Check out the poster to the left. That's for the documentary debuting on 9/7/07 titled, "You Must Be this Tall."
It's a doc about the now abandoned and destroyed Rocky Point Amusement Park - a RI institution until about 15 years ago when it went bankrupt.
I spent many a summer day at the park in my youth, often feeling sick on the Rock & Roll, the Corkscrew, or the Musik Express after chowder and clam cakes from the Shore Dinner Hall.
Click on the link and check out the site, and come September, if you are in the Little Biggest, please see the movie.
Also, 75orless Records will be issuing the soundtrack to the film, later in the month. In case you didn't know, I created the logo for the label, do a lot of the layout and design work for the albums they produce, and have had a personal hand in printing more than a few (thousand) of the hand-pressed cd covers myself. So head over and check out all of their selections as well.
Hair metal bands. (The term "metal" being used loosely) Hairspray bands. Glam rockers. They always come up in conversation amongst people who get excited every summer when the the local hair metal revival tour breezes through town. Or if you're at a bar with one of those Internet jukeboxes and a someone shoves a twenty in and plays nothing but hair metal for the next two hours. Then, you try to beat them at their own game by putting forty bucks and utilizing the "Your Song First" feature in an attempt to force good taste on the masses. It's a battle of good versus evil and the only ones who win are the people that own those infernal machines.(Note: the Internet jukebox may be the biggest double-edged sword in the pop culture world. It can do so much good, but can do SOOOOO much evil.)
Poison will be releasing an album of covers called Poison'd. (I wonder if this is due to the rise of guyliner) On this offering, they perform a cover of The Romantics' "What I Like About You" and have released a video of it. Lucky us. The concept of the video is a high school yearbook come to life in which all the pics tell each other what they like about each other. I wonder how long it took them to come up with that concept. The band is dressed in suits, but not quite 80s style. They just look like a hair metal wedding party. This video seems like it was a pretty good idea.....for when Poison was a popular band. Poison ruins the track which is surprisingly hard to do. The original has a bare bones, garage rock feel. It's not rocket science. Brett Michaels puts a little too much of glam, faux-soul swagger in his voice which doesn't work. The harmonica solo has been replaced by dueling harmonica-guitar solo, complete with simplistic noodling. You can totally see the sales guy from work having a few too many Bud Lights and playing air guitar to this at happy hour.
My guess is people who like Poison will like this no matter what I say. In fact, they'd probably like it Poison released a techno record, simply for the fact that it was Poison's techno record. As for me, this is the only poison I'll ever need.
R. Kelly has put out nine albums. That's quite an output for someone who is marginally talented. But what do I know? I'm a silly blogger. And he's the King of R and B. He's managed to come back after getting thoroughly clowned by Dave Chappelle and...ahem...other issues. Double Up offers the world what you think it would: club songs, slow jams and melodrama.
The club tracks on Double Upserve as a hedonistic how-to guide of nightclub behavior, including bringing not one, but two ladies home ("Double Up" featuring Snoop Dogg,) stealing someone else's girl ("I'm A Flirt (Remix)" feat T.I. and T-Pain) and getting freaky in the club ("Freaky In The Club"). You have to appreciate an artist who gets right to the point with his song titles. The club songs all produced by Kelly, seem just average at best. You can see how people would dance to it, but it lacks the GNF (Go Nuts Factor.) He's got an ear for writing a catchy tune but nothing great.
Kelly's true strength is his ability to weave melodramatic storylines into pop songs as evidenced by his magnum opus "Trapped In The Closet." "Best Friend" features Keyshia Cole and Polow Da Don visiting Kelly's character in jail. It turns out Cole and Polow's character have begun dating while Kelly's character has been in jail. On "Same Girl," Usher and R. have a conversation where it turns out--surprise, surprise--they are both dating the same girl. "Real Talk" though may be where R. keeps it the realest, no pun intended. This song is annoying because Kelly punctuates every line by saying "Real Talk." But the nuts and bolts of the song are true. It is, in fact, "real talk." How do I know? Here's an example. Sometimes, you're in the mall and you're just quietly waiting for your smoothie from Smoothie Criminal or whatever your local smoothie proprietor is called. There's a dude on his cell phone behind you, arguing with his girlfriend about her hearing that he was out at the club, getting freaky on some other chick. But all you can hear is him defending himself. This is exactly how "Real Talk" plays out. He makes it so authentic by repeating a sentence three times in a row as if his cell phone is cutting out: "Did she say there were other guys there?/Did she say there were other guys there?/WERE THERE OTHER GUYS THERE??" And all you can hope for is that they hand you your smoothie, so you can get away from a cellular domestic dispute.
Kelly's weak points on this album are the same that he's had his entire career: he can't write lyrics to save his life. This fact is compounded by the guests who wield excellent command of the English language. "Sweet Tooth," a terrible allegory for a woman's body, contains the laugh-out-loud line "I'm all up in your middle/Ooh, you taste like Skittles." He seems to be setting himself up as an R and B Spinal Tap or Tenacious D. He may have reached a new plateau in musical comedy with "The Jungle" and "Sex Planet." "The Jungle" boasts the line "I got your soul wet, it's like a rainforest/Like Jurassic Park, except I'm your sexasaurus, baby," complete with monkey noises in the chorus. (Seriously, he says Sexasaurus) "Sex Planet" which sounds like a late night Cinemax movie, can be summed up with the atrocious line "Girl I promise this will be painless, painless/We'll take a trip to Planet Uranus, Uranus." He may want to start employing a ghostwriter, just so it doesn't seem like he's the world's worst songwriter.
Interestingly, it's not all about being ballerific and urban soap operas with Kelly. He makes a stab at appearing more human on tracks like "Havin' A Baby." Oddly enough, this is about having a baby. He pays musical tribute to the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings on "Rise Up" which sounds a lot like "I Believe I Can Fly." I don't know if this is a PR move to make us forget about his pending legal issues or if he's that compassionate. This could be what he meant by saying he was today's Muhammad Ali, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye.
Aside from the comedic benchmarks he has set, this is pretty crappy. Also, if you want comedy in your R and B, you can always check out Percy Miracles. The best move R. Kelly could make to achieve the Marley-Gaye status he has claimed, would be to hire a ghostwriter. Or he could just audition for "Saturday Night Live." I think he could top "D*ck In A Box" if he really applied himself.
That guy who got shot nine times is back. And he's a sexy roller-coaster, so to speak. "Amusement Park," the second single off his upcoming album Curtis, is another song extolling 50's virtues as a lover which I think we're all dying to know about. What does this song have to offer? More tepid crooning over a mellow-to-the-point-of-boring R&B beat. Let's not forget about dozens of double-entendres comparing his lovemaking ability to an amusement park, like "Some rides go fast, some rides go slow/You feel heights when I'm high, hell yeah, I go low." Wow, 50 brings the A game.
Hopefully, he goes back to talking about shooting haters. At the least, it would keep my attention.
(Note: the inclusion of Lenny Kravitz pained me just as much as you. But naming ten viable black rockers is a daunting challenge. Go ahead. Try. I dare you. Double dog dare you.)
1. Jimi Hendrix There's really nothing to add here.
2. Prince Don't challenge him to a game of basketball.
3. Chuck Berry Who knows where we'd be if he never got that phone call from his cousin, Marvin...his cousin Marvin Berry.
4. Bad Brains
4. Bad Brains Call them Black Dots. Call them Fearless Vampire Killers. Or just call them awesome.
5. Little Richard
Before the mashed potatoes, gravy and cranberry sauce, WOOOO!. he did this...
6. Fishbone Blame them for every third rate ska band you've ever heard.
7. Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy) True definition of Black Irish.
8. Slash The other guy besides Abe Lincoln, who made the top hat cool.
Is there such thing as reality art? Can a band survive together in a plastic bubble? Will John Travolta be trapped in his cocoon forever?
The band Cartel apparently hopes so, as they plan to seal themselves in a giant transparent bubble in New York, entering during a live MTV broadcast on May 24th and will stay enclosed until June 12th when the bubble "bursts," in time for a live concert featuring new material composed during their stay.The entire event will be streamed live at drpepperbubble.com and will be the subject of a four part reality series on MTV. Six weeks after the event, Cartel's bubble-recorded album, the follow up to CHROMA, will be released.
Will the sophomore slump hit Cartel for the entire world to see? It will be interesting to see the creative process under such scrutiny, as well as the opportunity to see if intensity of being literally under a microscope leads to success.
"Monster Mash" singer Bobby "Boris" Pickett has died of leukemia at the age of 69. It might be easy to call Pickett a One Hit Wonder, but keep in mind that the song managed to chart three times, reaching number one in 1962 and charting subsequently in 1970 and again in 1973. Who doesn't love "Monster Mash?" Even Dylan covered the tune.
Check out the poster to the left. That's for the documentary debuting on 9/7/07 titled, "You Must Be this Tall."
