Twista couldn’t fast-rap his way out of this one. McDonald’s
dropped the quick-talking rapper from the Chicago stop on its McDonalds Live parking-lot concert series thanks to pressure from an old Idolator friend: noted billboard advertiser St. Sabina Catholic Church and its pastor, Michael Pfleger.
The concept seemed simple enough, a bit of a stunt for a future post: show up at the local roller skating venue (or as I prefer to think of it, the “wheeled-footwear entertainment complex”), take over the DJ reins for an hour or so, throw together a piece about the experience, make a few cracks about how hard it was to pick a track for the couples’ skate. Easy breezy. Everything started off well; the general manager of the three area skating centers called me back and was really excited about the idea. I had an appointment to help out with the most popular skate event of the week at Skateland Mesa, Saturday night’s “Jam Skate.” That’s where I ran into the roadblock that would derail my roller skate DJ dreams: an underage (I assume) kid named Malik.
You’re a big label group with a teetering stock price, and one of your biggest artists may be leaving your stable for a fat deal offered by a competitor. So what are you to do? If you’re Warner Music Group, you get into the exciting new markets offered by the social-networking world, embedding widgets into your artists’ MySpace pages so people surfing by on a whim can download a track, if they so desire. Of course, though, since you are a major music company in 2007, you don’t do this without committing at least one grave error:
Every week, we round up the all-important, all-summarizing last sentences of the biggest new-music reviews. Today’s entry is Common’s Finding Forever, which hits stores in the U.S. tomorrow:
Britney Spears’ new video: A tasteful blend of I Know Who Killed Me, Showgirls, and that scene in Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls where the Z-Man goes completely off his rocker. More »
Tom Snyder died yesterday in San Francisco at the age of 71, after battling leukemia for several years. Inevitably, most of the obituaries that will cross the newswires today will mention his heavy smoking on Tomorrow, which followed Tonight on NBC from 1973 to 1982, and Dan Aykroyd’s Snyder impression from the early years of Saturday Night Live. But Snyder deserves to be heralded by music-nerd circles, too.
Rihanna’s “Umbrella” ends its 10-week reign as the UK’s No. 1 single, giving hope that the sun may come out tomorrow. More »
One would be reasonable in assuming that Will.I.Am.’s forthcoming solo album would be a fall highlight for retailers and the bean counters at Interscope. The last Black Eyed Peas disc has sold nine million copies so far, and (despite any sort of force for justice in this universe) the Will-masterminded Fergie solo album has been certified double platinum. As a highly sought-after hit maker and a member of one of the more popular groups of recent years, there shouldn’t be any reason to doubt the success of Will.I.Am’s Songs About Girls. An article in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, however, brings one question to mind: Is it too late to pretend this whole thing never happened?
Usher and Tameka Foster broke off their planned weekend wedding on Saturday, asking the media to respect the “privacy of this matter.” To be honest, I don’t have any unique insight into the situation, but I’ll take any opportunity to quote lyrics from “Same Girl.” More »
Despite naysayers’ predictions, Saturday night’s party celebrating the 20th anniversary of Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction did, in fact, have Steven Adler, Duff McKagan, Izzy Stradlin, and Slash in attendance. (Axl Rose was, perhaps unsurprisingly, nowhere to be found, although apparently someone decided to attend the show in Axl-impersonator gear.)
