All posts by Stephen Macaulay

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Some Thoughts About the Grammy Nominees

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Grammy“Record of the Year.” What are they going to do if Cee Lo Green gets it? Will they have Bono make the presentation given that he’s comfortable dropping the F-bomb on broadcast television? Will CBS be able to afford another dustup with the FCC? And why is it that three out of the five nominees need to leverage themselves with another performer (B.o.B featuring Bruno Mars; Eminem featuring Rihanna; Jay-Z and Alicia Keys)? Shouldn’t Cee Lo and Lady Antebellum get some sort of single-combat advantage?

“Album of the Year.” This is clearly a carefully calculated blend, one that may have been concocted to help move discs with those little “Grammy” stickers that can be affixed to the packaging of nominees. Arcade Fire from Alternative; Eminem from Rap; Lady Antebellum from Country; and Lady Gaga and Katy Perry from Pop. Sell, sell, sell.

“Song of the Year.” Again, the Cee Lo issue.

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Articles

(No) Paradise by the Dashboard Lights or Steve Perry Couldn’t Pull This Off

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Belt it OutWhile it has been a while since we’ve looked at the nexus between carmakers and consumers, and while we are fully in favor of safe driving, and while this isn’t an instance of a car company supporting a lame-ass band or using a washed-up musician as a brand icon, it still is worth mentioning, inasmuch as it provides an indication of how car companies are tapping into a demographic that we might like to believe doesn’t exist.

The Ford Motor Company Fund—a fund funded by Ford (say that several times quickly)—which promulgates programs for high-school students and the Governors Highway Safety Association, a nonprofit dedicated to, well, highway safety, are launching a contest named “Belt it Out.”

No, this is not about seatbelts.

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Articles

A Fool and His or Her Money…

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Deal with it.For the past few years, after the music industry’s fortunes went bottom-up and, consequently, the performing artists got even more taken to the Vaseline jar than they previously had, it seemed that the only way that performers would be able to make a quasi-reasonable living was through live performances. The return from the shows wouldn’t be predicated on the take from the tickets, but from whatever swag they were able to sell to the faithful.

After all, one of the issues vis-à-vis ticket sales was that there were corporate interests involved in many of the venues, which worked to their favor. “They,” not incidentally, were Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which are now a singular pronoun.

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Articles

Hot, Not, Wot?

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HeatmiserOK, let me set this up by providing the explanation of who the person being cited is from the press release that her firm put out: “Marian Salzman, president of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, North America, is known across industries for her annual analytical take on about a dozen business, consumer and social trends that she believes will become prominent in the coming year.”

Known across industries, perhaps, but heretofore not known across GloNo.

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Articles

The King of Product

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Michael Jackson - MichaelIn a piece on the latest Michael Jackson album, Michael, appearing in the New York Times, Jon Pareles writes:

Pop careers are built, among many other factors, on quality control, on a musician’s instincts about what to reveal to the world and what to hold back. And Jackson, who had not released a studio album since ‘Invincible’ in 2001, was notoriously perfectionistic.

Now other people have sorted through the discards, the rough drafts, the fragments, the songs that could have interrupted the flow of an album, the songs that might be forgotten gems or embarrassing dead ends. And other people have decided how those songs will be heard.

Clearly, Pareles is not happy with the album.

But that’s not the point here.

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Articles

Monstrous

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MonstrousCARBONATED WATER, GLUCOSE, CITRIC ACID, NATURAL FLAVORS, TAURINE, SODIUM CITRATE, COLOR ADDED, PANAX GINSENG ROOT EXTRACT, L-CARNITINE, CAFFEINE, SORBIC ACID, BENZOIC ACID, NIACINAMIDE, SODIUM CHLORIDE, GLUCURONOLACTONE, INOSITOL, GUARANA SEED EXTRACT, PYRIDOXINE HYDROCHLORIDE, SUCRALOSE, RIBOFLAVIN, MALTODEXTRIN, CYANOCOBALAMIN

Those are the ingredients of Monster Energy drink. Mmm. . . . According to the people at the company, that liquid “delivers twice the buzz of a regular energy drink.” I’m not 100% what a “regular energy” drink is. Is there an irregular energy drink that’s concocted by some gray market beverage company, or is it something that is an analogue to carbonated prune juice? And does the “buzz” have something to do with a drone in one’s ears?

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Shorties

What’s In a Name?

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Dr. LukeWhile reading over a list of the songwriting winners from the 27th Annual ASCAP Pop Music Awards, an event during which Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald was named Songwriter of the Year, it occurred to us that one of the evident problems that we suffer here are GloNo is an insufficiency of nicknames, handles, or whathaveyou. To wit:

• C. “Tricky” Stewart

• Matthew “Boi-1da” Samuels

• Robert “Bobbybass” Larow

• Janet “Jnay” Sewell-Ulepic

• Carl “Gudda Gudda” Lilly

• Christoper “Dow Jones” Whitacre

• Edward Bello “El Cata”

• David “Haw” Wolinski

• Darius “Deezle” Harrison

• Curtis “Kidd Kidd” Stewart

And let’s not overlook Dot Da Genius or Flo Rida, or Kool Kojak.

All of which is to say that we’d best not venture into songwriting careers until we have an appropriate moniker.

Articles

Got (Almost) Live If You Want It

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PixiesHollywood once used the phrase, “You’ve read the book, now see the movie” to promote their latest offerings. But given the acceleration of time, music vendors can now use the phrase, “You’ve just heard the concert, now just hear the concert again,” and make that statement approximately 10 minutes after the show is over.

At least that’s the case with the performances of the Pixies, starting November 23 in New York. The firm Abbey Road Live is recording the shows and then burning CDs of the performances. The Pixies, as seems to be the case with some vintage bands that are still striding the boards (e.g., Steely Dan) are doing the complete version of “Doolittle” from 1989 (although unlike S.D., this isn’t a matter of the fans voting for it, they’re getting it each night of the tour).

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Shorties

The Vehicular Return of Another Bad Band

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Ford S-MAX Titanium

In case you were wondering, as the reformed Spandau Ballet rolls through Ireland and the U.K. this month as part of its “Reformation Tour” (clever, eh: reformed, reformation—that’s the kind of stuff that makes the band what it is), it will be doing so in Ford S-MAX Titanium vehicles. As lead singer and evident car whore Tony Hadley puts it of the S-MAX Titanium 2.0TDCi Automatic that he’s been driving for the past few months (we’re guessing he didn’t pay retail), “I wanted a car that was stylish and comfortable for long journeys, and the S-MAX fits the bill perfectly.” Right.

Or maybe that should be “True.”

Spandau Ballet: iTunes, Amazon, Insound, wiki.

Articles

Obsessing the Empty Orchestra

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KaraokeDon’t Stop Believin’: How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life

By Brian Raftery

DaCapo, 233 pp., $16

Don Henley is, apparently, four-square against karaoke.

Do you want to be like Don Henley?

We didn’t think so.

Does this mean that you’re likely to run down to your local bar and belt out “Feelings” with some gusto in front of people who are undoubtedly there because they are there to reveal their own secret song stylings in public?

We didn’t think so, either.

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