Mika’s The Boy Who Knew Too Much and Sean Kingston’s Tomorrow both came out this week. One is outselling the other by a 10,000-copy margin. And it’s not the one with the seemingly inescapable pop hit about dialing 911! Can we blame the bobbleheaded cover art? (Meanwhile, in completely unsurprising news, Pearl Jam’s Backspacer is set to bow at No. 1 with estimated sales in the 200,000-copy range.) [Hits] More »
The folks at industry rag Hits have a handy chart of the albums coming out in the last months of the year, which, who knows, may be the last one in which a chart like this is even necessary! But even though we’re a long way from the days of 50 Cent and Kanye West squaring off on the anniversary of 9/11, it’s still sort of fun to see what CDs will be landing at America’s retailers on the same day. After the jump, five of the best battles that could arise from the coming release-date schedule. (Marketing departments, get your beef stew recipes ready!) More »
The video for Mika’s glamtastic “We Are Golden” has the singer trying on the old “shirtless guy dancing around his bedroom” routine, I guess so he can trick people in the States into liking him by thinking that he’s actually the star of “Single Man Dances To ‘Single Ladies’ “? The song’s still pretty stompily great, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help but think that there’s a weird sort of reversal-of-fame trajectory going on here with Mika’s attempt to show that despite his major-label backing, all he wants to be is a YouTube success story. Clip after the jump. More »
The fabbed-out British singer Mika never really gained any traction over here, thanks to American rock programmers only being into new rock that’s a) hypermasculine and b) often musically upstaged by the awful names of the bands practicing it. But that hasn’t stopped his unabashedly foppish ’70s revivalism, which at the very least led to him being a favorite among American Idol hopefuls. Mika’s new single “We Are Golden” continues his trip into the past, sounding like a hybrid of the Sweet and—really! (?)—“Born To Run.” The chanting crowds and lyrics about teenage worlds make me wonder what would happen if “Golden” got slipped into an oldies station’s playlist by accident. Would it make people confused? Would they just accept the alternate reality in which Mika existed as a ’70s superstar? Some radio programmer out there really needs to summon his balls and find out. Clip after the jump. More »
As part of book giant Borders’ slashing of its DVD and CD sections, the store here in Athens, Ga., is selling its CD and DVD inventory at 50% off. The standard pre-liquidation price for a CD? $18.99. So at 50% off, most of the remaining inventory was still as much as it would have been at Best Buy, Target, or Wal-Mart. In fact, in most cases the prices were exactly twice what they were at the Big Boxers, particularly in the DVD/Blu-Ray section. I decided to document the dregs of Borders’ music collection to see what people weren’t buying, much like I did last year during the Circuit City fire sale. All of the releases documented after the jump had at least four copies for sale.
