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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Katy Perry

  • American Idol Season 10 – Who Makes The Final 6?

    I write two American Idol blogs per week. On Wednesday’s contest portion of the show, I blog for Popblerd! which is run by the guy who used to run this blog, Money Mike. And on the elimination show, I blog here, which I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. This year, I’ve been incorporating tweets into my Wednesday blog to give it more of a “live” feel, even though I generally write it five hours after the show has already been broadcasted live on the East Coast.

    I missed one tweet last night that pretty much described my feeling on who is going to go home tonight. My homegirl Michelle was a little bothered that I decided to omit her fantastic tweet, but I had to let her know that I simply missed it. The show goes fast when you’re searching through Twitter to find good tweets. However, she let me know what she said in a comment today.

    I had to work late last night and watched the show from Stefano’s performance on. During his performance I kept thinking, I know Stefano “just can’t stop” but I wish he would! It’s a bummer becuase I’ve liked him from the beginning but now he’s getting annoying. He’s trying way too hard. J. Lo will definitely shed tears when he leaves the show.

    Stefano was singing Ne-Yo’s Closer and he continuously sang the lyric, “I just can’t stop.” Michelle, and others, wished he would’ve.

    J. Lo Booty Alert
    As usual, J to the LO (hello) looks hot to deaf. But there wasn’t even a glimpse of the backside action.

    Stefano and Jacob start out singing Hey Soul Sister. Haley and Lauren chime in. It was not good.

    I have finally figured out where I’ve seen Jacob’s dance moves.

    Scotty, James, and Casey are singing Viva La Vida. This was much better. However, what I don’t get is why aren’t they having the kids harmonize like they were in groups if they want them to sing as a group?

    Ryno asked Jacob about being called a diva by his fellow contestants. He said that it wasn’t in a bad way while James was shaking his head. Scotty said there was a cupcake named after him in his hometown. And Casey held up a painting someone made of him. They surely needed to fill two minutes or something.

    Ryno tells Casey and Jacob to stand up. Casey is safe because of the J. Lo kiss and Jacob is in the bottom three for his diva-ness.

    David Cook is on stage singing The Last Goodbye. It’s a nice little ditty, but I’m not running over anyone to buy it on iTunes. Cook brought his mom up to the stage so she could meet Steven Tyler. I think Tyler snuck in a lip lock there like usual. Daddy Cook may get some action tonight now that his wife is all hot and bothered.

    Ryno has Stefano, James, and Lauren on the stage. Stefano is in the bottom three, as predicted. Lauren and Big Game James are safe. Haley and Scotty are up and I would put big money on Scotty being safe here. Of course, Scotty was safe. But soon thereafter, Ryno also told Haley that she was safe, so she wasn’t in the bottom three for long.

    Katy Perry is singing E.T., which would’ve been pretty cool if Kanye West was there, but unfortunately, we only got young Katherine. I think it would’ve been cool if she came out with some Reeces Pieces, but alas, she wasn’t creative enough. I get why this song is popular, but it’s pretty drab and boring until Kanye’s verses. Ok! Kanye is there! I should’ve expected it. He rarely misses an opportunity to be seen on camera in front of large audiences. Go Yeezy.

    Yep, Stefano is going home. Both Michelle and I called it. Actually, I don’t think it was that hard of a choice. I bet many people figured he was going home. He should be ok with going home. When he gets home, it will be groupie central time. He sings Lately as his goodbye song which was one of his better performances. If he sang like this last night, he wouldn’t have gone home.

    It reminded me of maybe the greatest performance of Lately ever. Wait until about the 1:10 moment.

    Seacrest out!

    Photo of David Cook by Wikipedia and was released into the public domain

  • PAUL’S TOP 100 OF 2010 – PART 8: #30-21 “Louder than god’s revolver, and twice as shiny!”

    What better way to spend your blizzard? Part 8, baby!

    #30
    #30: “THE BEST OF TIMES” by SAGE FRANCIS.
    An intimate conversation between a man and his 13-year-old self. “Don’t listen to them when they tell you these are your best years… and when you think you got it all figured out and then everything collapses – trust me kid – it’s not the end of the world.” With Kanye West putting Bon Iver on his record, and The Roots collaborating with Dirty Projectors and sampling the Monsters of Folk, this was the year where hip hop and indie rock finally met on a Run DMC/Aerosmith type scale. But no one took that meeting to a greater extreme than Sage Francis who enlisted a pack of indie titans including Chris Walla, Mark Linkous, and Jason Lytle to concoct the “beats” for his latest album Li(f)e. Here, he’s accompanied by French avant-garde/post-rocker Yann Tiersen.

    #29
    #29: “ACAPELLA” by KELIS.
    It’s hard to imagine this is the same woman who sang “Milkshake” in 2003. Then again, it was hard to imagine the woman singing “Milkshake” was the same one who sang “I Hate You So Much Right Now!” in 1999. Which I suppose is the point of this song: People change when life changes. The life change here being, specifically, motherhood, which Kelis dramatizes in various guises in this gorgeous video. I especially love her jungle huntress and her desert wanderer personae. The sadly somewhat overlooked Flesh Tone, Kelis’s debut album for the will.i.am label, was a surprise gem of a dance pop record in year packed to overflowing with great dance pop records.

    #28
    #28: “SHE SAID” by PLAN B.
    I think this might just be my favorite video of the year. That jury has rhythm! Those bailiffs are funkayyy. And Plan B’s hyperspeed “defense testimony” at the song’s center is a perfect sonic counterpoint to his pleading blue eyed soul vocal everywhere else. And the strings! Holy sh*t, the strings! How is this guy not getting airplay here?

    #27
    #27: “IF WE EVER MEET AGAIN” by TIMBALAND featuring KATY PERRY.
    “What’s your name, whatcha drinkin’, I think I know what you’re thinkin’. Baby what’s your sign? Tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.” Just a great, fun pop duet to get stuck in your head for days, and, really, better than anything on Katy Perry’s (literally) cotton-candy scented album.

    #26
    #26: “DANCE IN THE DARK” by LADY GAGA.
    This is THE shoulda-been single from The Fame Monster. How this one got passed up for the immediately catchy but ultimately sorta lame “Alejandro” is just beyond me. “Tell ’em how you feel, girls.” Any song that can somehow mournfully-defiantly-joyfully link Judy Garland, Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, JonBenet Ramsey, Liberace, and Princess Di – and actually make absolute sense in the process – has to be some big flowery, exotic kind of awesome.

    #25
    #25: “YOU KNOW ME” by ROBBIE WILLIAMS.
    A great big ballad on the lifestyles of the rich, famous, and newly single. “I’ve been doing what I like, when I like, how I like. It’s joyless.” I love this song’s big arrangement, but I’d also love to hear it acapella with all those doo-wop-op-op background vocals.

    #24
    #24: “UN-THINKABLE (I’M READY)” by ALICIA KEYS.
    A dark atmospheric ballad of a forbidden affair’s “moment of honesty”, this song topped Billboard’s R&B charts for 12 weeks this summer, and was named Billboard’s #1 R&B song of the year. All for good reason. Given the Keys’ engagement to producer Swizz Beatz before his divorce was even final, the song has an autobiographical truth to it, but this gorgeous video puts the song in a social/historical context. Probably a good move.

    #23
    #23: “NA NA NA (NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA)” by MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE.
    Without question, my favorite song title of the year, even though I had to “fact-check” it to make sure I had the appropriate number of NAs. The song is as frantic and obnoxiously fun as its title: “Shut up and let me see your jazz hands!” You’ll also notice that the song racks up 3 bleeps in the first verse. The word there is “drugs”. We’ve apparently come a long way since Huey Lewis. They do also bleep out a spoken f-bomb during singer Gerard Way’s little mid-song monologue, but the actual swear word is covered by lazer shot sound effects.

    #22
    #22: “ALL THE LOVERS” by KYLIE MINOGUE.
    Probably the happiest sounding song of the year. Every time I hear it, it makes me smile. Every time I see the video, it makes me smile real big. Kylie’s Aphrodite is one great big adorable pop record that sounds like everything I loved about 1983. And how can you not love a video like this? A white horse on a city street. A white balloon elephant in the sky between the skyscrapers. And a great big Christmas tree of beautiful, copulating, near naked human flesh with Kylie Minogue on top. She swoons, the whole tower swoons, I swoon too.

    #21
    #21: “BUTTERFLY, BUTTERFLY (THE LAST HURRAH)” by A-HA.
    “These stained-glass wings could only take you so far…” Earlier this month, the trio that brought us “Take On Me” in the 80s (and many great – however neglected – singles since) played their last shows. a-ha is kaput. And with this song, they don’t wave good-bye so much as shrug off their 25+ years together.

    In the Top 20: There will be Kanye, I promise. (Or is that a threat?)

  • 2009 MTV Video Music Awards Live Blog (West Coast Edition)

    Money Mike blogged the VMAs earlier this evening. You can read his perspective of the show. Since I’m on the West Coast, and I haven’t seen it yet, I’m live (delay) blogging it as well.

    I think everyone has a love/hate relationship with the VMAs. When we only had two “stuffy” music award shows, the VMAs was the necessary contrast, especially to the young generation. It then became the place for artists to shock the world. And now, it’s just a bunch of performances mixed in with goofy publicity stunts, which is what I imagine we’ll see tonight.

    Michael Jackson's This Is It promo poster
    Michael Jackson’s This Is It promo poster
    They’ve promised a Jay-Z set, Janet Jackson doing a tribute to her big brother, and the trailer to the new MJ movie based on his rehearsal footage movie This Is It. Also, the Internets were abuzz tonight based on something stupid Kanye West supposedly did. I’ll have to see it with my own eyes.

    – Madonna comes out and thankfully, isn’t baring her overly buffed out arms. She talked about how MJ missed out on his childhood, which elicited applause, but then we had to see Jermaine and his plaster of paris face stand up.

    – She did a pretty nice speech about a date she went on with MJ and how he just wanted a friend, and not a romance. But she made sure to bring it back home and make it about his humanity. Though, she compared the bad press he received to that of hers, and I’m not sure the comparison was there, or necessary.

    (Ok, enough seriousness, it’s time to make fun of stuff, like Jermaine’s greasy plaster of paris face.)

    – After faceless and nameless dancers went through some MJ choreography, sweet Penny from Good Times (Janet) went through her verse from Scream and did some of her own MJ choreography. That was sweet.

    – We’ll see how much of Russell Brand that I can stomach tonight. He already told Katy Perry, who for some reason was performing We Will Rock You that she had a hole in her trousers which gave him a great view from below.

    – If you guessed how long it would take for Brand to make a joke about Lady Gaga being a hermaphrodite, you won if your guess was twenty minutes into the show or less.

    – If Beyonce’s Single Ladies doesn’t win Best Female Video of not only this year, but of the EARTH, then the fix is in.

    You be the judge

    – Taylor won. Taylor Swift is ok for who she is, but in no way, in the history of man and woman-kind, can she hold Beyonce’s jock strap when it comes to shaking her badonkadonk in a video.

    – See, Kanye agrees with me! And Kanye loves the kids too I bet you! Ok folks, if you don’t think that was just a replay of Kanye channeling his inner Big Baby Jesus, then Kanye pulled the wool over your eyes.

    (You can see the video on the right hand side of this page.)

    – Wu Tang is for the children!

    – Hey, I saw Paramore when they opened up for Gweneth Stefani and No Doubt. Gweneth was very sweaty that night.

    – I think I got a little too excited to see Miranda Cosgrove on the VMAs. Sorry y’all, I’m an iCarly fan.

    – Taylor Swift just performed on the subway. If anyone saw that and didn’t think Beyonce deserved the award, then I’m not sure what to tell you, other than, “Wu Tang is for the children!”

    – Is it wrong of me to try hit the pause button to see if Lady Gaga is really packin’?

    (She’s performing by the way.)

    – Didn’t RuPaul slide it to the back?

    – This is a very meaningless comment, but damn, Nelly Furtado got some hips. Where did they come from? She’s back on the radar.

    The man who will always be known as David Silver
    The man who will always be known as David Silver
    – I may be the only man alive who thinks this, but when I see Megan Fox, I immediately think, “Where’s David Silver?”

    – They just showed the extended trailer of the new Twilight movie. I was told by a 13-year old girl that in no way should I, like, ever read the book because like, it’s for girls and girls day dream about like, boys and it would be, like totally awkward.

    – Ne-Yo just came out and I think I used up all my big head jokes on him in the BET Awards write-up. Ok, I lied. Remember when Ne-Yo cried at the concert he did a month or so ago? People wondered if it was a cry for help. Actually, it was a cry for hats.

    (Sorry to Chris Rock for mangling his awesome joke.)

    – Beyonce is doing Single Ladies and I’m gonna put a ring on it. I’m not sure who I’m going to put that ring on. But Beyonce’s inspired me to put a ring on it. I have two words for you based on this performance: jee zus.

    – How did Taylor Swift beat Beyonce again? Wu Tang is for the chilren!

    – I should probably know some of Muse’s music, but I have to apologize. I just slapped my hand like Arsenio used to do when he called himself a bad host.

    – All show long, they’re doing these skits with Tracy Morgan and Eminem where Em tries to help Tracy achieve his goal of being the Best New Artist. Let’s just say that I liked Em much better at the movie awards when Borat fell ass first on his lap.

    – MTV better hope that Asher Roth doesn’t beat Jay-Z for Best Rap Video award. We might see Kanye West again.

    (That was just an excuse for me to say, “Wu Tang is for the children!” again.)

    – Nope, Ellen Degeneres, I mean, Eminem won the award.

    – Eminem’s new album is terrible by the way.

    – I think Kid Cudi had to wear a Kid Cudi shirt so that the crowd would know who he was.

    Lady Gaga
    Lady Gaga
    – I wonder if that now because of this Lady Gaga fiasco that she becomes my go-to joke when I make fun of girls who might be guys. Because I really ran that Ciara adam’s apple thing into the ground.

    – The great Serena Williams is on the show and she found an Asian girl in the audience and told her she was going to stuff this moon-man down her f****** throat.

    – Wait, was that Serena Williams or Estelle?

    – Speaking of women having man-like features, Pink (built like a man) is on the stage. She sure doesn’t sing like a man. Mad respect for Pink.

    – Pink actually did some hanging gymnastics as her entire performance. Was she really singing? Because I didn’t hear an “oh shit” every time she was thrown in the air.

    – I never understand how someone can lose the male or female video of the year, but then win the video of the entire year award. What, this doesn’t really mean anything anyway you say?

    – Beyonce just won Video Of The Year and called out Taylor Swift so that she can do her speech. Taylor was oh so ready with microphone in hand. So maybe that Kanye thing was staged? You mean, Wu Tang was really for the children?

    – Why is Taylor Swift always squinting?

    – Jay-Z is wearing a leather vest over his long sleeve shirt, much like Triple H used to wear. Except, Triple H’s leather was once a jacket and the arms were torn off.

    – Looks like Jay-Z and Alicia Keys are going to close the show with Empire State Of Mind like Mariano Rivera.

    – “Everybody ride her like a bus route.”

    – Watching the trailer to This Is It was a bit surreal, but I know I’m going to be there first day with my 3-D glasses on.

    – This show is done, and they did it in 2 1/2 hours. Peace out!

    Photo of David Silver shared by MR O and is shared via Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0

    Photo of Lady Gaga shared by StephenCarlile via Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0