I'm starting to think that the singularity has already occurred and I just didn't notice it up to this point. Apparently, computer intelligence has already gotten more advanced that the human brain and figured out how to fuse itself with human cell tissue and that the robots are already reprogramming themselves and re-enhancing themselves and regenerating themselves-into today's leading hip-hop and R&B stars.
Slate's Jonah Weiner writes a good piece about why music magazines are dying. Part of the problem is what they like to call "access": "When I profiled Beyoncé for a 2006 Blender cover story, I was granted one hour to interview her and one hour to observe her at a video shoot. I stayed on the set for three hours, hoping to wring some lively detail from the mundane proceedings, until a bodyguard showed me the door. Beyoncé's mother, Tina, gave me a warm goodbye, then called a publicist to chew her out for letting me hang around so long and accused me of 'going through Beyoncé's underwear.' (I'd [...]
Seriously, I'm having one of those days where everything I look at makes me go "What?" Anyway: "US pop star Beyonce has angered a high-brow art museum in Vienna by sending a look-a-like to her own special personal tour of the museum, while she went shopping, according to newspaper reports here Wednesday." I mean, really: What?
Beyonce's I Am… Sasha Fierce celebrated its one year anniversary last week, and it is still being unspooled across various media-most recently, in a remix released last night of "Video Phone." The album is notable for an album by a woman in that it has no guest stars, no rappers cropping up, but in this remix, she is accompanied by more-newly-famous entertainer Lady Gaga. This is a remix in the sense that Sinead O'Connor's remix of "Jump in the River" with Karen Finley was a remix, in that there is largely only sections added; added value, brand conjunction, etc., and also that the match-up seems at first strange. In [...]
"No one's gonna be sittin' at home, thinking 'Man, Ryan Tedder gave Beyoncé and Kelly the same track to write to.' No, they're just gonna be saying I ripped someone off." Kelly Clarkson is pissed because her new single, "Already Gone," uses the same musical track as Beyonce's springtime hit "Halo." Turns out her collaborator, producer Ryan Tedder, really did sell the same track twice. Clarkson didn't hear the Beyonce song, she says, until too late. Her point: "It sucks." But she needn't be so upset.
Beyonce's Vagina Armor sounds like the great unreleased sequel to Erykah Badu's seminal 2000 release Mama's Gun.
Rap Radar points us to this youtube clip of Beyonce performing "Crazy In Love" at a recent concert in Singapore. It's amazing to watch someone so on top of her game. Her relationship with the song-which is already a generation-defining standard-and her horns, and her drums, and her guitarist, and her back-up singers and dancers, and the lighting, and the wind-machine and the audience: she has every element on lock.
Oh, right, that baffling story about Beyonce sending a body double to a fine art museum in Vienna was a hoax perpetrated by a local radio station, which makes our What? all the more searching and profound. It seemed ridiculous in any event (the phrase "two Austrian tabloids" set the tone), but it's the kind of story that, in retrospect, you wish were true. Anyway, I'm going to use this opportunity to post a picture of Beyonce because, you know, Beyonce. The girl's attractive.
