL FOR THE SUMMER," Demi Lovato

"STONE IN LOVE," Journey

#playlists #lists #summer

[chriswillman]

London (Angrily) Calling: The British Wave of Protest Punk That Might Be Due for Revival

(photo: Getty Images)

That stereotype about Brits being polite and reserved? It went right out the window, at least for a few years, in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, when Britannia became better known for rage than reticence, thanks to the dawning of the punk era. Unlike today’s American pop-punk bands, who have trouble finding anything to rage about besides hormones, the punk and new wave acts of the Thatcher-era U.K. had an economic and cultural crisis to react to in song, replete with unemployment and perceived xenophobia.

Sound familiar? If you think it does, then maybe you’re looking for a silver lining in England’s current furor over the Brexit vote. After all, the last time the British economy went in the tank and led to a sharp turn to the right, music fans got a golden age out of it, rife with a good portion of the most convincingly angry rock ‘n’ roll ever created, by the Clash, Elvis Costello, the Sex Pistols, the Specials, and other surly upstarts. If there’s a bright side to Britain’s current crisis, it might be in a coming wave of protest music.

While we wait to see if any such post-Brexit tide arrives in response to London’s burning emotions, here’s a look back at 10 of the most scathing songs to come out of that previous British crisis. 

“GOD SAVE THE QUEEN” — THE SEX PISTOLS

Sometimes it’s easy for Yanks to forget that Margaret Thatcher didn’t become Prime Minister until 1979, so hardly all the furious British rock of that era was in response to her polarizing rise. Two years before that, Johnny Rotten and company found a less immediately polarizing figure to stake their sneering claim upon: the queen herself. Trashing the monarchy? Then, as now, it was somewhat taboo even on the left, and it’d been few enough years since WWII that the phrase “fascist regime” carried more baggage than it does now. But to the disenfranchised young who felt they had “no future” (or “nooooo fuuuuuuture”), the Sex Pistols pointed out a scapegoat hiding right in plain sight. After this came the equally nihilistic “Anarchy in the U.K.” Diagnosis, or prescription?

“WHITE RIOT” — THE CLASH

The racial politics of this early Clash anthem were a little difficult to parse, at least for foreigners. But after members of the band saw violence erupt between young blacks and police at a Notting Hill Gate festival in 1978, they were inspired to write a song wondering why young whites couldn’t be equally shaken out of their complacency. They later explained that they didn’t mean the call to riot literally, necessarily, but you could be forgiven for thinking the song suggested white kids should pick up a brick in solidarity with the uprising of their black brethren. Practically half the Clash’s catalog can be seen as in a protest vein, with “Clampdown” and “Career Opportunities” continuing the thread of England as a dystopia for the young.

“OLIVER’S ARMY” — ELVIS COSTELLO

A new wave revelation: protest rock didn’t have to sound angry to be legitimately nasty. The ABBA-inspired piano on “Oliver’s Army” barely belied the venom Costello held for England’s armed forces. The Oliver of the title was 17th century commander Oliver Cromwell, who established the New Model Army — which was this year’s model, too, in Costello’s eyes. He was taking on the army recruiters who, as he saw it, preyed upon youths with no hope of escaping Britain’s record unemployment. He knew “the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne” (or Liverpool, London, and Newcastle) might get sent to “the murder mile” (a particularly dangerous area in Northern Ireland), or any of the other exotic locales he name-checked: “If you're out of luck or out of work/We could send you to Johannesburg.” Costello’s British politics-themed songs really started with “Less Than Zero” and continued with “Pills and Soap,” “Shipbuilding,” and the Thatcher-hating “Tramp the Dirt Down.”

“GHOST TOWN” — THE SPECIALS

It’s middle-class Britannia as the Haunted Mansion. This spooky but catchy neo-reggae tune went to No. 1 on the U.K. charts in 1981, although not everyone embraced the grim sentiment about urban decay and abandonment in the wake of rioting that had braced several cities the previous year. The true subject of the song was bandleader Jerry Dammers’ hometown, Coventry, where he really did see clubs closing down. “Government leaving the youth on the shelf… No job to be found in this country… The people getting angry.” This message was not brought to you by the English Tourism Board. Ironically, speaking of unemployment, it was reportedly the contentious sessions for the song that led the band to split up within two months of recording this, their biggest hit. But they left a legacy of other politically minded songs, too, including “Why” and “Concrete Jungle.”

“TOWN CALLED MALICE” — THE JAM

Paul Weller was a very serious and civic-minded young man of 17 when the Jam started out in the late ’70s. Before their short career as a band was up and Weller moved on to the Style Council, he generated a lot of socio-political material, including “That’s Entertainment” and “Eton Rifles” (a broadside against a soldier-spawning private school that Eton alumnus and future Prime Minister David Cameron somehow mistook for a compliment to his alma mater). But the most popular of the Jam’s protest music — hitting No. 1 in the homeland in 1982 — was “Malice,” a deceptively upbeat paean to an economic downturn. “Rows and rows of disused milk floats/Stand dying in the dairy yard/And a hundred lonely housewives/Clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts” somehow made for lively, R&B-inflected new wave fun.

“ELECTRIC AVENUE” — EDDY GRANT

The protest song that no one in the U.S. realized was a protest song, thanks to our being distracted by the sparkliness that was early MTV. We should have suspected when the opening line was “Down in the street there is violence,” and perhaps we could have picked up another clue from “Deep in my heart I abhor ya/Can’t get food for the kid.” He was writing about the 1981 Brixton riots, part of which took place on, yes, a thoroughfare named Electric Avenue — which, whatever we American MTV viewers assumed, was no relation to Electric Boogaloo or Electric Dreams.

“MADAME MEDUSA” — UB40

Americans knew UB40 primarily as Neil Diamond revivalists, but there was no mistaking for Brits that the band was named after an unemployment form, and much of their initial material reflected that attention to social conditions. “Madame Medusa,” from their 1980 debut, was a nearly 13-minute broadside against Margaret Thatcher, who went unnamed but was clearly being unflatteringly depicted in a scenario that saw the title figure rise “from the tombs of ignorance, of hate and greed and lies” and had “the sick the poor the old/Basking in her radiance.” It took a lot of red wine to wash that bitter taste out.

“NOT NOW JOHN” — PINK FLOYD

The Sex Pistols supposedly came into being partly in reaction to prog-rock groups like Pink Floyd, yet Roger Waters was on much the same page as Johnny Rotten, as a non-lover of the British political aristocracy. The entire Final Cut album — Floyd’s swan song under the leadership of Waters — was politically themed, to its commercial detriment. “Fletcher Memorial Home” took on foreign political leaders like Reagan and Alexander Haig (remember him?) as well as targets in Waters’s home country. But the profane single “Not Now John” stuck closer to home, mentioning a need to “compete with the wily Japanese” and mentioning how “we showed Argentina” in the Falklands before concluding: “Won’t Maggie be pleased?”

“STAND DOWN MARGARET” — THE ENGLISH BEAT

The Specials did not have a premium on political content in the two-tone scene. The (English) Beat’s band leader Dave Wakeling told Songfacts the genesis of the song: “The late '70s in England were troubled times: high unemployment, secession, the fear of nuclear war breaking out, the kind of fantasy end-of-the-century, end-of-the-world kind of feeling. And Margaret Thatcher came on, kind of like the last great hope of the British Empire… And in a very few short years she managed to turn people in England from neighbors to competitors… jealously guarding our shares. Our people stopped talking to each other at bus stops. People started to become more suspicious of each other. And the sense of camaraderie was broken in a way that I haven't ever seen fully replaced, really.” His call for her to stand down was hardly heeded, but it gave aid and comfort to a wave of disaffected mods and rockers. Of course, Wakeling’s request for a resignation seemed quite mild compared to Morrissey’s wish, later in the ‘80s, for “Margaret on the Guillotine.”

“SHIPBUILDING” — ROBERT WYATT

Elvis Costello eventually claimed this ballad for himself, hiring Chet Baker for a trumpet solo. And it’s still a haunting highlight of Costello’s concert sets. But a year earlier, in 1982, he gave it to Wyatt, offering a hot-off-the-presses perspective on England’s short war with Argentina over the Falklands. It’s ultimately less specific to that situation than war in general, pointing out the irony of the economic positivity of “reopening the shipyards” being nearly simultaneous with the tragedy of “notifying the next of kin.” Costello later made his latent anger with Thatcher’s war policies blatant in “Tramp the Dirt Down,” which became famous for wishing for the prime minister’s demise.

#lists #brexit

[chriswillman]

Garth Brooks, New York Homeboy: The Country Superstar Previews His Yankee Stadium Moment

He’s got friends in Long Island-adjacent places. Garth Brooks is coming to Yankee Stadium July 9, for a show that will be captured on film for an even bigger audience. (Streaming or a recorded TV special? That’s all yet to be determined.) You could call the Bronx incursion of music’s most famous belt-buckle bearer an Okie-out-of-water story... 

...but, if you did characterize it that way, you’d be proving to have a short memory. Because Garth already proved just how at home he can make himself in the Big Apple back in 1997, when his free Central Park concert seemed to make all of Manhattan into that proverbial low place he came to fame singing about. Depending on which crowd figure was accurate — estimates ranged from 750,000 to 980,000 — it was either the biggest or second-biggest concert in American history. By that standard, July’s Yankee Stadium gig will be a comparative club gig. But the probability of an instant sellout when tickets go on sale Friday will again establish that Brooks remains just as sure a draw above the Mason-Dixon line as below it.

Brooks stopped by the stadium Tuesday to promote the on-sale, and he took time out to tell Yahoo Music why the stadium offer felt like “a gift” between his usual runs of multi-night arena shows. Plus, he looked even farther ahead to a Christmas gift that’s in the offing.

YAHOO MUSIC: You’re the master of the singular ticket price, with every seat set in the same $70-80 base range. Will that be the same at Yankee Stadium, too, even though the people in the front will be getting a very different experience than the fans in the back? One price point still fits all?

GARTH BROOKS: Yeah. I just like the luck of the draw. Truthfully, man, it would break my heart if my child said “Hey, Dad, how come we’re not sitting down there?” and the answer is, “We can’t afford it.” I’d rather much that child is hearing that it’s just the luck of the draw, and you get your tickets when they come up, and whoever gets in there, it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact of who can afford more or not. You know the great John Lennon quote, [paraphrasing] “You fans up there in the balcony make some noise; you people on the floor rattle your jewelry” [when the Beatles performed for the queen, but fans were allowed upstairs]? That kind of thing is what I always try to stay away from.

You haven’t played in New York City since you did Central Park in 1997, which by some estimates had the biggest attendance at any concert in history. After you came out of retirement, you’ve been back on the touring circuit for more than a year and a half, but you avoided NYC up until now. Is that because you were trying in vain to figure out how to do even bigger and better than Central Park, which you really couldn’t do unless you played from the top of the Empire State Building?

When you take on something like Central Park, I guess you never look past it and go, “Well, if I play here again, how are you gonna do it?” But the truth is, man, it doesn’t matter to us. It doesn’t matter if it’s five people or 5,000. We just want a place to play and have fun. But when this call came from Yankee Stadium, it was like, “Oh, that makes all kinds of sense to me to come back and do this.”

You’re doing multiple nights at arenas on the rest of your tour dates — a level of venue that is kind of mid-level for you, between the intimacy of your Las Vegas residency and the ability to do stadiums if you wanted to. Why stick with arenas — other than this? And when you do this stadium one-off, do you have to adjust the show?

You’re dead-on. Say we’re averaging somewhere between 95,000 and 100,000 in each city. How do you want to do that? Do you want to do it as a stadium show, or do you want to do individual arena shows where the whole room gets a little more up close and personal? That’s kind of how we wanted to do it. But then something like this comes along where just the name itself, Yankee Stadium, is the event. You take that as a gift. Now my job is to try to make this feel like a small arena to these people who show up. And then the job of the guy filming it is to make it look as big as he can. You get the best of both worlds, I think.

Speaking of which, how will this be filmed, and for what? Will there be a live TV or streaming element, or will you record it and save it for another purpose?

Right now that’s still on the drawing board. We really don’t know what’s going to happen. You go through the on-sale first and see what the parameters are and see what you have to work with. The rain-or-shine thing kind of gets you [thinking about weather hazards], too. Same way it was in Texas Stadium [filmed for a TV special in 1993]; even though it was a stadium that was domed, the roof was open on it always at that point. And the same way with Central Park. All these things come into play when you’re trying to film something.

You’re on what you describe as a three-year tour, though the dates are put on sale bit by bit. How do you calculate the length of a tour and put that precise number on it?

BROOKS: I think the reason we do it is because that’s what we’ve always done. This is our third time we’ve done a world tour. The one in the early ‘90s went for three years; the one in the late ‘90s went for three years. Usually that’s the time it takes to see the allotted cities. But those tours were 96 cities or something. We’ll never make that number on this one... A big difference between now and the ‘90s is, all you had to compete with then were hockey games and basketball games. Now, arenas are like this stadium: I’m in Yankee Stadium right now and I’m watching ‘em set up for a graduation. They’re all starting to realize that every event in the world can fit into your arena, and you’re competing with thosel kinds of things for that arena space, too. So getting arenas (for multiple-night runs) is harder and harder as time goes by. 

YAHOO: You put out a new album a couple of years ago, and you’re still performing some of the songs from that, like “Mom.” Will you be bringing any new music in the near future?

If you want talk about the big difference [between the ‘90s and now], how do you try out new music without it being on YouTube the next day? That’s one of the things that’s been taken away from the live show: We used to be able to experiment and know, “Hey, this song’s really working well out on the road, so let’s go and let’s cut it — let’s do this thing.” Now, a lot of the stuff’s mostly what we call working in a lab, behind closed doors. New music is not as easy to work on on the tour as it is in the studio.

So any new album release from you is still a ways off?

Oh, no, I don’t think so. We were supposed to be [out with something new] this last Christmas. The tour has kind of – thank God — pushed everything back, with the way people are showing up. We feel very lucky. Right now me and Miss Yearwood are just finishing up our first-ever Christmas album — I mean, our first album together [period] — which is coming out this Christmas. Then the [other studio] late summer or fall record, we’ll get started working on that here in the next week or 10 days.

You’re the first country act to play the new Yankee Stadium. You put in a cameo with Billy Joel when he was closing out the old Shea Stadium. Do you put stock in the historical value of firsts or lasts in these kinds of venues, or is a building just a conduit for your show?

It’s funny. If you ever dabble in screenwriting or movies or anything like that, they say one of the most important characters is where it’s shot. That becomes a character itself. So there is no building that’s just a building. We just played a place in Grand Rapids, and it was so tight, I don’t even know how the stage got in there. You’re going, “Holy cow, this is like dynamite getting ready to happen,” because it was so packed. Each building is its own thing. Where you’re at in Southern California, for example, Anaheim [the arena now called the Honda Center] is a little more what I would call soft-seated. It’s a lot more plush, and it’s a bigger room than the old Forum. Whereas you would hit a chord in the old Forum and it bounces around for 15 or 20 minutes, like the old rock palaces – just fantastic. And then you have things like the Staples Center, which seem to be right in the middle of the two. So each building has its own fingerprint, and you prepare for that when you go in, how to play them differently.

How do you prepare to play Yankee Stadium, when you haven’t done that before? Prepare to experiment?

Right. The whiteboard’s blank right now. Scheming and dreaming will probably start after this on-sale on Friday, and we’ll start to put together what I consider the most fun part, and that’s [considering] all the possibilities, which you’ll only try to pull off 10 percent of. But just getting to think of stuff is fun.

You’ve got a heck of a support act, in your wife. In the press conference you did for the event, and even in this interview, as always, you refer to your wife as “Miss Yearwood.” Is that a term of respect or deference you just got used to before you were closer to her, and it just stuck?

You know what, you’re dead on. Because forever I used to call her “Miss Yearwood.” She was an artist on another label, she was married to somebody else, and you worked with her every day, so “Miss Yearwood” is kind of what it became. And then you fall in love and you start to date each other, and then you meet Jack, who was her father [he died in 2005]. This is a good man who has two daughters, so the Yearwood name is going to go with these two daughters. Her older sister’s already married, and she took her husband’s name — sweet couple. But it’s something that means a lot to her for that name to stay around. So the “Miss Yearwood” thing also kind of helps with that. It’s a tribute to her father who’s a good, good man. So, all good things, actually.

#interviews #garth brooks #video

[chriswillman]

Taylor Swift: ‘Super-Relieved’ to Pull Out a Victory for the ‘Taylor Swift Award’ at BMI Ceremony

(photos by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for BMI) 

“Thank you so much to BMI for giving me the Taylor Swift Award,” said honoree… Taylor Swift. “You know, I’m really super-relieved that BMI decided to give me the Taylor Swift Award,” Taylor Swift added, “because if they had chosen somebody else to give the Taylor Swift Award to, I’d be kind of bummed about it.”

The name of the trophy given to Swift at Tuesday night’s BMI Pop Awards may have become a laughing matter, but the performing rights organization that administers the star’s publishing royalties was quite clear about her place in the firmament, and just how rarely they’ve done or plan to do this sort of thing. The only other time they gave someone an award named after himself, said BMI CEO Mike O’Neill, was with Michael Jackson in 1990. (That prefigured MTV creating the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award to give to Jackson in ’91, so maybe Swift can expect a Moonman named for herself next year, too.)

Usually BMI is content to give one younger songwriter a President’s Award each year. In 2015, it went to P!nk, who may be wondering how she can have hers re-engraved to be a P!nk Award right about now.

The other career achievement award of the night — still and forever called the Icon Award — went to Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, the married songwriting team behind “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” which O’Neill mentioned was the most-performed song in the history of BMI. Swift was happy to share the stage with them for two very distinct reasons. “I first wanted to say to Cynthia Weil, to Barry Mann, and to Carole King [a previous Icon honoree also in attendance], you, the Brill Building, your legacy, are the reason we do what we do. Many of us in this room can’t dream of accomplishing what you guys have accomplished.”

And then: “I recently have had a lot of time off. I’ve been watching a lot of reality TV, and Barry and Cynthia’s daughter Jenn [Dr. Jenn Mann] is the couples therapist on a show called Couples Therapy that I watch a lot.”

(President/CEO of Sony/ATV Music Publishing Nashville Troy Tomlinson, Taylor Swift, and Sony/ATV CEO Martin Bandier)

That time off may not augur well for fans who’ve gotten used to their workaholic heroine going right from a tour finale into intense new album sessions every even-numbered spring, but few will likely begrudge Swift her first extended vacation since she first signed with BMI a dozen years ago.

Among the black-tie crowd, Swift was possibly the only person amid hundreds of attendees to give a standing ovation to all 50 of the rewarded songs. (Her parents and brother joined her in rising on a lot of those.) She was definitely the only person to give a dancing ovation to most of the tunes as they came up for reward.

The graciousness continued during her acceptance speech, as the shout-outs began. “I noticed that a lot of the songs that were awarded tonight, I actually got to sing with the artists on the 1989 world tour, because the artist was generous enough to come out for free and play their song on my stage,” she said. “It was something that made this tour special and different for me, because we live in an age where everybody has the ability to see your show online before they come if they want to. But if you surprise them with a special guest, then they actually get to feel that very unique-in-2016 feeling of being surprised by something. So I would like to go through the list — just ignore the cat stickers on my phone, if you will — of songs that I got to perform with the artists on my tour. I think this is a testament to the writers, what you created, because every single person in those stadiums knew every single word to your songs.”

She then ran through the list: Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again” (“a very special moment”), Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song,” Jason Derulo’s “Want to Want Me,” Omi’s “Cheerleader,” Nick Jonas’s “Jealous,” Andy Grammer’s “Honey, I’m Good.,” Selena Gomez’s “Good for You”… “and all the rest of you guys, we’ll get you next tour.” Swift also gave shout-outs to Imagine Dragons (“I know this wasn’t the [honored] song, but we sang ‘Radioactive’”), Fall Out Boy (“came out on the last tour — still counts”),  Fearless album co-writer Colbie Caillat, and Red collaborators Jeff Bhasker and Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody.

“Thank you for rewarding the favorite part of my life,” she told the crowd. “With all the adventures that this career path has brought, my favorite part is when I’m in the middle of a conversation with one of my friends, and my eyes glaze over and I awkwardly run into the corner… and I have to explain to them that I have this issue called ‘I love songwriting so much that it interrupts my daily life.’ And I know you all have it, too.”

Although Swift didn’t wax political with any of her remarks, O’Neill was happy in his introduction to make note of her music-biz advocacy, calling her “a powerful voice in the creative community and especially in the digital world. When Taylor removed her music from Spotify, she made a statement that there is value to your art … Taylor took on Apple, one of the most powerful and influential companies in the world, and she succeeded.”

A video reel somewhat resembled the autobiographical montages that have shown up during set changes on some of Swift’s tours, albeit with more of a biz bent. The family had video cameras rolling during her first visit to Nashville, and had footage of the moment she first laid eyes on the BMI complex there. She also discussed her struggle to be taken seriously as an 18-year-old performer facing allegations that she must be the lesser partner on all those co-writing credits, and how that led to creating the Speak Now song cycle without any collaborators.

In the video she was also more direct about the exact circumstances that led to the all-pop 1989 m.o. than perhaps she ever publicly acknowledged before, admitting that disappointment over her loss for the Album of the Year Grammy on Red was a motivator. (She won for Fearless and 1989, becoming the only two-time female winner ever in that category.)

At the start of 2012’s Red, “I was making country music, and I was getting ideas the same way I always did,” she said in the video, “but then a few months in, they started coming to me as pop melodies, and I could not fight it, and I just embraced it.” Still, “we labeled Red a country album, and it came out and got nominated for Album of the Year. When they announced the winner, it was like ‘And Album of the Year goes to Rrrrrrrandom Access Memories — Daft Punk.’ For a second there I kind of felt we had it, and we didn’t. We don’t make music so we can win a lot of awards, but you have to take your cues from somewhere if you‘re going to continue to evolve. And so I went to bed and I woke up at 4 in the morning like: ‘I’m going to make ‘80s synthpop, I’m just going to do that, I’m calling it a pop record—I’m starting tomorrow.’”

#news #taylor swift

[chriswillman]

Stagecoach Day 3 Recap: RaeLynn Salutes Gwen, While Luke Bryan Is Working for the Weeknd

Luke Bryan performs at Stagecoach (Photo: Mark Davis/Getty Images)

“Team Blake!” yelled RaeLynn, getting her Stagecoach set into gear Sunday with one of the songs associated with her ascendancy on The Voice. And she appears to still be on that team to the extent it seems clear that, in the Blake/Miranda split, it was Shelton who got custody of RaeLynn in the divorce, as it were.

She didn’t bring any special guests on for her afternoon Main Stage set, to the disappointment of fans who’d been hoping that RaeLynn hanging out with Shelton and Gwen Stefani the previous night at the Radio Disney Awards might have augured for a Stagecoach hookup. But the young singer made it obvious how much she’s in thrall to her Auntie (or should it be Stepmama?) Gwen. Saying she was “gonna do a little Throwback Thursday,” RaeLynn — who turns 22 on Wednesday — launched into Stefani’s golden oldie “Hella Good.”

They say that what makes a song country is the person singing it, and if there’s any truth to that, “Hella Good” became very much a country song in RaeLynn’s hands, despite the band’s fealty to the original pop arrangement. As you can see from the excerpt from Yahoo’s live stream here, every syllable that comes out of RaeLynn’s mouth is so hilariously, exceptionally Southern that she makes “Hella” sound like something that emerged from deep in the holler. 

At Stagecoach, performers don’t have to worry about showing up wearing the same outfit. (That’s kind of a given, with so many ballcaps in play.) They have to worry about showing up with the same cover songs in their set. That happened when RaeLynn did Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” as part of her afternoon set, only to find Little Big Town doing an a cappella arrangement of the same song in the evening. That’s not quite as coincidental as the hour the previous day that found both Chris Stapleton and Rodney Crowell doing the latter’s “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” in overlapping sets, but close.

The weirdest trend that emerged over the course of Stagecoach 2016’s final day? The oddity of country artists doing covers of actual country songs. Beyond the multiple Dolly homages, there was that moment toward the end of the night when headliner Luke Bryan brought Dustin Lynch out onstage and they collaborated on Brooks & Dunn’s “Play Something Country,” followed by the seemingly spontaneous addition of Jason Aldean’s “Play Something Country.”  

But, with apologies to B&D, “play(ing) something country” is way more the exception than the rule when it comes to festival covers. After all, when Bryan brought Little Big Town out to share his stage just prior to Lynch, the fivesome did Ed Sheeran’s “We Found Love,” along with a bit of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” And during LBT’s own set, they found room for an off-the-chain redo of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” and a chorale of Prince’s “When Doves Cry.”

Following the Friday spotlight moment that had Sam Hunt ceding his stage to Snoop Dogg and G-Eazy for a spell, Sunday’s lineup had one more instance of a guest from outside the genre joining the proceedings. Jay Popoff and Jeremy Popoff of the band Lit put in a surprise appearance toward the close of Lynch’s set to join him on their 1999 alt-rock hit “My Own Worst Enemy.” With his pleasingly anachronistic Stetson, Lynch may be the last of the so-called hat acts in country, but he can put on a ballcap, too, in spirit if not reality.

Aside from Bryan’s ecstatically received, festival-closing performance, the most crowd-pleasing sets of the day might have been over in the Mustang tent, by a pair of bands who haven’t changed their sets up too much for 40 years for anything, least of all any contemporary covers. Those would be the Doobie Brothers and the Marshall Tucker Band, both of whom achieved the rare feat of filling the massive, hangar-like structure (albeit with not quite the overflow crowd outside it that John Fogerty drew the previous night).

It was recently announced that the promoters behind Stagecoach and Coachella are looking to add a third festival to their spring lineup next year, the new one comprised entirely of classic rock artists like Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Neil Young. It’s as if they’re already having a smaller scale dry run for that, though, in the Mustang tent, where Stagecoach bookers have been having a lot of success putting in mid-level veterans like the Doobies and Fogerty (and, in recent years past, ZZ Top and Gregg Allman) whose connection to country is more implied than overt.

Ponytailed Marshall Tucker Band singer Doug Gray (the only holdover from the 1970s lineup) addressed the genre question during their set, telling the crowd his group had long played at rock, jazz, and country festivals and “we still don’t know what kind of band we are.” But with a plurality of today’s country acts claiming vintage Southern rock as a primary touchstone, the MTB has as much right to the country mantle as anyone who never got airplay in the format. The Doobies didn’t waste any time philosophizing over genre distinctions between their hits, but co-founder Tom Johnston did accurately describe one deep cut as “hoedown music,” before also correctly assessing that the following number was essentially R&B.

The Tucker Band’s Gray seemed to be having as good a time as anybody onstage all day. He interrupted the trademark song “Can’t You See” to conduct an audience sing-along of “Why Can’t We Be Friends,” which he claimed was a first for one of their sets, inspired by the Stagecoach love he was feeling. At another point, picking out for attention one young lady behind one of the walls of hay bales serving as a buffer between the audience and stage. “I ain’t had but one girl hide behind the hay bale in a long time,” he said. “She knew who was coming out the other side.” With the audience whooping it up over his rascally remarks, Gray added, “At 68 years old, you supposed to have a damn good time, baby. You ain’t supposed to sit around!”

At 68 years old, Gray is also 40 years (if not more) above the median age of Stagecoach attendees. There is still service paid to the concept of this as a family-friendly festival, with a petting zoo, stage, and crafts area aimed exclusively at kids. (Well, almost exclusively. What drunk girl doesn’t want to pet a goat?) But it’s clear that Stagecoach has skewed younger than any other country festival, resembling a typical spring break in its demographics than, say, an average CMA Festival audience. The transformation could hardly be more complete for a format that once worried that its audience was aging up and out, a fear that seems like very ancient history amid all the bare male chests and ubiquitous Daisy Dukes.

The party aesthetic was certainly visible onstage as well as off. Dustin Lynch took the occasion to premiere a new song from the sophomore album he’s working on. Its title: “Party Song,” with the promise to “get you up in my truck/Tearin’ it up… Can I get a whoo-whoo?” If a computer assimilated everything about bro-country into one tune, it might have resulted in this, coming to a radio near you in the summer of 2017, most probably.

When Blake Shelton drinks onstage, you get the feeling that he might be downing colored water, the way Dean Martin used to while playing drunk. But there was definitely no pretending going on in the imbibing Bryan did during his climactic set. When he brought Little Big Town out, they did shots of Patron, with Kimberly Schlapman literally pouring it into his mouth out of a miniaturized Red Solo cup. “The best thing about singing with Little Big Town is that everything you sing sounds good as s---,” Bryan noted… and then they proved it by improvising a group chorus of a soul refrain that went: “Philip’s gonna throw up.”

When Lynch came out to join him, they switched to chugging Lite beers drawn out of a cooler at center stage. And more than one. When Bryan hollered “Who likes to hunt?,” you might have feared that a tragic shooting-while-plastered accident was about to occur, but fortunately, he was only leading into “Huntin’, Fishin’, and Lovin’ Every Day.” If that described a lifestyle that not everyone in southern California is personally familiar with, his set-ending cover of the Weeknd’s “I Can’t Feel My Face” captured a part of the lifestyle that knows no state boundaries.

Not all the performers on the bill were indulging. At least, we’re pretty sure that 11-year-old show opener EmiSunshine was maintaining her abstinence, which served her well when the power went out in the Palomino tent and she showed off her sharp show-business chops by going down into the audience to play acoustically.

#stagecoach

[chriswillman]

Stagecoach Day 2: Carrie Gets Shoeless, Chris Stapleton Gets Hairy, Fogerty Gets Busy

(Carrie Underwood performs at Stagecoach 2016. Photo: Rich Fury/Invision/AP)

The desert has a funny way of getting people to do things they normally wouldn’t. Even the people in the spotlight at the 10th annual Stagecoach country music festival, which had its hump day Saturday in Indio, California. The winds kicked up in a big way, and suddenly some of the performers were throwing caution to them.

"I'm gonna do something I said I'd never do onstage,” declared Carrie Underwood, the second day’s late-night headliner. Probably the entire sold-out audience of 75,000 had been obsessed with how she managed to frenetically pace around on those spike heels of hers without doing some serious damage to herself. Turns out she’d become obsessed, too, as the set wore on. “I feel like these shoes are keeping me from getting down, and I want to get down,” she announced, getting barefoot, to huge cheers. “My feet are gonna be nasty after this!”

At Stagecoach, a little nastiness among friends is highly acceptable, given the wear and tear of three days of serious tromping. Unlike most of the audience, Underwood was probably not medicating her blisters with alcohol.

Earlier on the Mane Stage, it was the weather compelling Chris Stapleton to adopt a new look. Since the release of his freshman Traveller album, Stapleton hasn’t really been seen without his trademark straw hat. But as “Nobody to Blame” kicked in at the beginning of his early evening set, his backup singer and wife, Morgane, gently placed her hand on his chest as she seemed to offer him some counsel. All of a sudden, she was removing his hat and handing it to a roadie, obviously convinced it would blow off. And for the next 50 minutes the crowd got to see the longhaired Stapleton like most had never seen him before. Morgane occasionally came over to brush her husband’s flowing locks out of his face, but gave up during the intense jamming that ended “Outlaw State of Mind,” as Stapleton came to look like the Addams Family’s Cousin Itt turned guitar hero.

Over on the Mustang stage, there were fewer physical transformations… unless you want to count the makeup of the tent itself, which had never been fuller in Stagecoach’s 10 years of existence than it was for John Fogerty, who had hundreds of people listening from outside the confines of hangar in addition to the thousands packed inside. Preceding him, Lee Ann Womack also managed to fill the massive tent, which typically sits three-quarters empty for most of the day as attendees are reluctant to leave the lawn chairs parked in front of the Mane Stage.

Fogerty is in a happy tradition of classic rock bookings that had the similarly not-entirely-country ZZ Top headlining the tent last year, with nearly the same draw. The ex-Creedence frontman was returning to Stagecoach for the first time since 2008 and seems to have a liking for the desert, as the tent’s big screens preceded his appearance with an advertisement for a Vegas residency he has coming up. If you were a betting person, you might gamble on whether Fogerty will be able to project as much pure glee at those shows as he did at Stagecoach, with some of his joy surely coming from the opportunity to trade guitar licks with his highly capable son, Shane Fogerty.

Womack’s set emphasized material from her recent turn toward the even rootsier sounds of Americana, including the title track of her 2014 release, The Way I’m Livin’, with its memorable refrain, “If I ever get to heaven, it’s a doggone shame.” But the set inevitably ended with the country/AC crossover hit to end all AC/crossover hits, “I Hope You Dance.” They did… as space allowed.

Back on the Mane Stage, the Band Perry was back at it after having played Stagecoach a mere two years ago. Their third album has been delayed while they negotiate for a new label after parting ways with Big Machine following the release of a teaser single last year, “Live Forever.” The crossover direction of that tune proved slightly controversial – “If I Die Pop,” anyone? – but the trio were hardly backing off it, proudly declaring that the song had just been selected as the official number of Team USA at the 2016 summer Olympics. They played two other songs from the unreleased third album, as well, including one that had unusually sultry lyrics — “Let’s turn off all these lights… I just want to stay in the dark” — yet sounded even more pop-anthemic in style than “Live Forever,” if that’s possible.

And now, a day 2 covers roundup:

* An old soul at age 23, Mo Pitney covered recent Big Machine signing and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me," giving the Empire Polo Field its Budokan moment. Pitney, one of country’s most promising freshman artists, was not the first artist of the day to cover Merle Haggard. He was beat to it in the afternoon by Jamestown Revival, who put their luscious harmonies to work on “Silver Wings.” However, Pitney became the first and presumably only artist of the festival to precede his Hag cover — “Big City,” in this instance — with a song about the late legend: “I Met Merle Haggard Today.” It immortalizes in song the sole unforgettable line that Haggard ever spoke to the up-and-comer two years ago: “Pleasure to meet you, Mo.”

* Two acts performed Waylon Jennings's 1979 hit “I Ain’t Living Long Like This”: Chris Stapleton, who includes it as a staple of his nightly set… and Rodney Crowell, who wrote and was first to record it in the late ‘70s. You were left wishing one artist might have joined the other’s stage to sing it as a duet, but even if that had occurred to anyone involved, that would have been difficult, seeing how Crowell’s and Stapleton’s sets were overlapping.

* Crowell drove his set into the home plate with an epic version of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” successfully prompting the enthusiastic crowd to sing many of the song’s approximately 6,178 lines.

* An unlikely cover Fogerty somehow worked into his set amid the nonstop array of CCR hits: Van Halen’s instrumental “Eruption.”

* Newcomer Caitlyn Smith might have seemed to have been covering Meghan Trainor’s top 10 pop hit “Like I'm Gonna Lose You,” but she had a pretty solid right to it — she co-wrote it.

* As always, the Band Perry did Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls,” with Kimberly Perry changing the “they” to “we” — a disingenuous line at this point, given how the audience marveled at how her outfit flattered the most toned bare country midriff this side of Shania Twain.

* Underwood is one of the few people in the world who could cover “I Will Always Love You” at this late date and get away with it. And now, foot fetishists will always love her back.

Yahoo’s live stream of the Stagecoach country music festival concludes Sunday here.

#stagecoach

[chriswillman]

Stagecoach Day 1: Sam Hunt Snoops Around for a Crossover Moment

(Sam Hunt, Snoop Dogg, Bebe Rexha, and G-Eazy pose for a photo backstage at Stagecoach 2016. Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Anheuser-Busch)

Sam Hunt can sound like he’s spent at least as much time listening to the Cash Money stable of artists as he has to Johnny Cash. So when a beer company announced that it was promoting a “moment” during Hunt’s Friday Stagecoach country music festival set in Indio, California -- and that his set would involve other artists -- you might have felt safe placing a bet that the guests would come from the world of rhythmic Top 40, as opposed to the back forty.

Sure enough, the first guests to whom Hunt ceded his spotlight turned out to be G-Eazy and Bebe Rexha, giving the audience their rapped/sung smash, “Me, Myself, and I.” It wasn’t just the musical style that was a departure from the rest of the day, as Rexha provided a break from the Daisy Dukes favored by most of the women on- and offstage in favor of the most skintight outfit seen since Tanya Tucker scandalized country with her own posterior-flattering bodysuit in the 1970s.

Then came a celeb who prompted a more massive ovation: Snoop Dogg, performing a bit of Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode” and a lot of “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” and offering more F-bombs in four minutes than Stagecoach’s stages had previously seen in the entirety of the fest’s 10-year history. True to his trademark, Snoop took a toke on a joint mid-number. Then, later, perhaps having been reminded that this was billed as a “Bud Light moment” and not a dispensary moment, Snoop put down the spliff and joined G-Eazy in picking up one of the brewer’s blue bottles for the cameras as they gathered around Hunt for his “House Party.” 

It’s rare for a sponsor to instigate and promote a specific moment in a set, the way Bud Light did with this country/rap crossover. “The word ‘sponsor’ – that’s something I try to shy away from,” Hunt told Yahoo Music before the set, sitting in his trailer. “But they’re responsible for making the thing happen. They had the idea and brought it to my manager, and I was brainstorming and thinking what artist or group of artists would fit. I wanted to do something outside of the genre, because in country music the opportunity to do something with other country music artists presents itself pretty often.”

Added Hunt’s manager, Brad Belanger, of the six-month process that led to the teaming: “They were like, 'Send us some rappers that you like.' So we sent ‘em a list of eight, and it had Kendrick [Lamar] on it and a lot of cool stuff, and they were like, ‘We know G-Eazy, we can bring him here.’ And it was like, awesome. We knew the kids out there would know that hook and go crazy as soon as it started. They threw out Snoop, and it was like, yeah, of course — a legend, and a new up-and-coming guy that we like and listen to.”

(Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Anheuser-Busch)

Actual in-studio collaboration? That will have to wait for another occasion. “They’re sort of doing their thing, and I’m just there for encouragement,” said Hunt. “But I know their music well enough I could probably jump in there and do the parts if I had to.”

Other highlights from day 1 of Stagecoach 2016:

* There was at least one actual in-genre pairing: Chris Young was joined by Voice winner Cassadee Pope, duet partner on their recent country chart-topper, “Think of You.”

* Eric Paslay had some guests from outside the genre: kids from the Boys and Girls Club of Indio, who emerged to dance to his current single, “High Class.” Were the youngsters doing line-dancing, or just standard show-biz choreography? It’s such a fine line.

* Eric Church headlined a night at the festival for the first time, which seems like an odd case of delayed gratification, given what a natural fit his rowdy/outlaw persona is for the largely collegiate Stagecoach audience. That is not to say that he never played the fest before at all. As he reminded the sold-out crowd of 75,000, he performed at the very first Stagecoach in 2007, albeit in a less premium slot. “I played at 2 in the afternoon. And no, you weren’t there! I remember.” (In the desert heat, the first performers of the day can usually count on playing to just a few hundred people.)

* If you wanted a study in contrasts, Emmylou Harris was doing a shimmering set of her post-Daniel-Lanois material over in the Mustang tent at the same time Bebe Rexha was shaking it with Hunt on the Mane Stage. The title of her climactic cover, Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” could have served as a metaphor: Harris moved on from the gold rush that is mainstream country after going indie in the ‘90s. But the crowd was appreciative of her quieter approach, even if some who haven’t heard her in a while probably expected more hits from her Warner Bros. years.

* The audience for Robert Earl Keen’s set appeared to be comprised almost exclusively of expat Texans. The chorus of his most famous number — “The road goes on forever and the party never ends” — may have been originally conceived with some irony, but no irony was taken with a Stagecoach crowd that was ready to get this party started.

* The first Prince cover of the weekend came early in the afternoon as Tigerman WOAH busted out a bit of “Purple Rain.” More to come, surely.

* Haggard did not go unmemorialized, with Dale Watson being first (and we hope not last) up at the Merle tribute bat with “Here in Frisco.” Watson also paid tribute to George Jones on “Jonesin' for Jones.”

* Cash emerged as a theme… again, the green kind, not the Johnny kind. Within minutes of hearing Aubrie Sellers cover “Money (That’s What I Want)” in one tent, we heard the Malpass Brothers do “If You’ve Got the Money, Honey, I’ve Got the Time” in another. (Malpass also cover "Folson Prison Blues," however.)

* Chris Young’s ZZ Top cover fit the general expectations of what’s likely to show up at Stagecoach. Country guys do love their ‘70s and ‘80s classic rock. But a couple of riffs on the ‘90s took us by surprise, as Drake White covered 4 Non Blondes’ ‘“What’s Up?,” followed by Jana Kramer rousing the crowd with Meredith Brooks’s rarely revived “Bitch.”

Yahoo's live stream of the Stagecoach country music festival continues Saturday and Sunday here.

#stagecoach