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  • Clay Aiken & His Babymakin’


    For the past day and a half or so, I’ve tried to figure out how to discuss this while a) not being boring and b) not being completely obnoxious.

    Personally, I don’t care if a star is gay or not. It really doesn’t make aifference to anything or anyone. Will your enjoyment of Luther Vandross’s music suffer because of the fact that he was (by most accounts) gay?

    I also don’t like the fact that there often seems to be a witchhunt to out celebrities. We don’t own them. They’re allowed to have private lives, and who they sleep with is none of our business. People like Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, who delights in grade-school innuendo and borderline name-calling, strike me as bitter queens who either spent their childhood being bullied for being gay and/or are spending their adulthood being bullied for being gay and want to pull someone else into their misery.

    Truth is, none of us really knows if Clay Aiken is gay. He’s never said as much, simple as that. We all might have an opinion (and I’ll admit that my gaydar goes off whenever I see him), but there are straight dudes who act like sissies the same way there are gay dudes who don’t have stereotypically “gay” mannerisms.

    The fact that Clay (by artificial insemination, apparently) impregnated the 50-year old sister of music producer David Foster (who’s 30+ year career has seen him work with everyone from Earth, Wind & Fire to Whitney Houston to Josh Groban) is…a little strange, and it rings ever-so-slightly of a publicity stunt. However, I (like plenty of other people) am a cynic. If Clay wants a kid and this is the means he chose to have it, then God bless him. If it is indeed a publicity stunt, then boo on Clay and his handlers for bringing an actual live human being into this mess (although what would having a baby by artificial insemination do for his career, considering it would just seem to compound the gay rumors…). It doesn’t matter to me, because I have no interest in Clay Aiken’s music and probably never will (unless he gets hip and walks away from trying to be the 21st century Peter Cetera).

    What happened to the days when the music mattered and people didn’t really care what musicians did in their personal lives?

  • Friday Throwback – You Make Me Wanna

    It seems like this week has been “Usher week” on our blog. But really, why not? Usher is a star and these days, there are so many fly by night artists that we should celebrate the artists that continually fill the appetites of their fan bases. Though Usher’s first CD (way back in 1994) didn’t really make an impact, his second did in a big way, thanks to this single, You Make Me Wanna. I actually remember going to a record store with my then girlfriend and buying the single because she was so crazy for it. How many times do you remember buying a certain song or album? That’s the impact this one made.

    – How much money do you want to bet that dude isn’t playing one lick of that guitar?

    – Is he wearing the Jordan XIs?

    – This song made every guy question any male friends their girlfriends had. It was like, “You like this song, ok, you can’t have anymore guy friends.”

    – What do the fish in the aquarium have to do with this song?

    – Ha! If you squint a little, I think you can see Jermaine Dupri.

    – Based off this video, you can tell dude has some dance skills, but I didn’t think he’d be the closest thing to MJ that he became. Wait, I think Chris Brown might’ve taken the closest thing to MJ on the dance floor mantle.

    – Why did they all take off their shoes? Was it to tell us that they were dancing with their laces untied?

    – What kind of speed bag dancing was Jermaine Dupri doing at the end of this video?

    The man is still singing and dancing 11 years later. And he probably won’t be stopping anytime soon.

  • The Random Endorsement Files: Cindy Blackman- Europeans are Crazy!

    From the Random Endorsement Files: the new pitchwoman for Volkswagen appears to be none other than Lenny Kravitz… ‘s drummer. That would be Cindy Blackman, whose appearances in Kravitz’s videos have been, for this writer, all that truly matters about Kravitz’s recording career. Witness her magnificence in the 1993 video for “Are You Gonna Go My Way”!

    There she is amidst all the dread-flailing and fancy lights – she’s the only one in the whole video not throwing her hair around. In fact, her whole body seems completely consumed in the generation of the song’s relentless beat. That singularity of purpose coupled with giant black sunglasses and auburn chrysanthemum afro make her the most magnetic sight in a video full of people trying really, really, really hard to hold our attention. There’s really no one else in the video I want to look at, and I can’t think of anyone else who projects such a mystifyingly wonderful stage presence from behind a drum kit without opening his or her mouth.

    Which, apart from the shear randomness of the casting, is what makes her appearance in this new Volkswagen ad such a surprise: Cindy Blackman speaks! Playing the leader of the house band (Kravitz’s band, minus the Lenny) for a talk show hosted by a VW bug with a comically thick accent and an effusively flattering manner, she delivers the familiar tagline – “Europeans are crazy” – with a withering cool. Even better though is the “whooo” she launches before she and the rest of the band play the ad out. The vocal equivalent of the ascending flare of a firecracker just before it explodes into its colors, that “whooo” is what makes the commercial for me – a nanosecond of good old-fashioned, retro-soul, dance-to-the-music joy, incorruptible even within the context of something so crass as a car ad (albeit a crazy European one).

    Of course, more than making want to check out the new VW Tiguan, the ad made me want to look further in Cindy Blackman’s work, and as might have been predicted, the Lenny Kravitz connection is not just the tip of the proverbial iceberg (she’s played on Joss Stone’s records too), it’s also largely an anomaly in a career that’s found the 48-year-old Brooklynite jamming with a virtual who’s who of contemporary jazz players – Bill Laswell, Cassandra Wilson, George Benson, Hugh Masekela, and her most frequent collaborator bassist Ron Carter, among many others – and, with her gift for dynamic Tony Williams style polyrhythms, holding her own quite well in a still-very-much male-dominated genre on a still-very-much mail-dominated instrument.

    Since 1987, she’s released 10 albums as a band leader, and though her most recent album – 2004’s monumental double-disc Music for a New Millennium – is woefully out of print (at the time of this writing, Amazon has a single third party listing for the album, selling for $170), you can hear a few tracks from the album, recorded with saxophonist JD Allen, keyboardist Carlton Holmes, and bassist George Mitchell on Blackman’s website. I’m particularly digging “Letter to Theo”. Whooo!

    -P.Lorentz