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Tag: Beyonce

  • American Idol Season 10 – And The Winner Is …

    Like I said yesterday in my American Idol recap on Popblerd!, this season is a bit anticlimactic. It’s reminiscent of the Jordin Sparks/Blake Lewis clash. Neither contestant was super interesting or had a great story and they were simply nice kids. That’s how I feel about this year’s finale.

    Based on last night, Lauren clearly out-performed Scotty, but really, it’s not about what happened last night. What’s more important is how much of a fanbase each was able to create throughout the season. I’ve pegged Lauren as this season’s winner from day one based on how I think they can market her. She’s much more in the Kelly Clarkson/Carrie Underwood zone than anyone else they’ve had in the past several years. But Scotty has those girly girls voting for him in droves. And that could prove to be the difference.

    I received this tweet from elliehempleman which made me excited for the show.

    @roheblius you finally got to see @JLo shake her money maker. Worth the wait?

    (She’s on the East Coast so she was able to see the show before I was.)

    Wait, I just saw Aunt Becky (lesser known as Dixon’s and Annie’s mom) in the audience! That woman never ages.

    We’re going to do this a little differently tonight. Here come the bullet points!

    – The top 13 is singing Lady Gaga’s Born This Way. Are they trying to tell us something?
    – If Pia dressed like this during the season, she would’ve never lost.
    – Haley is wearing some of the hottest hot pants I’ve ever seen.
    – Hey, Karen Rodriguez, thanks for reminding me what you look like.
    – James Durbin is performing with Judas Priest. He’s wearing a captain’s hat and a sleeveless vest, looking like he wants to bring back The Village People.
    – Jacob Lusk and Kurt Franklin are performing together. Gladys Knight just came on stage to sing with them, but without the Pimps. Oprah Winfrey is shaking her head for not thinking of this trio for her final week of shows.
    – Casey and Jack Black are on stage together and they both have new movies coming out this weekend. For Black’s it’s Kung Fu Panda 2 and for Casey, The Hangover 2.
    – The girls of American Idol performed a flurry of Beyonce’s hits and it really made you appreciate Beyonce as both a singer and a performer. Haley has a little funk in her though. Pia, not so much.
    – Beyonce came out and just killed everything. They’ve had some fantastic performers on this show before, but she leaves most in the dust. And who doesn’t enjoy that Beyonce shake? I’ll take two.
    – They rolled out the corpse of Tony Bennett to sing with Haley. Who am I kidding? This dude has more life than I do.
    – In the “5 Years Late” department, Lil’ Jon came out on the stage. And in the “15 Years Late” department, TLC came out. But damn, Chili is still fine. The moral of the story is and always will be, “Don’t go chasin’ waterfalls, y’all.”
    – Tim McGraw came out to sing with Scotty, but really, he just should’ve started bench pressing him. Scotty’s a little light in the ass to be on stage with McGraw.
    – So this is what happens when your wife is the star of the show. Marc Anthony is out singing and I’ll be fine with this if J. Lo comes out and dances for him. If not, it’s a waste of my five minutes.
    – If Marc wasn’t a Grammy winning singer and was just some dude from the hood, wouldn’t he look like someone who kidnaps children?
    – J. Lo is out with him and she is shaking what her momma gave her. I think Beyonce threw down the gauntlet and J. Lo answered the challenge.
    – Sheila E. was banging on some drums too. It’s always great to see Sheila.
    – While the Idol dudes were out performing, my son says, “How does Scotty do it? Did he hypnotize the judges. I just don’t think he’s very good.”
    – Tom Jones came out to sing It’s Not Unusual. If Carlton comes out dancing, I will declare this show the greatest of all time.
    – It didn’t happen, though Jacob tried his hardest to channel his inner Carlton.
    – Hey, it’s Lady Gaga. At least this time, she’s actually on stage, rather than from her own concert like a couple of weeks ago.
    – Lauren started to sing some Carrie (you know, that song about Tony Romo) and you just knew Carrie was coming out to sing with her. Someone needs to feed Carrie a couple sammiches. She still has that terrible case of noassatall.
    – Beyonce is out again singing her new single 1 Plus 1. Let’s just say that this is a smidgen better than Beyonce’s current single about the girls who are running the world. Ok, maybe 100 times better.
    – Finally, we get some Steven Tyler live. Sing it Stevie!

    It’s now time. Who wins season 10 of American Idol?

    And the winner is … Scotty McCreery!

    Well, 10 years of American Idol are in the books. And I’m tired. See you next year.

    Photo of Carrie Underwood is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

  • PAUL’S TOP 100 OF 2010 – PART 6: #50-41 “You came to celebrate, I came to cerebrate…”

    And the countdown marches on…

    #50
    #50: “YOU MUST BE OUT OF YOUR MIND” by THE MAGNETIC FIELDS.
    You have to love a guy unafraid to rhyme “on your knees, yeah” with “anesthesia”. A great song about not letting bygones be bygones sung in Stephen Merritt’s strangely incisive Eeyore deadpan. After releasing a their feedback heavy 2008 album Distortion, the Magnetic Fields returned with Realism the stripped-down acoustic yin to its predecessor’s clanging yang.

    #49
    #49: “THE SKY’S THE LIMIT” by JASON DERULO.
    Petty thievery never sounds so good as when Mister Desrouleaux swipes the essence of “Flashdance… What a Feeling” from Irene Cara. The best reinvention of an 80s soundtrack anthem this year. Which is not to say that the Black-Eyed Peas provided any competition with their insufferable “The Time (The Dirty Bit)”. Also: this song contains my favorite instance of the word “shawty”.

    #48
    #48: “TRIPPIN’ DOWN THE FREEWAY” by WEEZER.
    Although the song is about the persistence of a romantic relationship (and a woman’s awesome “Shirley Applebee” look) against all odds (and all guys named Kevin Green), it could be just as much about Weezer and their fans…
    I loved Weezer from the very start, but since their 1996 album Pinkerton, I’ve run hot and cold with them, and in the last few years, I’ve completely written them off (or thought I had). But they always manage somehow to re-justify their existence and re-justify my love. Example: This damn song. Gawd, I love it. It’s been in heavy rotation on my iPod all year. It made me love the band again. It also made me want to google Shirley Applebee. And then, once I did, it made me love the song and the band even more. Weezer and I are gonna be okay.

    #47
    #47: “ALL NIGHT LONG” by ALEXANDRA BURKE featuring PITBULL.
    The fifth season winner of Simon Cowell’s UK (soon to be US) singing competition The X-Factor, Alexandra Burke throws a wild house party. Although I like this version fine, the Pitbull-less version that appears on Burke’s debut album Overcome has a better build-up and you don’t miss the obligatory rap break at all.

    #46
    #46: “TELEPHONE” by LADY GAGA & BEYONCE.
    Before there was a video for this song, it was just a funny little song about not wanting take calls from a stupid boyfriend when you’re out dancing. I love the video, but it sort of overshadows a lot of what was fun about the song to begin with. Although it does give us some very quotable lines. “Once you kill the cow…”

    #45
    #45: “MARCHIN’ ON” by ONEREPUBLIC.
    “For those days we felt like a mistake, for those times when love’s what we hate, somehow, we keep marchin’ on.” This is a great song to listen to after you’ve spent most of an otherwise pleasant evening arguing about who’s more underappreciated and throwing Tupperware lids at each other.

    #44
    #44: “GRENADE” by BRUNO MARS.
    The guy who wrote “F*ck You” for Cee-Lo Green goes all Christ-like (with a piano instead of a cross) for the video for the second single from his debut album Doo Wops and Hooligans. Awesome lyric: “Tell the devil I said ‘Hey’ when you get back to where you’re from…” Ouch. Also, I love – LOVE – the drums in this song.

    #43
    #43: “BREAK YOUR HEART” by TAIO CRUZ.
    This song is all about its middle eight. If this were a countdown of songs I most loved singing along with, this song’s bridge (“Yeah! And I know karma’s gonna get me back for bein’ so cold…”) would be, like, #7. I deliberately chose the original sans-Ludacris version of the song because I think Ludacris distracts us from the super-awesome middle eight.

    #42
    #42: “THE FIRE” by THE ROOTS featuring JOHN LEGEND.
    Like the rest of their amazing album How I Got Over, “The Fire” is tenaciously, apocalyptically soulful. The video has some disturbing imagery, but despite its ambitions, it’s too incoherent to really work.

    #41
    #41: “CREDIBLE THREATS” by THE ONE AM RADIO.
    A nice little song about contemplating all of the possible demises that await us on a day-to-day basis. Things like turbulent airplanes, shuddering L-trains, and sudden floods of brakelights on I-5. Oh, and foreigners. This is also my favorite choreography of the year. The video was also released in a 3D version. And the 45rpm vinyl version of the single came with a set of 3D glasses and a download card for both the song (in various versions) and the 3D video for it.

    In the next installment: Because “one’s not enough”, an unbroken tie…

  • Gaga and Beyonce in a Lez-ploitation Epic: “Telephone”

    As inspiration for a music video, you wouldn’t think much of the latest Lady Gaga single “Telephone”, a thumping Rodney Jerkins instant-club-hit with a feature spot by Beyonce (returning the favor after Gaga guested on a remix of Beyonce’s “Video Phone” for the reissue of I Am… Sasha Fierce).  The song’s lyrics virtually write their own screenplay (girl wants to dance; boy keeps calling girl; girl takes no calls cuz she’ll be dancing), and in any other hands, would probably get a very literal music video treatment.  But, as we’ve come to expect, Lady Gaga and director Jonas Akerlund (who directed her video for “Paparazzi” last summer) have come up with something altogether more menacing, and hilarious – a “lez-ploitation” sequel to “Paparazzi” which finds Beyonce bailing Lady Gaga out of jail, only for the two of them to hit the local diner, off all the patrons (including a Beyonce boyfriend played by Tyrese), and then do a big dance number for an audience of fresh corpses before riding off into the sunset.

    The long-anticipated  video – Gaga’s been tweeting about it for what seems like months now, and the song has already bulldozed its way up into the Top 3 of the Billboard Pop Chart – made a splashy premiere Thursday night on E! News, which also ran clips of an interview with Gaga (praising the E! network’s “courage” in running it in it’s glorious 9 minute entirety, and noting her and Beyonce’s shared love of women) who was almost certainly encouraging those (like me, admittedly) who would draw parallels between this particular spectacle and the ceremonious unveiling of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” more than 25 years ago (before Gaga was born).

    Okay, so I’ll bite.  There won’t be another “Thriller” moment.  There can’t be.  In 1983, the music video was still a fledgling form – videos were cheaply made, poorly shot, and disposable – and with one grand gesture, Michael Jackson had turned it into a legitimate art form.  That kind of thing can’t happen now – the audience isn’t nearly innocent enough, which Jackson himself almost certainly had to have learned.   He never stopped making epic music videos (ahem, “short films”), but none came close to garnering the notoriety of “Thriller”, even when the actual quality of the videos (I’m thinking “Smooth Criminal” here) rivaled it for pure watchability while ditching the embarrasing dialogue and bad acting.

    But setting that singular moment aside, there are numerous parallels to be drawn between the videos for “Thriller” and “Telephone”.  Not the least of which is that they are both genre flicks with big-name directors.  Michael’s was a horror movie directed by John Landis of American Werewolf in London fame (and Twilight Zone infamy), while “Telephone” is a 70s-style exploitation flick with a decidedly meta twist and a pulpy lesbian plot line like a cross between Thelma & Louise and Natural Born Killers.  Like Jackson, whose song “Thriller” was actually the seventh (and final) single to be released from the album of the same name (a year and a half after that album’s release), “Telephone” – Gaga’s sixth consecutive top 10 hit since late fall 2008 – comes at a moment when the artist risks shark-jumping by sheer pop-cultural ubiquity.  Like Michael in 1984, Lady Gaga in 2010 needs no further exposure, and like Michael before her, she lunges for it, regardless, with a video that demands to be talked about.

    Both videos culminate in a menacing/comical dance sequence involving dead people (Michael’s are an undead dance army while Gaga’s are a still-warm flock of face-stuffers), and like werewolf Michael, lusty murderess Gaga is portraying herself (along with her oh-so-game partner Beyonce) as a monster – as in The Fame Monster, now on sale at iTunes for $7.99! – with a knowing nod to all the metaphorical implications of such.   If “Telephone” offers one major innovation, it’s a knack for wall-to-wall product placement that manages to be simultaneously witty and crass.   Half the fun of the video is spotting the shill.  Diet Coke cans for curlers?  Miracle Whip as murder weapon?  I didn’t even know that there was a real dating website called Plentyoffish.com.  I just thought it was a really good joke.  And just like Thriller when Michael confesses to actress Ola Ray that he’s “not like the other boys”, Telephone has at least one, great, defining, iconic, self-referential, media-tweaking one-liner.  But I’ll leave it to the prison guard to deliver it: