Track Marks: How The “Kelly Clarkson’s Album To Be Revamped” Rumor Became Today’s Biggest Rumor In The World

noah | May 4, 2007 4:48 am
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Welcome to another edition of Track Marks, in which your Idolators perform an autopsy on the latest band burning up the MP3-blogger charts. Today, however, we’ll take a look at today’s second-most blogged-about rumor:

Artists: Kelly Clarkson Project: A complete revamp of her forthcoming album, My December. First mention: An April 30 post on the Velvet Rope claiming that label head Clive Davis savaged the first four songs on the album at a corporate conference, asking the crowd, “Remember, we’re all family here and this project is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and does this sound like a Number One single to you?” The Build-Up: A piece running with Davis’ displeasure and claiming that Clarkson was completely overhauling the album ran today in the UK newspaper The Daily Star, a Page 3 Girly tabloid that we had never heard of until it was cited in…

The Dam-Break:a bunch of blogs that ran with the item, including In Case You Didn’t Know, rickey.org, and the always-reliable TMZ. It doesn’t look as if any of them tried to further the story, or even think about the fact that the album’s first single, “Never Again,” has already hit the Billboard 100 and TRL; we’re not saying that it’s completely unlikely for an on-the-verge-of-release album to be shelved, but it does seem pretty weird for the Kelly backlash to hit so hard at this particular moment. Is this the result of Kelly “crossing” Davis by wanting to strike out in a more rock direction? And why in the world would some British tabloid that doesn’t even have a proper Web site be ground zero for a whispering campaign against her?

Kelly Clarkson scraps her new album [Starpulse]