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 »
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 »
Having already conquered the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 with Cobra Starship’s “Good Girls Go Bad,” Gossip Girl‘s Leighton Meester is continuing full-speed-ahead with her music career. After the jump, the sorta-“Toxic” “Body Control,” which leaked over the weekend. 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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Certainly I’m not the only person who heard the rumors about a sex tape involving Leighton Meester of Gossip Girl and thought, “Well, this will be a fine way to cross-promote that catchy little Cobra Starship song she lends vocals to.” I mean, it’s called “Good Girls Go Bad,” for Pete’s sake. So obvs! [The Awl / YouTube] More »
“(I Make) Good Girls Go Bad” is the first single from Hot Mess, the third album by self-aware electropop outfit Cobra Starship–and in a sort of one-upping of yesterday’s news that her co-star Taylor Momsen had signed to Interscope, it has Gossip Girl star Leighton Meester trading off vocals with lead Cobra Gabe Saporta. The track is produced by Kevin “Let It Rock” Rudolf, and it doesn’t quite have the crackle of “Guilty Pleasure” from the band’s last album, but Meester certainly sounds like she has at least a couple more songs of “electro-pop edge” left in her. [YouTube / MySpace] More »
In today’s lunchtime headline roundup: Spoon makes it all about them, John Legend is looking green, and even when it’s down, the music industry is still desperate enough to sign celebrities to recording contracts! More »
