I’ll admit that I’ve never been the world’s biggest Whitney Houston fan. She’s held my interest for 2 or 3 songs per album, though, and I certainly won’t deny that she’s in possession of an amazing voice. A voice that, to my ears, has gotten better as she’s aged. Her last two studio albums, “My Love is Your Love” and “Just Whitney” found her tackling material that was a bit more mature and substantial than the likes of “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and those God-awful Michael Masser ballads that she started her career singing.
Whitney Houston in concert, 2007 (Photo: JKevin01)
As anyone on the planet Earth knows, Whitney’s career has been derailed by all sorts of drama: the tempestuous marriage to Bobby Brown and subsequent divorce, problems with various substances that left the former model looking like the sister of Pookie as played by Chris Rock in “New Jack City”, the fact that her daughter Bobbi Kristina is already going to need YEARS if not decades of extensive therapy. However, over the past year or so, Whitney has made several public appearances (usually in the company of her label owner/Svengali Clive Davis) and has looked damn good. While rumors of a new album have been floating for quite a while, we finally get our first taste of the scheduled-for-November release with “Like I Never Left”.
And the verdict? It’s a pretty good song, with a mellow, summery vibe. It’s not a blow-the-doors-open huge single, but Whitney’s in fine voice, the song doesn’t try too hard to align itself with current trends, and Akon (by some strange act of God) turns out to be a pretty decent duet partner. If he can do do this for Whitney, there might be hope for that Akon/MJ collaboration after all.
And…we’re off! Here are this week’s Top 20 Singles and Albums as provided by the lovely folks at Billboard Communications.
Top 20 Albums
1) “Untitled”-Nas
2) “Tha Carter III”-Li’l Wayne
3) “Mamma Mia Soundtrack”-Various Artists
4) “Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends”-Coldplay
5) “Camp Rock Soundtrack”-Various Artists
6) “Rock & Roll Jesus”-Kid Rock
7) “Life, Death, Love & Freedom”-John Mellencamp
8) “The Greatest Story Ever Told”-David Banner
9) “Beautiful Eyes EP”-Taylor Swift
10) “Good Girl Gone Bad”-Rihanna
11) “Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. 28”-Various Artists
12) “Taylor Swift”-Taylor Swift
13) “All Sides”-O.A.R.
14) “Around the Bend”-Randy Travis
15) “One of the Boys”-Katy Perry
16) “Modern Guilt”-Beck
17) “Indestructible”-Disturbed
18) “Revelation”-Journey
19) “Here I Stand”-Usher
20) “The Dark Knight”-Soundtrack
Top 20 Singles
1) “I Kissed a Girl”-Katy Perry
2) “Take a Bow”-Rihanna
3) “Forever”-Chris Brown
4) “Lollipop”-Li’l Wayne feat. Static Major
5) “Viva La Vida”-Coldplay
6) “Bleeding Love”-Leona Lewis
7) “Pocketful of Sunshine”-Natasha Bedingfield
8) “A Milli”-Li’l Wayne
9) “Dangerous”-Kardinal Offishal feat. Akon
10) “Leavin’”-Jesse McCartney
11) “Burnin’ Up”-The Jonas Brothers
12) “When I Grow Up”-Pussycat Dolls
13) “7 Things”-Miley Cyrus
14) “Bust it Baby Pt. 2”-Plies feat. Ne-Yo
15) “Disturbia”-Rihanna
16) “Pushin’ Me Away”-The Jonas Brothers
17) “Shake It”-Metro Station
18) “Get Like Me”-David Banner feat. Chris Brown
19) “Closer”-Ne-Yo
20) “Lolli Lolli (Pop That Body)”-Three 6 Mafia feat. Project Pat, Young D & Superpower
*Well, I’ll be damned. Not only did “Mamma Mia” do mighty fine business at the box office, but the soundtrack nearly doubled in sales this week (and promises to do the same next week). Considering this, as well as the fact that “Hairspray” was the soundtrack hit of last summer, is it safe to say that gay men comprise a quite large segment of the music buying audience?
*The Jonas Brothers (who are in the Top 20 twice this week) are on the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone. Don’t you think Jann Wenner would have caught more than a little shit if he’d put Hanson on the cover of RS 10 years ago or put the New Kids on the cover 20 years ago?
*I knew I could work an NKOTB reference into this column somewhere.
*Wasn’t Jesse McCartney trying to be Ryan Cabrera five years ago? Why is he trying to be Ne-Yo these days?
*Never thought a Canadian rapper would make his way into the Top 10 in America? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Kardinal Offishall. I’ll spare you the video. You can thank me later.
*It should be fairly obvious, and I think I’ve mentioned it before, but isn’t it so easy to look at the top selling albums, then look at the most popular singles and realize who’s buying what these days?
*For a band that gets collectively rimmed by the rock press as much as The Hold Steady does, you’ve gotta imagine that the #30 start for their new album “Stay Positive” has gotta be something of a disappointment. When Randy Travis sells more records than you in his first week twenty years after his peak, you’ve got to be just a little embarrassed, no?
*This week’s “Catch a Falling Star” award is shared by Alanis Morissette and Weezer. Alanis’s record sales have been dropping ever since everyone and their momma bought “Jagged Little Pill” in ’95-’96. “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie” sold 3 or 4 million off of fumes, the next album debuted at #1 and promptly sank like a stone, and outside of a brief resurgence due to the re-recorded version of “Pill”, Alanis has slowly sunk into marginalia. Her latest album, “Flavors of Entanglement”, shows some sign of life this week, bouncing up 18 spots to #40 this week, but for an album to be out of the Top 40 within a month and a half when one of your older albums spent twice that amount of time at #1 has got to sting a little bit. As for Rivers Cuomo and his boys, it seems like word of mouth is what sunk Weezer’s “Red Album”. With the general consensus being that this is by far the worst album of the band’s career, the album stands at #42 after 7 weeks. Ah, well. Rivers always has that degree to fall back on.
*Finally, “The Dark Knight” soundtrack debuts at #20 this week. It’s not near as successful as the soundtracks to some of the earlier “Batman” movies, but charts extremely well for an album of instrumental score music. And it’s a perfect way to end this week’s Chart Chat with…”Batdance”!! YAY!!!
Fuck. I forgot. Prince hates the internets these days. Oh well.I tried, y’all. Till next week.
Sometimes it’s hard to separate artistry from publicity. I was recently involved in a healthy debate regarding whether Amy Winehouse’s success is due to her artistry or the fact that she’s a walking, talking trainwreck (I vote for the former). The fact of the matter, though, is that in an environment when record sales are falling and record companies are scrambling to make their bottom line and justify their extravagant expenditures, artists are relying more and more on publicity stunts to keep their names in the headlines, which ends up putting true music fans in a bind, unable to separate the artist and the artistry from the celebrity.
This is one of two reasons I was initially skeptical about the untitled (or self-titled, depending on how you look at it) ninth studio album by the rapper Nas (or NaS, as iTunes annoyingly lists his name). As anyone who has even a remote interest in popular music must know, a mild furor arose when Nas announced what he intended to originally call the album: “Nigger”. In a hyper-sensitive world where the media seems to pounce on every available opportunity to create division and drama, a simple word/album title turned into a political football (interesting that no one batted an eyelash when Ol’ Dirty Bastard titled an album “Nigga Please” less than a decade ago). Various stories began circulating around the press: was Nas going to get dropped from Def Jam, his label? Would certain stores not carry the album if released? Why was the album’s release date continually getting pushed back? Why did Nas rip off the whip-welt scarred back cover of dead prez’s “Let’s Get Free” for the front cover of his album? Ultimately, Nas chose (or was asked, depending on who you believe) to change the title of the album-well, actually the decision ended up being not to title the album at all. I’ve viewed this whole situation with a cocked eyebrow, amazed at the ability of the average rap fan to buy in to what was obviously (at least partially) a publicity stunt milked to raise maximum awareness of the album’s release (as it turns out, the gambit didn’t exactly work. While the album debuted at #1 on this week’s album charts, it did so with the lowest first-week sales of any Nas studio album since his debut).
