web analytics

Pop Rock Nation

Blog

  • Thinking About Michael Jackson: One Year Later

    MJ
    Just the other day, I reminisced about Tupac Shakur on what would’ve been his 39th birthday. That post was much easier to write than this one. It’s still too soon.

    I was a fan like everyone else when I was younger. Thriller came out when I was six years old and I had the flea market glitter glove like every other kid. But I fell off as a fan. I’m not really sure why, other than it probably just wasn’t as cool to be a MJ fan anymore. I still knew the music and I still enjoyed it, but I was nowhere near the fan that I am today.

    Right around my late high school and early college years, I just started to buy everything in site. I bought a J5 four-CD set, all the Jacksons albums, and all of his back catalog on CD. And today, while I won’t say I have everything the man put to wax (or plastic), I do have most everything he’s done. Now if they’d only release all the old J5 and Jacksons’ TV footage.

    What’s interesting about Michael Jackson’s death to me is that he was so much larger than life when he was alive that it was almost like he wasn’t really alive. He was a living legend. And by that, I don’t mean the cliched way that the term is used. He was like a fairy tale that we lived through. Michael Jackson the real person was almost like a character from a book. He was a surreal celebrity who was hard to relate to.

    So to me, I still think of him in that way. He was never someone I could touch. I could only see him and hear him.

    Rather than look back at how I felt when I heard he passed (sad), where I was when I heard (work), and how I followed the situation (Twitter), I wanted to point everyone to some of the cool things I’ve read and seen in the past few days.

    Our previous editor and lead writer and friend of SC, Big Money Mike, wrote an exhaustive four-part series on Michael’s music at Popdose which you can read here, here, here, and here. It’s a fantastic read.

    Nancy Griffin writes a stellar piece for Vanity Fair called The Thriller Diaries, which studies Michael during the filming of the Thriller video just as his superstar status was entering white hot mode.

    Last month, the New York Daily News posted an interesting photo of Michael that was being considered as album art for his 2001 album Invincible.

    The Beautiful Struggler deals with Michael’s death with one year of retrospection.

    Lastly, I wanted to showcase a few videos that I’ve come across and also my favorite video that wasn’t actually a performance or music video.

    Someone Put Your Hand Out was recorded during the Dangerous era and was actually released in Europe through Pepsi to promote the Dangerous World Tour. It was released in the US several years ago as a part of MJ’s The Ultimate Collection. It’s one of the better previously unreleased tracks that have come out.



    This next video isn’t really all that ground breaking. It’s just him rehearsing for We Are The World. I’d never seen it before until recently. It’s kind of interesting to see him bide his time and try to figure things out with the song. And for whatever reason, he breaks into a dance step for 2 seconds, which I found pretty funny.



    This is my favorite non-performance, non-music video piece of footage out there. It’s actually for a Pepsi commercial, but you get to see Michael play an instrument and it seems like he’s truly happy in that moment. For whatever reason, I’ve just always been fascinated with this short piece.



    Edit: I added one more that Questlove tweeted out. Michael is literally a dancing machine.



    Lastly, if you can find it, go download DJ Jazzy Jeff’s mixtape, He’s The King, I’m The DJ. By the looks of it, people are having a hard time finding it though. It was released shortly after MJ died last year.

    From Jazzy Jeff’s Twitter:

    Miss u Mj…He’s the King….I’m the Dj….find it if u can…for real Mj Fans


    Photo of MJ shared via Wikipedia and licensed through Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

  • First Look: Kelis “4th of July (Fireworks)”

    Here’s the video for the second single from Kelis‘s forthcoming fifth album Flesh Tone. It’s her first new studio album in almost 5 years; her first album under her freshly inked deal with the will.i.am Music Group and Interscope and also the first record since she became a mother (by rapper Nas). The DJ Ammo-produced “4th of July (Fireworks)” follows closely behind the amazing “Acapella”, which (not for nothing) topped Billboard‘s dance charts earlier this year. That song dropped the sex kitten act that gave Kelis her biggest hit (“Milkshake”), in favor of an earthier, more soulful vocal reminiscent of classic Donna Summer on a song that was a soaring and spiritual celebration of new motherhood. “4th of July”, accompanied by another visually stunning video, is another song about the transformative powers of love. It may lack a bit of its predecessor’s immediacy, but for “dance pop,” this song comes harder than a lot of what qualifies as rock these days and Kelis has never been more compelling or more disciplined as a singer. It advances the case that Kelis, at the start of her second decade in the showbiz, is making the best music of her career right now; and that, with Flesh Tone, we may be in the presence of a dance pop masterpiece. This is one album I cannot wait for.

  • First Impressions: Marina and the Diamonds

    I have also decided I am the worst kind of artist. I think I am like a half-pop star. Too pop for indie & too indie for pop. Half way house, hellish doom.

    -Marina and the Diamonds.

    Marina and the Diamonds is not a band. It is the stage name of 24-year-old singer-songwriter-performer Marina Lambrini Diamandis. And I think I love her. Marina creates brilliant pop music, ready for the radio, but with an emotional intimacy and a sense of candor more fitting the confessional guitar strummers of the 70s. Incorporating both visual and vocal tics and mannerisms from a broad spectrum of out-there female forebears – the emphatic, naive joy of Bjork, the punk theatricality of Siouxsie Sioux, the faux-eastern European, new wave exoticism of Lene Lovich, the self-doubt and introspection of Joan Armatrading, and, what the hell, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s otherworldly trill – only without coming across nearly as forbiddingly weird as any of the above, and all while sounding like no one but herself. After several singles and EPs, her debut album The Family Jewels was released in February 2010.

    “Mowgli’s Road”

    Like Lady Gaga, there’s something visionary about what Marina and the Diamonds is, for it most certainly isn’t just Marina herself. Gaga may have her little monsters, but Marina addresses her fans as her Diamonds, which makes her stage name not just a play on her given name, but gives new meaning to the phrase “I’m with the band”, implicating those who listen to her music, who come to her shows, who read her (awesome) blog, who buy her branded lip paint and face gems, (and presumably those of us who write fawning admirations of her in their obscure little music blogs) as participants in this ongoing, open-ended musical art project. It might be a little easy to write off this idea of artistic audience-inclusiveness as a Gaga rip-off, but Marina comes by the concept independently, and this is pretty much where comparisons to Lady Gaga end. Where Gaga embraces her celebrity, taking a sort of pre-emptively self-exploitative stance and making self-consciously provocative videos to aggrandize otherwise often silly pop songs, Marina regards pop culture and celebrity – her own increasing celebrity especially – with caution and the kind of curiosity one might have for an exotic, potentially deadly tropical insect, fascination tinged with revulsion. An emotionally charged, cabaret-style cover of 30H!3’s “Starstrukk” has become a fixture of her live show (you can download it for free here).

    “Hollywood”

    While embracing instantly lovable pop melodies, her songs are full of challenges and manifestos in disguise. Her single “I Am Not a Robot” might be a reassurance to a social outcast boyfriend coming to terms with his baggage. But it also reads as a statement of artistic purpose, not just Marina’s, but her audience’s – and, simultaneously, a rebuke of the soulless-ness (not to mention joylessness) of Autotune radio pop fodder. “You’re vulnerable. You are not a robot,” she sings at the end of the first verse. She counters that charge with an empathetic chorus, “Guess what? I am not a robot,” and finishes with a question “Can you teach me how to feel real? Can you turn my power on?” With this song, she throws down a gauntlet for her vision of Marina and the Diamonds going forward. She’d rather be hated for her genuine two-thousand-and-late-ness than be loved by millions for a phony three-thousand-and-eight pose. Yes, I believe this makes her The Anti-Fergie. Thank Diamonds for that.

    “I Am Not a Robot”