Hey all, remember Leona Lewis? You know, the 2006 winner of the Simon Cowell-headed British talent search show The X-Factor (which Cowell plans to bring to the U.S. later this year)? The British Mariah? “Bleeding Love”? Can it be that “Bleeding Love” is only three years old? Can it be that only two albums into her kid-tested, mother(-and-Cowell)-approved career, and despite an appearance on the soundtrack of one of last […]
Back around maybe the second or third season of American Idol, when the show was becoming the established pop cultural phenomenon it is today, we started hearing about similar shows being developed by Lord of the Idols Simon Fuller and 19 Entertainment in other countries like Sweden and Poland and Indo(friggin)nesia. To date, there have been approximately 30 various Idol-esque franchises created around the world. I remember reading around that time about Kurt […]
Not to be confused with a German band who mined a far less confrontational hybrid of hip-hop and soulful pop in the mid 1990s, Plan B is the wildly ambitious British singer-rapper-actor-producer-aspiring filmmaker Ben Drew, whose 2006 album Who Needs Actions When You Got Words?, a record as nightmarish, epic, and unstoppable as a British Petroleum oil spill, elicited breathless comparisons to artists as varied as Eminem, Justin Timberlake, and Damien Rice. Like Eminem, […]