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  • Friday Throwback – Rub You The Right Way

    I was thinking about what to use for this week and it hit me like a ton of bricks. A friend had sent me Ralph Tresvant’s video for Sensitivity and I figured that if Ralph looked silly, I remember Johnny Gill looking even more silly. He’s workin’ it in this video.

    – A shirtless Johnny wasn’t too impressive. Dude could’ve got in the gym a bit and hit the bench press.

    – Was he shiny suit man before Diddy was?

    – Check out JG’s moves. He’s got some frenetic moves.

    – Whenever I see his haircut, I think it looks like someone was building stairs.

    – His dance moves are like a wannabe Janet in the Rhythm Nation era, with MJ’s pelvic thrusts.

    – This might be one of the greatest lines in pop history – “Whenever I need to rub, I run her happiness.”

    – Why is he saluting and then crotch chopping all at the same time?

    – Is he wearing a leather tank top with that leather jacket and leather pants?

    – That’s an angry running man.

    Johnny’s Wikipedia page says that he, Ralph T, and Bobby B created a group called Heads Of State. Huh? Can’t they just get back with the rest of the New Edition fellas?

  • Infatueighties #66: Fast Car

    Story-songs peaked in the early Seventies with songs like “The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia”. It might be diluting “Fast Car”‘s overall message by classifying it as a “story song”, but it’s very easy to see Tracy Chapman’s 1988 breakthrough hit as a TV movie the way “Ode to Billie Joe”, isn’t it?

    The premise is simple: a couple aims to improve their surroundings by leaving their thankless, luckless ife behind. Beneath all that, though, “Fast Car” is a very simple love song. “The city lights came on before us/And your arms felt nice wrapped ’round my shoulders”. Tracy’s impassioned vocal makes you believe that those surroundings will be escaped by sheer force of will…and the power of love. Aw, shit. Hand me a tissue.

    Seriously, Chapman arrived in the summer of ’88 as an anomaly…not only a folk singer, but a BLACK folk singer. An explicitly political artist in a world of Taylor Daynes and Paula Abduls, someone who didn’t have model looks, but got video play anyway. Everything about her was different from what was popular at the time. Nevertheless, her self-titled debut hit #1 on the charts, won a shelf full of Grammys, and “Fast Car” became a Top 10 pop single, setting off a career that’s still going strong twenty years later.

    It’s hard to imagine someone like Tracy Chapman becoming a superstar in today’s musical climate, isn’t it? Makes one pine even more for the good old days.

  • So Much for Prognostication: The 2009 Grammy Award Nominations

    Well, for the most part, it was out with the old and in with the (fairly) new when the Grammy nominations were announced last night. With 8 nominations for Lil’ Wayne, 7 for Radiohead and Coldplay, and 6 apiece for Jay-Z, Kanye West and Ne-Yo, the hipness quotient got raised quite a bit. There were also a couple of surprise shutouts, as Alicia Keys and Mary J. Blige, both Grammy favorites, got relegated to minor categories despite two of the biggest selling albums released during the eligibility period. There were a ton of surprises. Here are a couple of them.

    *Ne-Yo for Album of the Year: An album that kind of slipped by unnoticed on the critical scale, Ne-Yo’s third album is sharing space with Lil’ Wayne, Radiohead and likely winner Robert Plant and Alison Krauss for Album of the Year. Pretty impressive.

    *Where’s Leona Lewis for Best New Artist? “Bleeding Love” got nominated for Record of the Year and Leona got a nod for Best Female Pop Performance, but she got beat out by Duffy, Adele (who scored a surprise nomination for Record of the Year), The Jonas Brothers (!!!), Lady Antebellum and Jazmine Sullivan (with an unexpected 5 nominations) for this award.

    *AC/DC gets nominated for Best Rock Performance, Group: Not so much a surprise, but I bet our own Mikey Hersh just peed his pants.

    There are plenty of other surprises-and surprise omissions-but you’ll just have to rifle through the list of nominations yourself.