The late Law & Order star’s version of “Try To Remember” from The Fantasticks was one of 40 songs from American musicals that were pre-loaded onto the iPod given to Queen Elizabeth by President Barack Obama on the occasion of his visit to Buckingham Palace yesterday. The playlist also included Ethel Merman’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “One” from A Chorus Line, and Judy Collins’ performance of “Send In The Clowns.” I have to say, though, that putting that song about 525,600 minutes being in a year from Rent instead of something from Bye Bye Birdie? A very major gaffe. Full playlist after the jump.
After last night’s State Of The Union stand-in, the anchors on CNN got into a little discussion of the hip-hop horseraces of 18 months ago, and how they paralleled the bickering between the Democrats and the Republicans over Barack Obama‘s various initiatives. Yes, that’s right: The 50 Cent/Kanye West beef made it to Anderson Cooper 360, with Kanye taking on the role of Barack Obama and 50 Cent serving as a stand-in for the Republicans. While Curtis has claimed allegiance with the GOP in the past, he may not be too happy with the reason Cooper gave for lumping the two parties together. (Hint: It’s not because of their shared affinity for Vitamin Water and/or unfettered capitalism.) The excerpted transcript after the jump.
MSNBC entertainment correspondent Tony Sclafani has proven himself to be hacktastic in the past, so it’s not surprising that his latest salvo for the cable channel’s Web operation, which tries to make the case that “young Democrat presidents” result in pop music going bad, is full of by-the-numbers rock snobbery and cherry-picked examples that elevate the solo work of Don Henley and declare that the work of Max Martin is neither brilliant nor innovative. (Few pieces of music, after all, can match the never-seen-before genius of “The End Of The Innocence.”) But I wonder if Sclafani himself realized that he was kind of full of crap midway through writing the piece—because beyond a brief mention of a Guardian rundown of artists who wrote anti-Bush songs and some head-shaking about Lady GaGa‘s “Just Dance” hitting No. 1 coinciding with Barack Obama‘s inauguration (complete with misuse of the term “begs the question”), he tries to make his shaky thesis stick using a bunch of dubious examples that are straight out of a moldy issue of Rolling Stone, thus eliding any mention of “meaningful music” that actually charted between 2001 and 2009.
Etta James‘ tirade about Beyoncé at a Seattle show last month? It wasn’t a dis so much as it was a joke that none of us got because the audio making its way around the Internet didn’t have the audience’s laughter properly amplified, she told the New York Daily News: “I didn’t really mean anything. Even as a little child, I’ve always had that comedian kind of attitude. … That’s probably what went into it.” Although she did think that B could have maybe given a better-than-B-grade performance!
For an edifice designed to house and represent the seat of national and international power, it sure seems like the White House could have been diagrammed in crayon on college-ruled notebook paper during third period. We know there’s a bowling alley, of course—which Barack Obama is going to replace with a basketball court, as any modern eight-year-old would. There’s a private chef who can make you mac and cheese or pizza rolls, even after midnight!!! There’s a pool, a dog, a helicopter, spy equipment, secret rooms for ordering missile strikes, and lots of long hallways to skateboard down. There’s no moat (that we know of), but as it turns out, there is one more key feature: an awesome secret record collection!
This week’s top 12, from Tuesday’s Obamarama to the prospect of Lil Wayne throwing a turkey to the idea that maybe music writing can be saved through the power of Britney Spears’ philanthropy, after the jump.
When it was announced that Beyoncé would be… More »
If you’ve turned on MTV at any point in the last few years, you probably saw a show about the social lives of rich teenagers; if you turned up just for the special events, they were generally stripper-themed. But if you happened upon the channel around 10 p.m. last night, you would see people repairing homes in New Orleans and building a computer lab in Kenya, all part of the channel’s coverage of the official Youth Inaugural Ball. What gives? MTV’s bread and butter has been resolutely aspirational, from My Super Sweet 16 to The Hills, but mere hours after a new president was sworn in with a speech about service and responsibility, the channel had footage ready to roll of kids pitching in and helping out. The crash format change hearkens back to an earlier era in the MTV’s history—an era that, coincidentally, included Bill Clinton’s inaugural ball.
