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  • Beating The Sophomore Jinx: New Releases 9/18/07

    The second album is the “show & prove” effort. The time to let people know that you’re more than a one-hit wonder, and two of 2006’s biggest debut artists make their (rather quick, if you ask me) returns today.
    Welcome back James (“You’re Beautiful”) Blunt and KT (“Suddenly I See”) Tunstall with their second albums. Blunt, the new king of Lite radio, has a new single called “1973” and his album is called All The Lost Souls. KT, whose chick rock has gained her a ton of fans through placement on just about every TV show imaginable, has a new album called Drastic Fantastic.
    Speaking of Lite radio, there’s a new Barry Manilow record in stores today, and something tells me Elizabeth Hasselbeck will not be buying it. But that shouldn’t stop you from buying The Greatest Songs of the Seventies. Then again…it *is* Barry Manilow…
    Want more of the greatest songs of the Seventies? Pick up Babyface’s new CD, Playlist, which features the R&B singer/songwriter/producer/instrumentalist remaking songs like James Taylor’s “Fire & Rain” and Dan Fogelberg’s “Longer”.
    Also on the release schedule, the solo debut of Train’s Pat Monahan, Aussie singer/songwriter Ben Lee, Finnish metal outfit HIM, rap Grammy winner Chamillionaire, and the final album from industrial gods Ministry.
    See? Something for everyone!!!

  • But Isn’t John Bonham Dead??

    OK, folks, seriously.
    I love Led Zeppelin-really, I do.
    But what’s the big hubbub over this reunion concert? (For those who don’t know, the three surviving members of Zep are performing in the U.K. at a tribute concert for the late Atlantic Records honcho Ahmet Ertegun).
    First off-it’s not like they haven’t had reunions before. Remember Live Aid? (where Phil Collins subbed on the drum kit for the dearly departed John Bonham…best rock drummer of all time IMHO). What about the Page & Plant acoustic album and tour in the mid-Nineties?
    And is it really a “reunion” when one of the members is deceased? If Paul and Ringo went on a tour today as The Beatles, it wouldn’t be the same, would it??

  • Friday Throwback – I Ain’t Mad At Cha

    Tupac Shakur died on September 13, 1996 and I figured it was fitting to showcase one of my favorite Tupac songs for Friday Throwback. It’s crazy to realize that it’s been now eleven years since he passed. Part of the reason I like this song so much is because of the timing. The video was released to MTV only two days after he died. And in the video, it shows him dying and partying in heaven. It was odd timing, but more coincidental than ironic. The video was filmed several months earlier. The song itself was on Pac’s All Eyez On Me and featured a sampling of DeBarge’s A Dream.

    • Where have you gone Bokeem Woodbine?
    • They can get a real actor like Bokeem, yet hire people off the street to play the one scene where there’s dialogue in the ambulance?
    • Redd Foxx greets you after you die?
    • I like the album version of the song much better than the video version.
    • Quick to approach a ghetto cutie with the same line? I remember them hollerin’ at hoochies with the same line.
    • Whatever happened to Danny Boy?
    • That was a broke ass Sammy Davis Jr. in there.
    • While he redid the song entirely for the video version, most of the first and second verses are similar and only changed because of the cursing. However, the third verse is entirely different.
    • Marvin Gaye was dancing like a mad man and Jimmy Hendrix was wearing some loud colors.

    Even though his works were probably a bit overrated lyric wise, there’s no arguing about his impact in hip hop. I still wear my Pac shirt today.