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Pop Rock Nation

Category: News

music-news-from-breakups-to-the-lastest-buzz

  • SonicClash News Break: Soundgarden Reunites

    Break out your flannel shirts, ladies and gentlemen, ’cause Soundgarden is back. One of the seminal bands of the grunge era, Soundgarden may not have sold as many records as, say, Nirvana or Pearl Jam, but their influence can’t be denied. Not to mention the fact that they produced Chris Cornell, who, despite his propensity for making not-so-good solo records, is the best rock singer of his generation.

    The band will be hitting a few festivals in 2010, but they’re trying to figure out tour routing, since drummer Matt Cameron is now also Pearl Jam’s drummer-and THAT band will be touring this year as well. A Soundgarden/Pearl Jam double bill sounds good to me. Add in the new Alice in Chains and I think fans of early Nineties hard rock will all simultaneously cream their pants.

    My initial thought was that this reunion was a reaction to the critical and commercial slaughtering that Cornell’s last solo album, the Timbaland-helmed “Scream” received last year. However, Cornell was discussing a Soundgarden B-sides release and a potential box set in Rolling Stone magazine last summer before “Scream”‘s release. So you skeptics can quiet down.

    Me? I’m excited. I caught the Soundgarden train late in their career, but was immediately taken by Cornell’s voice and definitely feel like he needs a whole lot of LOUD in order to maximize the use of that voice. Having 2010 start with news like this hints that this might be a better year for music than last year was.

  • Happy New Year: DJ Earworm’s 2009 Mash Up

    Here’s a pretty creative mash up mix of 2009’s Top 25 singles by DJ Earworm. Despite my ambivalence for most of the songs included here, I’ve gotta give props to DJ Earworm for being able to string all of these songs (and their corresponding videos) together.

    Enjoy the video and have a very safe and happy New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day!!

  • Billboard Presents The Top Music Moments of the Decade

    In my haste to start covering year-end Soundscan stuff, I didn’t realize that there were actually 53 weeks in this chart year!! So we’ll take a look at some of those year end numbers NEXT week. This, of course, also means that Susan Boyle still has a chance to overtake Taylor Swift for the honor of having the year’s best selling album, although I would say that chance is rather slim, considering both the fact that sales are going to drop sharply in the coming week as well as the fact that the kids who will be cashing in gift cards and exchanging their uncool Christmas gifts will be more apt to pick up Taylor Swift and RETURN copies of the Susan Boyle album.

    Anyhoo, while we’re waiting for the year-end charts to be tabulated, let’s take a look at Billboard’s list of the Top 50 Music Moments of the past decade. This list is a pretty accurate compilation of the past ten years’ most earthshaking popular music moments. From ‘Nsync and Eminem’s massive sales at the decade’s outset to the popularity of the iPod, the device that changed the way we listen to music forever, a lot has happened, good and bad, in music.

    That said, some of the moments listed here made me raise my eyebrow. Was the Spice Girls’ reunion tour important to ANYONE? Did Noreaga’s “Oye Mi Canto” really kick off the reggaeton movement (and which was a bigger flash in the pan, reggaeton or Texas rap?)? Couldn’t they have used a more sensitive headline to describe Elliott Smith’s death? If Kanye West was unknown outside of hip-hop circles when he had his little Hurricane Katrina telethon outburst, then who were the three million people who bought “The College Dropout” BEFORE that incident? Who edited and proofed this thing? It’s one thing to see numerous spelling and grammatical errors in a blog like this (which is normally composed on the fly and has an audience of 30), but when Billboard magazine is making more spelling errors than me (and I assume they pay someone to ensure that those errors don’t happen), we definitely have a problem.