Lady Gaga of the meat dress-having, singing-while-covered-in-blood and eating-designer-cakes-dripping-with-red-dye persuasion, did NOT receive anything crazy for her engagement, but she did get a completely normal heart-shaped ring from her boyfriend, television firefighter and werewolf Taylor Kinney, for Valentine’s.
What kind of world am I living in? Apparently one where Kanye West and Taylor Swift bury the hatchet by recording sweet sweet music together.
Kanye hasn’t recorded sweet sweet music since 2010, and while I doubt a country/pop crossover with Taylor is the answer, it’s still astounding that he says he’s for sure going to make sure going to make music with the girl who’s moment he ruined on behalf of Beyonce all those years ago. Continue reading “Kanye is ‘Definitely’ Recording With Taylor Swift”→
In the past few years, former Beatle Paul McCartney has collaborated with a plethora of artists who were mere embryos when The White Album was recorded. Since “replacing” Kurt Cobain in the Nirvana reunion at the Grammys, Sir Paul has filmed “FourFiveSeconds” with Kanye West and Rihanna and now he’s working on a “secret project” with Lady Gaga, which makes sense since she’s always had a thing for talented old guys like Clarence Clemons, Tony Bennet and Brian May.
Gaga’s new “post sex” fragrance inspired by her sessions with McCartney is available at Target.
At 4 minutes and 36 seconds, The Weeknd’s version of Fifty Shades of Grey is better than the movie. And instead of being summed up by an entire book with scenes featuring tampons and buttplugs that apparently turned on every woman in the world except me, this music video can be explained with a single gif of Dakota Johnson playing with The Weeknd’s hair tuft. Ellie Goulding has also released a song from the weirdly good Fifty Shades soundtrack AND a bonus Nike campaign video of her running in tights. You’re welcome.
Actor/rapper extraordinaire Donald Glover enlists his favorite director Hiro Murai (“Telegraph Ave,” “Sweatpants,” and “3005”) to shoot the stoner anthem “Sober.”
Glover displays excellent pantomiming skills in hopes of impressing a girl (Amber Lauren Jones) at a diner. Dude has doves flying out of his shirt and she barely bats an eye. Cold.
Nicki Minaj is feeling generous this holiday season, after delivering the “Only” video, a song about all the guys she could have banged but didn’t, she’s giving us The Pinkprint Movie – three videos in one displaying varying stages of heartache-inducing grief.
These stages of grief are: crying, crashing your car while crying, continuing to sing even though you’ve been in a car accident, and playing the piano.
The songs are about an angry guy with a Minaj chest tattoo who looks like Big Sean…
The only people who have seen Iggy Azalea’s sex tape at this point seem to be the “businessmen” over at Vivid Entertainment, who think the tape could actually be worth millions of dollars, possibly even more than saucer-eyed knob-polishers Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton.
The only people BESIDES of course Iggy herself and her co-star, former boyfriend and manager combo Hefe Wine.
Azalea is busy denying the tape’s existence while her lawyers are busy telling TMZ that it was filmed “without her knowledge or consent” and Hefe is busy pretending like he had nothing to do with it ending up at Vivid.
“I was high on vicodin and alcohol when I showed up at the studio,” Thicke said during a court deposition deciding whether “Blurred Lines” is a white copy of a Marvin Gaye song. “I started kind of convincing myself that I was a little more part of it than I was and I — because I didn’t want him — I wanted some credit for this big hit. But the reality is, is that Pharrell had the beat and he wrote almost every single part of the song.”
STOP contemplating spending your bad day watching videos of dancing lambs and monkeys bothering cats and listen to the folky/R&B version of “Do You Want to Build a Snowman” in all its glorious smile-inducing cuteness.
Yes, The Voice Australia semi-finalist Fatai just released her full rendition of the song everyone – even people who miraculously haven’t seem Frozen – are singing regardless of it being summer and there not being access to snow in most parts of the country.
It might seem unusual for a debut album to have a song called “Comeback” on it, but at only 20 years old, obvious Best Hair in Music-haver Ella Eyre makes it work.
It’s about a scoundrel who “comes back” after cheating, but instead of being a weak ass weak sauce bad-guy-taker-backer, she breaks his dishes, dissects his flatscreen with a guitar and lights his ride on fire. With a little help from her friends, of course. Continue reading “Video: Ella Eyre – “Comeback””→
This month, brilliant indie vocalist, ukulele master and all-around musical badass Jen Miller – representing Columbus, Ohio – tolerates my line of questioning for the second time around.
She covers the recording process, Kickstarter, her favorite bands, The Red Wedding, her quirky but beloved fans, how she’s grown as an artist and more. Read on, dinosaurs…
It’s been two years since you released your first EP on iTunes, what do you think the major difference between your new album, Overgrown, and Forget the Dirty Hearts is?
I think the major difference between the EP and the album is that I really got my hands dirty here. For the first EP, it was my first time in the studio. We did it all in one weekend and the songs didn’t really have a chance to ripen in the studio…we just recorded them as quickly and as well as we could in one 48 hour weekend.
This time around, I worked with a producer, Derek Snowden, who really helped me push my sound. Some days I would come in the studio and be like “Derek, I wrote a song last night! Let’s see what we can make of it!”, and that’s what we would do for the night. It would come in as vocals and a ukulele and get transposed to electric and banjo by the end of the night. That’s just how it goes. So the sound is definitely more developed and the songwriting more solid.
Kickstarter and YouTube seem to have been your friends over the years… What projects have you backed on Kickstarter?
Kickstarter burnt an imaginary hole in my pocket for a second there. I actually found it thanks to Julia Nunes…I am a massive fan of hers and she and Israel Kamakawiwo’ole are the combined reason I started teaching myself uke. She crowdfunded her first 2 albums which I (of course) backed obsessively.
Who are you into of these days musically? Anyone you fangirl over who readers might not have heard of?
I AM FANGIRL CENTRAL. A little less crazy than the One Direction fans though. I riot less.
Blood Orange, moniker of Dev Hynes – friend of Solange and Theophilus London – has a new video full of a style of dancing that I can only think to call candid.
This is a Lady Gaga update for all the people who do not need or want one and were hoping she’d evaporated into the cold dark sperm-soaked ether she came from… SO much is new with Lady Gaga. Like, uh, her CD – the one with no tolerable songs besides “Applause” – is 7 months old and, she has a dog. And an afro!
There she is waving on the streets of New York like “Hi, I’m totally pleased to announce that I’ve been cast as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in an off-off Broadway production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
In honor of habitual weirdos Die Antwoord’s new album, Donker Mag – with titles like “Raging Zef Boner,” “Don’t Fuk Me,” “Sex,” “Girl I Want 2 Eat U,” and “Happy Go Sucky Fucky” – dropping today, here’s a Reddit list of pre-Antwoord music by Ninja.
Also, a link to an interview explaining how Yolandi’s pet rats “raped” each othermultiplied like crazy on the set of the “Evil Boy” video. And a Gaga drag queen being eaten by a lion.
“Pitbull Terrier” (no relation to J-Lo’s Pitbull) features more animal-centric freakiness involving blood spatter, people dressed as cats and dogs, and a real rat dressed as nothing.
If only cell phone cameras had been around in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I could have seen Britney Spears inspecting Justin Timberlake’s crunchy hair for lice after dropping ecstasy, or Backstreet Boy AJ McLean taking shots and playing NBA Street with Hooters girls instead of rehearsing.
What I get instead is Louis Tomlinson of One Direction filming his band mate in a car in Peru with a joint in his hand and a motorcycle cop literally right outside the window and dear God I just don’t care about this kind of music anymore.
Don’t blame the weed. One Direction are definitely terrible role models, but only because they don’t play any instruments and have no discernible talent. If you combined all five of them into one man, that man might be moderately attractive. Continue reading “Popular Boy Band Gets High”→
Recently, a good friend sent me YouTube link to a song by Rising Appalachia and the Human Experience. Based on the fact that my friend likes to drop acid at Rainbow Gatherings (not that there’s anything wrong with that), I expected it to be whale and bird calls set to harps with the occasionally tink of a healing crystal bumping into a wind chime.
What I heard instead was truly brilliant. Folk music with a peppering of electronica? It has been done before, but on a fairly underground level. Bands like Thievery Corporation and Bonobo, friends of Human Experience-founder David Block’s, combine many music styles from all over the world with electronica in the forefront, while similar artists such as Gotan Project, Rodrigo y Gabriela and Pink Martini focus on the string-based folk elements.
“We don’t play music, music plays us” – David Block
Like those bands, Rising Appalachia and The Human Experience – a collaboration between Block (The Human Experience) and sisters Leah and Chloe Smith (Rising Appalachia) – are the definition of eclectic. With calmingly sensual tracks like “Swoon,” “Downtown” and “Mississippi” that transport you straight to the haunted bayous and foggy hills of the Deep South, I can’t help but feel like they’re on the verge of creating an entirely new genre with the potential to be massively popular in the way that dubstep is. Continue reading “Band Profile: Rising Appalachia and the Human Experience”→