Among many other fine, eminently respectable achievements – many Emmy nominated scores for TV movies of literary classics; arrangement credits on records by some of the pre-eminent pop singers of the 50s and 60s, etc. – Allyn Ferguson will forever be remembered as the composer of The. Greatest. TV Theme Song. Ever. Seriously. The awesomeness of this bassline simply cannot be overstated. If for nothing else, thank you, Mr. Ferguson, for these 40-or-so seconds of badass TV theme music. Rest in funky, funky peace.
DJ Hero Early Cover ArtDid any of y’all know that Jay-Z and Eminem were going to take over late night last night? If it wasn’t for a Fab Five Freddy tweet, I wouldn’t have even known.
Eminem delivered a rather wooden Late Show Top 10. Is it just me, or if Ellen DeGeneres gets a buzz cut, could she and Em be kin folk? Jay-Z did a goofy guest segment in which he laughed at Dave’s jokes.
They were on the show promoting their September concert shows in New York and Detroit, which will take place at the baseball stadiums.
And then, they performed on the roof top, which according to MTV.com, was pre-taped early in the week atop the Ed Sullivan Theater.
Eminem went first with his single Not Afraid, (from his new album Recovery) which has both become every baseball player’s batter walk-up music and every MMA fighter’s entrance music.
Then Jay-Z was next with On To The Next One and I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen dude wear shorts.
Lastly, they performed the song Renegade together, which is the best promotion for that concert you can have.
It’s 25 years ago next month that a certain Norwegian synth-pop trio first entered the Billboard Hot 100 with a song that would become one of the most beloved of its era, and a video that still looks as ground-breaking and exciting as it was in 1985: “Take On Me”. Though a-ha never managed another U.S. hit of that magnitude (or even close), they never really went away. Well, except for that time when they went on hiatus for most of the 90s. But with last summer’s lovely album Foot of the Mountain, and their current “Ending on a High Note” world tour, lead singer Morten Harket, keyboardist Magne Furuholmen, and guitarist-songwriter Pal Waaktaar-Savoy are, in fact, calling it a career. But not without a small postscript. The band will release what will presumably be their last single, called “Butterfly, Butterfly (The Last Hurrah)”, for digital download in July. After news of the new single was leaked by a mixing engineer, the song made its official world premiere on the internet via Warner Music Norway last week. For a good-bye song, “Butterfly, Butterfly” is remarkably unspectacular – just a typically sweet, three-minute, mid-tempo, synth-pop song, with a matter-of-fact vocal performance by Harket well in keeping with Waaktaar’s ambivalent farewell of a lyric: Tomorrow, you don’t have to mean what you say/left without a reason to stay/comes the last hurrah. The single is being released in conjunction with a forthcoming 2-disc retrospective set, and coincides with Rhino Records’ recent deluxe edition reissues of the band’s first two albums Hunting High and Low and Scoundrel Days.
