The late Michael Jackson’s landmark 1982 album Thriller wasn’t a collection of songs as much as it was an event that upended the pop landscape, and birthed much of what would come in its wake. But in addition to thinking about it as a direct influence on today’s pop stars (i.e. the “I heard ‘Billie Jean’ and knew that I wanted to make music my life” narrative proffered by so many artists in the wake of his passing), one can also think about how the songs themselves were sampled by musicians who came in Jackson’s wake, deconstructed so that they became still-recognizable parts of a greater, slightly updated whole. Six of Thriller‘s musical descendants after the jump. (Thanks to Idolator emeritus Jess Harvell for helping me with some of the brainstorming here.) More »
In today’s headlines: Rob Thomas keeps the NBA playoffs smooth, country gets a package tour all its own, and Coldplay turns concert tickets into value meals. More »
The Roots, Nas, Damian Marley, Big Boi, and Common are headlining this year’s installment of the Rock The Bells tour, which will set up shop in 10 cities across North America this summer. Nas and Marley are also putting out an album in June, so presumably they’ll share some stage time. The bill’s exact lineup will fluctuate a bit from city to city, but a rundown of all the performers scheduled to play at least one date is after the jump.
I thought I was going to get whiplash reading this Nas Q&A in The Onion A.V. Club, in which the bulk of Nathan Rabin’s queries get this sort of response: “AVC: Were you happy with how The Firm turned out? Nas: Yeah, no. More »
Greetings from “at large”! Like any good penitent, my self-imposed blogging exile has included certain dietary restrictions. Fer instance consuming as little music released in 2008 as possible. But spending the day slopping about in music-related nostalgia is still OK, because otherwise I would have to turn to Jack Van Impe reruns or honest work. That’s why this weekend, while Maura was taking in the horror what Fat Mike and/or the Get Up kids wrought, I was at the Rock The Bells tour, a package deal involving hip-hop’s geriatric giants that is not a “festival” but a “hip-hop platform,” presumably because it’s easy for socially conscious rappers to steal juice from political terminology in an election year. We (meaning me and photographer Frank Hamilton) scammed our way in with Idolator’s press credentials (and strategic puppy dog eyes), so the usual guilt meant I wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself if I didn’t type something up after the fact. (Plus Maura made me.) What did we learn? Well, for one thing, we learned that if your blog ass tries to stand on concrete in a “golden age of hip-hop” gulag for 12 hours, it seriously fucks your back up. (According to Maura’s account from emo-ville, this is a pan-genre festival problem.) Two, that if our nation’s enemies (except for those Iranian fibbers) had targeted Columbia, Md., with their nuclear whatnot on Sunday, they’d have evaporated just about every rapper that made my high school years tolerable. To wit:
The Great Miley Cyrus/Sugarland Battle of ’08 continues with today’s chart projections from Hits. Little did we know that Miley had a trick up her sleeve (on those days that she actually wears sleeves, anyway).
On the heels of the Fox News protest he led outside the NewsCorp Building and his album hitting No. 1, Nas stopped by the Colbert Report to chat with Stephen about why he was in a flame war with Fox and Bill O’Reilly in particular, the scrapped title of his album, and how the news media is somehow more sensationalist than ever before. Video of him performing his Fox News dis “Sly Fox” after the jump.
Nas’ new album, which was stripped of its epithetastic title in the months leading up to its release, took the No. 1 spot on this week’s album charts, selling 187,000 copies in its first week out. The album, which leaked earlier this month, had a first-week total that was a little more than half of the 355,000-sold mark achieved by Hip-Hop Is Dead a year and a half ago. Nas is Nas’ fourth career No. 1.
According to early reports, Nas has managed to pull off the seemingly impossible task of keeping Lil Wayne and Coldplay from the top spot on the Billboard albums chart. More »
From time to time, we round up the all-important, all-summarizing last sentences of the biggest new-music reviews. This time around, we look at the critical reaction to Nas’ long-delayed, controversy-skirting Untitled, which hits stores tomorrow.
