The second single from the New Kids on the Block’s upcoming album, “The Block” is called “Single” and features none other than Ne-Yo sharing lead vocals. I’d imagine he wrote the song too. Either way, women young and old are going to eat this one up. Just listen to the lyrics.
While “Summertime” was a moderate hit, giving the Kids their first Top 40 action in 16 years, this song sounds a little more in tune with what’s going on at radio these days. Ummm…not bad, I must say. Actually, this is better than a lot of the stuff that was on Ne-Yo’s decidedly so-so “Because of You” album.
It’s my hope that if American audiences managed to “get” Amy Winehouse, then they’ll eventually “get” Mike Skinner who is better known as The Streets. The British rapper has released three excellent albums over the past six years, but has yet to really catch on with audiences Stateside, although in his homeland, he’s a megastar. His albums reveal a much more complex personality than the average 2008-era rap artist (which is probably why he hasn’t been successful here-complex personalities are a little too far-reaching for most Americans), and if you can make it through the thick accent, you’ll be rewarded with music that’s occasionally laugh out loud funny, and occasionally heart-rending.
His new single, “The Escapist” finds Skinner lowering the tempo and adopting a reflective tone. The video is amazing. Not only is it a concept video in an age where it’s very easy to just show a bunch of chicks dancing half-naked and call it art, but the scenery is breathtaking. Besides, everyone needs to escape every once in a while, right? Boy, have I been feeling that something awful lately.
Anyway, the YouTube video pauses frequently on my computer…I don’t know that it will do the same on yours. So I’ve also included a link to Skinner’s site, where you can not only watch the video without it stopping every 10 seconds, but you can also download the song for free. Enjoy.
It’s a reasonably well-documented fact that most if not all artistic people are a few sandwiches short of the old picnic basket, and before Amy Winehouse took over as music’s #1 female nutjob, there was Courtney Love. Over the past two decades, Courtney’s been labeled as just about anything you could think of: opportunist, poseur…you name it, Courtney’s been called it. However, the fact that she led the music industry in Hot Messitude during the Nineties (and she’s still up there these days) should not take away from the fact that she and her band Hole made some good music: most of which appears on 1994’s grunge-era classic Live Through This.
The cover of Hole's 1994 album "Live Through This"
In retrospect, it’s pretty likely that her marriage to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain expedited the band’s signing to major label DGC (which just happened to be Nirvana’s label), but Courtney and Hole (which also featured Eric Erlandson on guitar, Kristen Pfaff on bass and Patty Schemel on drums) had paid their dues by slagging through the underground for years. Courtney had been a fixture on the L.A. rock scene since the early Eighties, enjoying vague associations with everyone from Faith No More to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, before founding Hole. They garnered some attention with an indie release called “Pretty On the Inside” before Love met Cobain. The association gave Courtney some additional notoriety (especially when she said she used heroin while pregnant with Kurt’s baby), but her association started a trend of her music almost becoming secondary to her celebrity. Which is a shame, because Live Through This is a damn good album.
A lot of the signifiers that associate music with the grunge era are here. The loud/soft dynamic is in full effect, as Courtney usually slurs the verses and shrieks the choruses. The lyrics are on the obtuse side-at least to my ears, but they certainly sound tortured enough. However, one thing that set this album apart from most records of that era was Courtney’s insistence on the music being as melodic as it was aggressive. Her sense of melody wouldn’t fully develop until her significantly more sanitized album “Celebrity Skin”, and most folks assume she had help in the songwriting process (in all likelihood from Kurt himself), but it’s a rarity in that it’s an aggressive rock album that you can actually sing along with.
