Justin Bieber is a smart kid. Sure, he can skillfully sing, dance, beatbox and play instruments like a performer much, much older than his zygote-age. But the real proof of this teen’s wit is that he already knows how to market himself—by starting a beef with other musicians.
After getting into a war of the tweets with John Mayer, Justin challenged Cobra Starship’s Gabe Saporta to a dance-off while they were both performing at the Jingle Ball concert in Sacramento. Unfortunately, this challenge was made before Justin broke his foot, which meant no repeats of sweet dance moves like this. Instead of forfeiting, however, he showed Gabe up in an even better way. The video results of Cobra Starship getting owned during their own set is after the jump. More »
People unveiled a sampling of its Top Sexiest Men Alive today (led by Johnny Depp, sooo boring a choice—what, were Brad Pitt and George Clooney busy?) and a few pop stars made the list. But they aren’t exactly who we would’ve selected: More »
My love for Ne-Yo propelled me all the way through the one-minute mark of the musical tribute to Leonard Bernstein and the Video Music Awards’ dubious honors, despite the musical instruments underneath him echoing in such a way that I wondered if they’d been recorded in one of the redbird trains being repurposed as reefs, then piped up to sea level using an intricately designed system of tin cans. But then Katy Perry came in at the 1:18 mark, wielding garden shears and sounding like an unfortunately winded Bjork, and suddenly hearing all about Johan Santana’s bone chips sounded like a somewhat appealing alternative! What about you? [YouTube] More »
I mean, an ad that’s framed as a duel between Cobra Starship and Ne-Yo? I know I’m a little out of your target demo, but it seems like I would at least enjoy those two artists facing off. And yet. And yet. The latest West Side Story-themed ad for the Sept. 13 Video Music Awards is a trainwreck of epic proportions—an achievement, I suppose, given that it’s only 30 seconds long, but. What are those synthesizer horns at the end? They’re not “triumphant” as much as they are “demo track on a Casio keyboard that some production assistant found molding in a corner of the basement.” Please, for the love of God. Stop it. Or at least get Matt Parker & Trey Stone to show you how to properly write an homage to the art of the musical. The clip after the jump. More »
The just-released ad for the Video Music Awards placed after the jump, featuring Cobra Starship and Gossip Girl starlet Leighton Meester, will apparently be the “first of many West Side Story-inspired VMA promos,” according to the clip’s caption. Is it super-condescending to ask how many members of the MTV target demo have even heard of the Laurents/Bernstein/Sondheim musical about inter-gang and racial tensions? Probably. But that doesn’t make the decision to theme this year’s Video Music Awards after a 52-year-old musical any less strange. Perhaps there will be a Very Special Episode of Parental Control in order to bridge the generational gap. More »
Our look at the closing lines of the week’s biggest new-music reviews continues with a roundup of reactions to Hot Mess, the new album by Cobra Starship: More »
The charts are in a bit of a Dog Days slumber, so let’s try a little trivia: What’s the most oft-recurring word on Billboard‘s Hot 100 over the last decade? I’m thinking of a word that appeared virtually never prior to, say, 1990 and eventually became ubiquitous. “Remix”? “Tha”/“Da”? “Dre”? “T-Pain”?
No, the most common word on the chart, pretty much every week, is “Featuring.”
This week, for example, 16 songs with “featuring” credits are on the Hot 100—17 if you count a “duet with” credit on Keyshia Cole’s latest single with Monica. (But then it goes back down to 16 if you exclude the craven Pussycat Dolls single “featuring” existing lead singer Nicole Scherzinger, a la Diana Ross in ’67 or George Michael in ’85.)
A dozen of these tracks, unsurprisingly, come from the worlds of R&B and hip-hop – genres where the team-up is standard operating procedure for both emerging acts (Drake, Kid Cudi) and veterans (T.I., Mary J. Blige). On this week’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, “featuring” appears no less than 37 times.
Back on the Hot 100, three of this week’s “featurers” are in the Top 10, and two are brand-new to the winners’ circle. Examining just these three tracks, you get a sense of the power of the featured-artist credit. Simply put, in pop music, there are friends, and there are friends. All three of these singles benefit to some degree from the name(s) to the right of the magic word. More »
Much as I hate to admit it, the people putting together the soundtrack for Diablo Cody’s emo-leaning, Megan Fox-enhanced entrant into the vampire genre Jennifer’s Body might very well have compiled an album that will prove to be the 2009 equivalent of, say, the Batman Forever soundtrack (or at least the album accompanying Batman & Robin) as far as summing up a very particular pop aesthetic at a very particular point in time. Well, at least I’m supporting Amanda Seyfried’s acting efforts, I guess. Track list after the jump. More »
Cobra Starship’s video for the shiny “Good Girls Go Bad” takes place in a casino underneath a deli that adds extra lettuce to the sandwiches ordered by those lucky enough to pass through the deli counter dude/doorman. I’m sure there is a venue that operates exactly under this concept somewhere in the lower reaches of Manhattan, although I’m kind of not in the mood to try thousands of bad sandwiches in order to suss out just where it might be. Also I still like this song a lot! (Apologies to the international readers looking at this who aren’t able to can’t see this–the MTV embed is the only available copy of the video just now.) [Friends or Enemies]
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