By Dallas
Friday, August 20, 2010 at 12:00 pm
According to Rollingstone.com, album sales nationwide reportedly hit its lowest low since the use of Soundscan first began, way back in 1991. The week of August 8th through August 14th generated a measly 4.95 million albums sold. Even worse, the last time overall album sales reached such a low…was earlier this year, when album sales for the week of May 30th were almost just as bad; a dismal 4.98 million albums.
For those of you that don’t keep track of album sales and the general state of the music industry (like myself), let me state emphatically that these numbers are bad. Really bad.
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By Dallas
Friday, July 16, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Has hell officially frozen over?
Nearly four years after the release of the instantly classic Back to Black, and after a never-ending and almost mind-numbingly horrible bout with drugs, arrests, and some serious man trouble, Amy Winehouse may finally be releasing her next album in the not-so-distant future.
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By Dallas
Friday, June 25, 2010 at 12:01 pm
A year ago today, the world lost Michael Jackson, undoubtedly the greatest entertainer of the 20th Century (sorry Elvis!). The ascendance of the King of Pop during the early 1980’s represents quite possibly the most mindboggling, immense shift the American (or World) pop cultural landscape has ever seen. At one point in time Thriller was literally selling a million copies a week; music videos for “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and of course “Thriller” were first-of-their-kind media events, ushering in an MTV-led, visual era in the music industry that we are just now starting to see come to a close. Arguably most importantly though were the racial barriers Michael quite literally shattered. No black artist had ever achieved anything that even approached the kind of crossover success Michael enjoyed with Thriller. The world would never be the same.
Of course, the most successful artist of all time also faced the harshest, most-widespread backlash in the history of popular music as well. And so we could spend all day ruminating over the brutal treatment of Michael Jackson during his life, his strange behavior, or the morbid fascination with his death and sheer opportunism we’ve witnessed since his passing. But I’d rather talk about the music. That is the man’s truly lasting legacy; everything else is really just scenery.
So on the one year anniversary of the death of Michael Jackson, my aim is to move beyond the myths and the scandals by focusing on an album unfettered by the weight of MJ’s incredible celebrity or incredulous detractors; Michael Jackson’s seminal 1979 album, Off The Wall.
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By Dallas
Friday, June 18, 2010 at 12:00 pm
It’s not easy being an icon.
Eminem’s first three albums are essential, autobiographical, to-the-minute accounts of the thoughts, dreams (or nightmares) and experiences of an antagonistic, complicated and unlikely superstar, and they’ve sold millions of copies. Eminem captured the zeitgeist of the early 2000s, and remains as integral a component to the cultural landscape of that era as Jim Morrison is to that of the late 1960s. By the release of 8 Mile, Eminem seemed like an indestructible force in pop music, immune to the fickle, constantly shifting nature of pop culture; but then he developed a nasty drug habit. And then Eminem released Encore in 2005, and suddenly the magic was gone.
And then he was gone as well, disappearing to his mansion outside of Detroit and privately battling an addiction to prescription drugs, which was only exacerbated by the violent death of his longtime friend and mentor, Proof in 2006. After an OD in 2008 scared him straight, Eminem got the monkey off of his back and recorded last year’s Relapse during that process. Although Relapse is unquestionably rife with evidence that Eminem is a top notch emcee, it was the first time that his graphic, horrorcore-inspired content drove listeners away rather than reeling them in, and overall it paled in comparison to his previous work.
Surprisingly, this is a sentiment stated multiple times by Marshall Mathers himself on his latest release, Recovery, an album clearly fashioned to be the true return to form for the best-selling artist of the 2000s. And most of the time, it is.
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By Dallas
Friday, June 4, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Drake’s official debut album Thank Me Later is arguably the most feverishly anticipated Hip Hop release since his mentor/boss Lil Wayne unleashed the instantly classic Tha Carter III back in 2008. And in all honesty, they are both fantastic albums…but they couldn’t be any more different from one another.
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By Dallas
Friday, May 28, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Yesterday, the official tracklisting for Eminem’s upcoming 6th studio album, entitled Recovery (and set for release June 22nd), leaked onto the internets, and it most definitely sent the message boards into a frenzy.
A few months back, Just Blaze, one of the producers for the album, and Eminem himself, touted Recovery as a new beginning for the legendary Detroit emcee, and unlike anything he’d ever done. Of course, I simply interpreted that as “less serial killing and hotter beats,” respectively.
Well, I was almost right; I forgot about “collaborations with pop divas.”
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By Dallas
Friday, May 21, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Combining the fearlessly experimental, quirky soul disposition of Erykah Badu, the Afro-futurist bent of Parliament/Funkadelic and OutKast, along with a complete mastery of an indefinable, genre-jumping form of pop music (ala Prince, Michael Jackson), Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid will at the very least impress the hell out of you.
Clocking it at about 70 minutes, and pulling from practically every and any genre you can imagine, what is initially stunning about Monae is how capably she bends and contorts her voice and persona into such varied musical settings, and yet crafts an album that is cohesive and meticulously organized. The ArchAndroid is a sprawling, jaw-droppingly fresh and relevant debut album from a young artist possessed with an intense reverence for her pop and soul forbearers, as well as the kind of raw talent, charisma and ambition that may see her reach those same heights one day.
It’s hard to call something an instant classic when it’s only been out for a week. But fuck it, I’m calling it now: Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid is an instant classic, and I am almost sure that it will be massively influential on the future of popular music.
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By Dallas
Friday, May 7, 2010 at 12:12 pm
As reported by Rolling Stone, Usher knocked B.o.B.’s “Nothin’ On You” off the top of the Hot 100 Chart this week, snagging his ninth number one with “OMG,” featuring Will.I.Am. His last number one was “Love In This Club,” from back in 2008.
Quick question: are you guys buying/supporting this guy’s songs out of sympathy or something? I mean, I hate being an asshole about these things, but I don’t get how either of the songs listed above could have reached number one in any way other than largely off of the strength of them being Usher songs. All things considered, Usher ain’t been the same since Confessions.
You know that; I know that.
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By Dallas
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Just seven years after Andre 3000 shattered every boundary and limitation Hip Hop ever really had with The Love Below, B.o.B. stands as the ideal culmination of that album’s incredible influence. Compelling, audacious, and genuinely upbeat and life-affirming (rather than “conscious,” pessimistic or whiny), B.o.B.’s The Adventures of Bobby Ray is definitely “Hip Hop,” but it may be the best Pop album you hear all year too.
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First, Rick Ross is making a fool out of us! Anyone that listens to his music is an informant and I don’t want to hear any opinions to the contrary.