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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Friends

  • Sharing SingSnap with friends…

    Sharing SingSnap with friends…

    It’s been awhile sing my last karaoke post. I’ve been sharing SingSnap with friends and now I want to share with you!

    Back when I first started writing on Pop Rock Nation, I wrote about SingSnap.com. SingSnap is an online karaoke site. I joined it when it first started in 2006, then took a several year hiatus. I got active on the site again in 2013, when someone who was reading my private music blog wanted to hear my singing voice. I remembered SingSnap and realized it wouldn’t take much to oblige his request. I quickly got hooked on online karaoke and have been hanging out there ever since.

    Over the past few months, I’ve gotten involved in a private duet thread on SingSnap. This thread is where people who enjoy singing duets gather to find partners. It’s a good place to find people who share your taste in music and like to harmonize. Recently, we had a “challenge” which involved singing duets that met certain pre-determined requirements. The duet thread administrators paired couples up every few days and then that couple would work together to come up with a fresh duet. The first week, we had a “ladies choice” challenge. The women were responsible for choosing a song. I ended up being paired with an old Epinions friend named Andrew and together we sang this… I should mention that I have never met Andrew in person, but we both used to write for Epinions.com and have become “virtual” friends! I’m sure we’d be friends offline, too!

    This is not an easy song to sing, especially if you’re a guy. Andrew did a good job!

    Another challenge involved taking a song that was ordinarily not a duet and turning it into a duet. My partner for this challenge was a guy who loves to sing. I found one of his old recordings that he did fairly well and we turned it into this…

    It never would have occurred to me to turn “Your Wildest Dreams” by The Moody Blues into a duet, but I think it worked pretty well. It was a bit of a challenge to pull this off, but we had fun with the process.

    And sometimes, it’s just fun to learn new songs. This SingSnap user named Bullfrog and I have done a number of duets together and he learned “Somewhere In The Vicinity of the Heart” for our challenge.

    This is a country song featuring Shenandoah and Alison Krauss. It’s not so often that I find guys who can sing this one. My partner had to learn it.

    Other times, it’s just fun to find someone who can really sing and duet with them. Last week, I sang “You Don’t Have To Be A Star” with a SingSnap user from Texas named OBSEQUIOUS. It was a blast!

    I think this guy belongs on a stage…

    Yesterday, I was hanging on one of my favorite message boards and someone started a thread about karaoke. Naturally, I had to pipe up with my experiences with online karaoke and I think I might have gotten a few more folks to try it. I like to sing at live karaoke shows because it’s a lot of fun to have a real time crowd. But SingSnap is a great tool for people who like to sing, for learning music, working on technique, and meeting new people from around the world. It’s also a great place to learn some basics of sound engineering. I also confess that I get a lot of ideas for my music blogging from hanging out on SingSnap, especially on my private blog DungeonOfThePast, which is mostly about songs from the 70s and 80s. I only hope my neighbors don’t mind that I sing all the time. If I’ve inspired you to check out SingSnap, I hope you’ll give it a whirl. You can join for free and sing a limited number of songs. If you like it, you can get a paid membership for less than $100 a year.

  • The Infatueighties Countdown: #99: “Looking for a New Love”

    My friend Jim calls Shalamar the most underrated pop group of the Eighties, and he might have a point. The threesome of Howard Hewett, Jeffrey Daniel and Jody Watley created some of the most bubbly, well-crafted pop-R&B of it’s time, even incorporating new wave and rock textures into their music by the time of 1983’s “The Look”. They’re probably best known for the hit singles “This is for the Lover in You” (which Babyface re-recorded with the three original members in the late Nineties) and “A Night To Remember”. If Jeffrey Daniel’s face looks familiar to you, it’s because he appears in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and “Bad” videos. He apparently was also moonwalking almost a year before MJ “created” it for “Motown 25”, as the below listed clip will demonstrate.

    Anyway, Shalamar’s story is worthy of it’s own column sometime in the future. Back to the topic at hand. The female third of Shalamar, Jody Watley, reintroduced herself to the market as the high-fashion edition of a Janet Jackson or Madonna. With Prince associates David Z. and Andre Cymone (who she later married), her first album was a Top 10 success and also won her the Grammy for Best New Artist, largely due to the success of “Looking for a New Love”, an attitudinal slab of techno-funk that spent a month at #2 on the U.S. singles charts (thankfully, it spent that time behind a song worthy of beating it: U2’s “With or Without You”.

    While Jody’s subsequent albums failed to set the world on fire, her first album is easily one of the best dance-pop albums of the Eighties, and very easily the equal of Janet’s “Control” or Madonna’s debut. She was certainly a more striking visual artist than the other two: with a highly defined fashion style adopted from several years living in London, not to mention cheekbones that you could cut yourself on. She was also the first woman I ever saw with a tattoo, but that’s neither here nor there.

    Finally, let’s give her some long-overdue props for originating the phrase “Hasta La Vista, Baby” two years before Tone Loc used it in “Wild Thing” and three before Arnie uttered it in “Terminator 2”.

    This is the extended version of the single…sounds like it was sped up a bit too.

    Oh, and one more thing…she was voguing and embracing gay culture before Madonna…as this video from 1989 (“Vogue” came out a year later) will attest to. Hey, is that Rakim rapping in a video filled with drag queens??

    …By the way, if this list had stretched to 150, both “A Night To Remember” and “Friends” would have been included.