Justin Timberlake and his partners at MySpace want you to know they never went away. Apparently you did. The new face and part-owner of the first big social media site is on its third life, and this cat may not need all nine feline lives.
The site celebrates its tenth anniversary next year and launched a slick video in advance of re-opening the doors. Filled with dizzying jump-cuts seen over JJAMZ’s Heartbeat, the video has a little something for everyone and leans on its celebrity connections to bring the party back to life. It’s not like the site died, but after its dizzying heyday as the place to be online, MySpace was a pioneer in suffering through issues that would later hound Facebook and other sites such as privacy and piracy. But 100 million people signed up for the service and until a few years ago, routinely visited MySpace instead of Facebook. News Corp, the company behind Fox, The Wall Street Journal and more media properties than fit here, paid $580 million for the company.
But Facebook, Tumblr and other beat up the first kid on the block, sending its traffic tumbling. Unsigned artists and people sick of Facebook games still visited the site, but Myspace had lost the hearts and minds of most social media surfers and re-targeted itself as the cool music hangout. You have one in your town too. They sell import vinyl, have three people who know everything about recorded music and are blaring a Nina Simone mashup over a dance track. And while that may be your local place to find rare stuff or buy items not on the shelves, it’s a labor of love, not big money.
JT and a media company changed that when they bought the bedraggled MySpace last year for $35 million.
Now the race is on to rebirth cool.
Timberlake fired the first volley on Twitter Monday.
Timberlake’s celebrity pals immediately endorsed his play, and the only question remaining on everyone’s lips is this: When the doors reopen to Timberlake’s MySpace, will the users who rush to create accounts regularly return? Timberlake has all those Grammys, Emmys and other businesses to occupy him. Hell, he may never record again and still never leave the public eye. Business interests keep him busy, he’s got that acting thing he seems to embrace and even owns a couple of restaurants. At 31, it feels like he has been around all our lives, and it’s crazy sometimes to think *Nsync started its real success more than 14 years ago when he was already a known commodity. (MIC –Justin, Brit-Bit, Gosling and Xtina–KEY) Mouse featured the precocious ones in 1993.
After twenty years in various spotlights, now may be the time for Justin Timberlake to add Internet executive to his resume.
The MySpace teaser video is attached to Timberlake’s tweet. And as a Saturday morning treat, here is a free download of JJamz’s Heartbeat, the song behind the video.
Hi! My name is Brian Block. I’m new here; pleased to meet you. I wear silly hats; I own silly cats. I read too much; I teach; I had Attention Deficit Disorder before it was cool. I raise two small children who don’t have Attention Deficit Disorder even though it is cool now.
Yes, this is me.
I used to write long, passionately in-depth music reviews at a website called Epinions. I don’t do that anymore, because it’s less important to me than raising two small children. But I have been invited onto Pop Rock Nation to practice the mini-reviewing skill I’ve been working on, where – in usually fewer than 200 words – I take an album I like and try to explain its style, its mood, its sounds, and its singing and lyrics, so that you can figure out if you would like the album too.
As I settle in, I will normally use Pop Rock Nation for mini-reviews of recent albums (or at least ones that are recent discoveries to me). But I thought I would start by making a list of 30 all-time favorites, and letting the list fill with hyperlinks as I submit reviews of each – fuller reviews, say 500 words, perhaps one every other day. You will notice a couple of things about the list (beyond my dubious taste) that have a good chance of bothering you, and I’d like a chance in both cases to explain myself before you see the list and react.
* Half these albums are little-known.
There’s an unfortunate stereotype of standoffish “hipsters” who insist on being the first to hear the underground sounds, on only knowing the things too good and precious for the mass audience: people who reject a band the moment fraternity guys start going to the concerts. Those fans exist, sure. But in my experience, the people with really obscure favorite cd’s got there the same way I did: wide-open enthusiasm. I love good music; therefore I want to hear *all* the good music. Therefore it’s easy for even one person’s recommendation – if it’s descriptive in a way that grabs me – to make me want to hear a record … and I spend a ridiculous amount of time looking for those recommendations. (While listening to music I already have, of course.)
Some of my favorite music has been known and loved by tens of millions of people: from the Beatles’ “a Day in the Life” to Beyonce’s “Countdown”, from Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” to System of a Down’s “B.Y.O.B.”, from Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair” through Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Pulp’s “Common People” to the Jay-Z/ Kanye West collaboration “No Church in the Wild”. One of the best and most profound essays I ever wrote, when I wrote essays, was a defense of Starship’s “We Built This City”, which is why I am never going to be an important writer.
But literally millions of Americans are in bands, and several times as many non-Americans: most songs will not be famous. Most songs *that deserve to be famous* will never be famous, crushed by the power of simple math. Plus, yeah, I love plenty of weird and difficult stuff too. Sometimes I convince other people to join me.
* This album list disrespects history: most of it is from the last two decades.
The fact that the 1960s and 1970s are represented once each is partly a fluke based on old record company practices, in which bands were asked to churn out one or two new 35-minute albums per year. It is easier to make a spectacular 55-minute album in three years than an equally spectacular 35-minute album in nine months – I should probably admit to having an economics degree, and therefore an unshakeable belief that 55 of a good thing is better than 35 of a good thing even without other considerations – and a list of the Best of the Best is going to show this. If Simon and Garfunkel had combined the best of Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme … if Yes’s Close to the Edge had included the same-year single Roundabout … if Blue Oyster Cult had held back Secret Treaties until they could put Don’t Fear the Reaper on it … they would be on this list.
That said, I absolutely think that the amount of great music being made goes up over time. For one thing, cheap access to ever-better recording equipment means that thousands of albums are released every year that, in the 1970s or maybe even the 1990s, would have been stuck inside the makers’ heads. Some of those albums are excellent. For another thing, the Classic albums – in the popular or especially the critical canon – are often albums that discovered a new trick. But discovering a new trick is not the same thing as writing great songs; it is my experience of the world that the best albums might invent a few tricks, but they steal and re-purpose many more. As time passes, more and more tricks have been invented, ready and waiting for clever use.
The list, then: 30 Great Albums I Intend to Review in the Near Future:
He's gonna rouge his knees and roll his stockings down.Finally. Someone – someone great even – has exacted a satisfying revenge on Pat Boone. Pat Boone’s crimes against rock n’ roll are myriad and well-documented. In the mid-50s, his Wonderbread and butter was in recording squeaky clean covers of contemporaneous R&B hits (“black” music) marketed heavily to a mainstream pop (“white”) audience. Not only did his recordings diffuse the power and energy inherent in those songs (imagine John Mayer covering Nirvana), but it succeeded to keeping the original artists behind the songs – The Flamingos, The Charms, The Eldorados – off the radio and out of the record bins.
Unsatisfied with the shameless real-time castration of some of rock n’ roll’s earliest classics, Boone attempted a late-late-late career comeback in 1997 by donning a leather vest (ewww) and doing a heavy metal theme album called No More Mr. Nice Guy, choosing 12 of the most iconic hard rock songs of the previous three decades and turning them into slick big band punchlines. (I’ll concede: his Latin-jazz take on Van Halen’s “Panama” has a certain Manilowian charm. Is that Reparata singing back-up?.) The obviousness of the song choices make the gimmick transparent. “Stairway to Heaven”? You get a sense that he’s playing for the laughs and doesn’t really respect the songs or the artists who originally performed them. It’s one thing to play fun with Van Halen, but when he starts crooning “The Wind Cries Mary”, that joke isn’t funny anymore.
A few years after No More Mr. Nice Guy, 50s teen star turned 70s adult contemporary maestro Paul Anka recorded an album called Rock Swings, proving that this sort of thing can be done well; among a few gimmicky selections (“Smells Like Teen Spirit”, Van Halen’s “Jump”) he delivered lovely, stylish, and wholly unironic interpretations of such unlikely numbers as Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s a Sin” and the Cure’s “The Lovecats.” Rock Swings is still very much a Paul Anka album – there’s not a guitar solo in sight – but he approaches the alternative and hard rock songbooks the same way he might approach any other American standard. You get the sense that he really understands, for instance, what a great melodist Robert Smith is – and what a romantic. Listening to Anka sing “The Lovecats”, I wish he’d do a whole album of Cure songs.
Dee Snider “Mack the Knife” (2012)
This month, Twisted Sister frontman (and recent Celebrity Apprentice contestant) Dee Snider turned the tables, releasing Dee Snider Does Broadway. As a fan of both Twisted Sister and Broadway showtunes, I’m happy to report that Snider takes the Paul Anka approach to this concept: he clearly loves the songs he’s singing; he sings them damn well. And along with guests Clay Aiken (his Celebrity Apprentice rival) and Cyndi Lauper (another Celebrity Apprentice alum), he gets buy-in from two of the greatest Broadway divas of the last three decades: Patti Lupone, who joins Snider for the album-closing medley of “Tonight” and “Somewhere” from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, and Bebe Neuwirth who reprises her role as temptress-from-hell Lola, a role she played in the 1994 hit revival of the Adler & Ross musical Damn Yankees, on a duet of “Whatever Lola Wants.”
His duet with Clay “Always the Bridesmaid” Aiken on Frank Loesser’s “Luck Be a Lady” (from Guys and Dolls) turns that sleak, jazzy 1950 gambler’s plea into a shark-jumping send-up of Sunset Strip decadence. But while he never loses his sense of humor, he plays much of the rest of the stuff – an appropriately snarling take on “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd”, for instance – like the Twister Sister songs Stephen Sondheim had no idea he was writing. Which is to say not necessarily straight-faced, but also not entirely without reverence.
