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50 Cent: Eminem’s success is ‘something to work to’
50 Cent says “Psycho,” from his new Before I Self Destruct album, is totally different from “Patiently Waiting,” even though the tracks feature the same collaborator, more or less.
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50 Cent says “Psycho,” from his new Before I Self Destruct album, is totally different from “Patiently Waiting,” even though the tracks feature the same collaborator, more or less.
Receiving what is the latest in a series of many accolades, 19-year-old Taylor Swift became the youngest person ever to win Entertainer of the Year at last Wednesday’s CMA Awards. According to the singer, she was amazed that it was all happening.
The late ’70s, when punk exploded and disco imploded, were tumultuous years for the music industry. A time bomb embedded in legislation from that era, the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, could bring another round of tumult to the business, due to provisions that allow authors or their heirs to terminate copyright grants.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – It’s been Taylor Swift’s year, and Wednesday was her night as she became the youngest person and the first solo female act in a decade to win the Country Music Association’s entertainer of the year award.
On an appropriately cold and rainy Friday night in the Minneapolis warehouse district, the Despair Faction, AFI’s fan militia, was working itself up, chanting the intro to Black Sails in the Sunset (”Through/Our bleeding!/We/Are one!”) and throwing up martial fist pumps. The all-ages crowd had already been primed by opening act Gallows, whose lanky, ginger vocalist, Frank Carter, spent half his time singing from the middle of the pit and the rest on stage, gobbing loogies with impressive trajectories. The Faction had just spent three years waiting for AFI to break their hiatus with a new album, Crash Love, and… Read more »
LOS ANGELES – Michael Jackson’s arms were covered with punctures, his face and neck were scarred and he had tattooed eyebrows and lips, but he wasn’t the sickly skeleton of a man portrayed by tabloids, according to his autopsy report obtained by The Associated Press. In fact, the Los Angeles County coroner’s report shows Jackson was a fairly healthy 50-year-old before he died of an overdose. His 136 pounds were in the acceptable range for a 5-foot-9 man. His heart was strong with no sign of plaque buildup. And his kidneys and most other major organs were normal. Still, Jackson… Read more »
Moments before the opening curtain of “American Idiot,” the musical theater debut of the punk band Green Day, a t-shirted house manager took the stage at Berkeley Repertory Theater for the tradition of reminding audience members to turn off their cellphones and unwrap their candies. This being a musical by Green Day, though, it wasn’t your typical curtain speech. “Are you ready to rock tonight?” shouted the house manager, John Gay. And sure enough, the crowd roared back, “Yeah!” Such is the rowdy mood surrounding “American Idiot,” a rock opera drawn largely from Green Day’s multiplatinum 2004 album of the… Read more »
Hayley Williams owns a car, though she prefers to ride her bike. If you live in Franklin, Tennessee, you probably know this by now, because she pilots the thing – a beige, kid-size rattletrap with a basket on the front – all around her hometown, chatting up the locals and stopping in at places like Puckett’s Grocery and the Ivey Cake bakery. She paid $60 for it at a nearby thrift store. It’s probably worth $30. Williams also owns a house in town, and though it’s certainly worth more than her bike, it’s not much flashier: a modest stone number… Read more »
Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are making preparations to one day collect performance fees from Apple and other e-tailers for not just traditional music downloads but for downloads of films and TV shows as well. Those downloads contain music after all. These groups even want compensation for iTunes’ 30-second song samples. In the future, Apple may be required to pay licensing fees to ASCAP and BMI for the downloads of TV shows and films it sells. At a time when many iTunes shoppers are still fuming over Apple’s first-ever increase in song prices, the demands by the American Society of… Read more »
Leave it to Kanye West to make headlines in the most unusual way — and he did, as he hijacked Taylor Swift’s speech at last night’s MTV Video Music Awards. Swift was in mid-acceptance speech for Best Female Video when West rushed onstage, grabbed her microphone and went on an outburst on behalf of Beyonce Knowles, who had lost out in that category. At the end though, a classy move by Beyonce, the night’s top winner, who brought Swift onstage and gave her an uninterrupted moment in the spotlight. “I remember being 17 years old, up for my first MTV… Read more »
