Following his crocodile tear-stained “tribute” to Michael Jackson on last year’s BET Awards, the cable network has announced that singer/actor Chris Brown has received the most nominations for this year’s ceremony. Brown, whose career looked to be over after an assault on his then-girlfriend Rihanna, has completed an unexpected comeback this year. His fourth album, F.A.M.E., has already spawned five hit singles and was recently certified Gold for sales of over 500,000 copies. He’ll be vying for the Video of […]
Posts tagged "Beyonce"
Chart Stalker 4/27/11: Easter Treats
Can we wrap up the Grammy Album of the Year category now? Adele’s 21 has been virtually carrying the music industry this year, and it returns to #1 this week. Sales of the British vocalist’s sophomore album increase 65% this week to an impressive 153,000 copies. For an album that’s already been out for over two months, that’s a pretty solid number. Adele’s total is almost double the quantity sold of the #2 album. The latest album from the “Glee” […]
Beyonce Knows How to Create a Buzz with “Girls” (Good Music, Not So Much)
The internets have been buzzin’ for the past week with the news that Beyonce is getting ready to release new music. Color me only semi-intrigued. To me, B represents a ton of unfulfilled promise and a lot of overrated-ness (yes, I know that’s not a real world). It’s an indisputable fact that the girl can sing. Her voice is a thing of technical beauty. However, that roar is rarely applied to songs that are either a) well-written or b) legitimately […]
The Viewfinder: Kelly Rowland’s “Motivation”
Poor Kelly Rowland. It can’t be fun being the second banana. Everything she does from here on to eternity will be prefaced or succeeded by a mention of Beyonce. Period. Never gonna change, unless something absolutely miraculous happens. It’s not fair-after all Kelly is a gifted vocalist in her own right and I’d argue that she’s more of a babe than Bee is (at least if you don’t subscribe to the typical American ideal of beauty), but as far as […]
Popblerd!’s 2011 Grammy Preview: Pop & Dance
Pop is such a random catch-all term that it’s hard to figure out how the people that nominate artists for the Grammys figure out what constitutes “pop”. Of course, if you’re in the know, you just know that the labels that nominate their artists designate what categories certain songs go into, so…yeah, it’s totally random. This year’s nominees are the typical mixed bag of pop, a term that can navigate vast waters and describe everything from Michael Buble to Lady […]
2010 American Music Awards: Live Blog
The American Music Awards may have fallen to third place on the importance list behind the Grammy Awards and the MTV Video Music Awards, but it’s still a pretty important show where it counts…at the cash register. It’s pretty well-watched, and lots of people that see performances or award winners end up going to their local store (or to iTunes) and picking up a single or album by someone they caught on the show. The AMAs began in 1974 as […]
Another Crazy VH-1 List: The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time
My first thought upon hearing that VH-1 was compiling a list of the 100 Greatest Artists of all time was: how does one even begin to compile such a list? It’s not easy to quantify exactly what makes a great artist. Is it raw talent? Is it an eye for reinvention? Is it work that revolutionizes the artist’s milieu? The thought of taking the time to compile one of these lists myself makes my head explode. Nevertheless, on 9/6, the […]
“Imma Let You Finish, But I Got Beyonce On the Track!”: New Kanye
To paraphrase Michael Jackson at the ’93 Grammys, Kanye West has gone from “where is he?” to “here he is again”. In just the past month or so, he has been behind one of the more entertaining Twitter pages in recent memory, he has released an interesting “video” for the song “Power”, and he has changed the title to his fifth studio album about 50 times. I’m not sure what the story is behind “See Me Now”. It doesn’t appear […]
How Strong *Is* Christina Aguilera’s “Bionic”?
I was fully expecting “Bionic”, the fourth English-language studio album from Christina Aguilera, to be a disaster. I wasn’t sure how her bombastic vocals and pop sensibility would blend with an intriguing list of collaborators. My suspicions seemed to be confirmed once I heard the fairly generic first single “Not Myself Tonight” and follow-up “Woohoo”, which features the unbelievably annoying Nicki Minaj. There was no way in hell “Bionic” was not gonna be a hot mess. Well, “Bionic” is kind […]
Liza Minnelli Tackles "Single Ladies": Here's Your Comedy for the Day
In my imagination, this is how it happened: Whoever the dude (or more likely, chick) was that was A&R-ing the “Sex & the City 2” soundtrack was smoking some of that good, goodd shit, and they had a brainstorm. “You know what would be really hilarious? If we got Liza Minnelli to sing “Single Ladies” by Beyonce. Wouldn’t that be a fucking hoot?” Then the person who was in the room with him or her went “Liza who?” “Lucille #2 […]
"Pulse" Finds Toni Braxton Still on Creative Life Support
You have to give props to Toni Braxton. Closing in on twenty years in the music business, she’s definitely a survivor. She’s gone through bankruptcy, health problems, mismanagement, divorce and more than her share of label drama. Even if it weren’t for her reputation as a singer of torchy, breakup songs, you’d feel for the woman. After starting her career off with a pair of smash Grammy-winning albums and a string of hit singles (most of which were helmed by […]