Impressed by Kelly? Really? She moved 83K units, or if you prefer, she completely blew it and it is a miracle she got to the top, a miracle or good planning, depending on your take. For sure, it ain’t great. Plus, where, exactly, is Kid Rock? I think the heart of the charts is stuck in place: 50, Tay, Drake, Maroon 5, Sam and Meghan., and the other four in flux. A little different than last year when the chart was much more volatile.
Today, there is certainly a lot of mediocrity, any American Idol, X Factor product is an example for me! But at the same time, there is a lot of excellent music, it is just harder to find it because of the enormous amount of bands formed every year and songs released each day!
Albert Einstein is truly part of our pop culture and figures in many songs as expected: They Might Be Giants’ ‘The World’s Address’, Landscape‘s ‘Einstein A Go-Go’, Counting Crows’ ‘Einstein on the Beach’, Jimmy Buffett’s ‘Einstein was a Surfer’ Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’, and even Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Einstein’… so weird!
Recorded at Symphony Park on October 18th, 2014, Kelly gets every ounce of the song and shares it right back with her audience, as if their voices are raised together in a hopefulness not actual written in at all. This isn’t actually Clarkson’s gift, she is another torch singer stomping the country side of love, but here with a song that doesn’t belong to her, Clarkson invites us all in.
‘For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept. . . Whenever people bring up feminism, I’m like, god. I’m just not really that interested. I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities.’
I really love it when an artistic success is a popular success and looking at my list of fave albums, well, even Yeezus didn’t sell that much. Beyonce is a beacon of artistic integrity and musical kismet. A complete triumph to end 2013.
Beyonce is head and shoulders above the rest with a ridiculous 750K + units moved at fifteen bucks a pop and no overhead, no publicity, all digital. Brooks is quite impressive with his non-digital release. It might be more last hurrah than new paradigm but as hurrahs go, I’m impressed.
Here comes Christmas and the proof is Pentatonix viral hit version of “Little Drummer Boy”, a capella and none the worse for it with a pretty good human beatbox. Meanwhile, Britney has the lowest sales of her career. Miley is gone, Gaga is gone and Katy is next.
That Cities thing is from a Minneapolis radio station KTCZ, it is for charity and it takes the best live performances from the past year, guys like Passenger and fun., and it sells the albums at Target. They sold out their entire 40,000 production run in a week
Hell, even Kelly is sucker punching us with a seasonal album and it may be ok, at least a coupla songs perked my interest, it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet!
