Alexadonon's Blog

THE BLANK TAPES

alexadonon — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:02:45 +0000

I’ve never seen so many musicians Online shopping go out for a candidate,” says a campaign vet.
fornia Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneg¬ger and Sylvester Stallone; when the U.S. senator VideoArizona aired John Mellencamp’s “Our Country” at a campaign rally, the politically Advanced Metal – Riffs, Arpeggios & Speed Runsliberal singer demanded that he stop using the song.)
For years, Stevie Wonder has supported Democratic candi¬dates and is a friend of the Clin¬tons, having appeared at several White House functions during the Clinton administration. But Wonder’s dream Democratic ticket is Obama for president with Hillary as the Illinois sena¬tor’s running mate. “We need Big Ones the two best to handle the business of getting America straight so we can get the world straight -that’s how I see it,” says Wonder, who appeared at a February 3rd Obama rally in Los Angeles. “We can’t play around with this thing. We have fallen down as a nation, and it’s time for us to get up. And I believe that can happen with Barack Obama.”
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Funky Nassau
Warm up your next house party with tnese duboed-out Eighties cuts from Talking Heads, Srace Jones and others, all recorded in the Bahamas with legend¬ary producers and rhythm section Sly and SobDie,
THE BLANK TAPES
Daydreams
We discovered this low-fi unsigned band – which somehow evokes Belle and Senastian, Pavement and the Black Keys – in a San Fran coffeehouse. (Just the old

San Francisco

alexadonon — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:59:50 +0000

Butler declared on his blog that Obama was the “first can¬didate in my lifetime to strip some of this bullshit away, and I just hope we don’t blow this chance.” Echoing that the browser sentiment, on February 4th the Grateful Dead reunited for the first time in four years to play a San Francisco fund-raiser. Comparing Obama to Robert F. Kennedy, bassist Phil Lesh told ROLLING STONE backstage, “I think Hill¬ary would make a good president, but Obama is my man.”
Other Obama supporters at rallies and fund-raisers have in¬cluded Ne-Yo, Bright Eyes, My Morning Jacket’s flash content Jim James and Pearl Jam (who recorded a new song, “Rock Around Barack”).
But Obama isn’t the only major candidate to receive endorse¬ments from musicians: Madonna, 50 Cent, Jon Bonjovi and many others have thrown their weight behind Hillary Clinton. (Repub¬lican front-runner John McCain’s celebrity support includes Cali-

OBAMA

alexadonon — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:56:05 +0000

OBAMA
[Cont.from n] what you could have done.’”
Willi.am declared his support with his “Yes We Can” video, in which he edited an Obama speech templates to music — with appearances by Common, Scarlett Johansson, Herbie Hancock, John Legend and others. It appeared online on the eve of the February 5th Super Tuesday primaries, and it got 13 million YouTube views by mid-February. “I just thought it was a little RocketThemeTemplate thing we’d do, and it might be a little circulation,” Legend says. “I was completely surprised by how popular the video became. The number of views it’s gotten has been incredible.”

Inside the London sessions

alexadonon — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:49:55 +0000

Inside the London sessions for her new disc with Timberlake and Timbaland By Evan Serpick L AST SPRING, JUSTIN TIM’ berlake, Timbaland and Nate “Danja” Hills jetted to London to TV & Video help craft a new sound for Madonna, who was , beginning work on her eleventh studio album. “She wanted up¬tempo, dance, club music, and for everything to have a hip-hop underlining,” says Danja, who co-produced four tracks on the still-untitled album, out April 29th. “It’s a different sound for her.” The first single, “Four Minutes to Save the World,” pairs menac¬ing marching-band horns with glitchy synth drums – and features Madonna and Timberlake trad¬ing verses MP3 Players about an impending apocalypse, a la Prince’s “1999.” A special-effects-laden video for the song, directed by French duo Jonas and Francois (who created the live-action animation clip for Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E.”), is due out in March. In it, Madonna and Timberlake star as super-heroes dancing and trying to avert global disaster. Madonna asked Timbaland and Danja to lay the foundation for the new album – her first since 2005′s Confessions on a Dance-floor – after being impressed with the work they did on Tim-berlake’s 2006 disc FutureSex/ LoveSounds. “She loved Justin’s album,” says Danja. In the stu¬dio, the producers would bounce beats off each other while Ma¬donna and Timberlake, who co-wrote several cuts on the album, worked on lyrics and melodies. “She would come in, sit in her chair in the corner and just vibe with us,” says Danja. “We just banged out a beat, and she would go with something she was feel¬ing and start writing.” Pharrell Williams also pro¬duced several tracks for the album, including “Give It to Me” and the seductive “Candy Store.” “Give It to Me,” an epic track built for the clubs and the runner-up for first single, has a thumping house beat and techno synth stabs that climax with a freaked-out break over which Madonna chants, “Get stupid.” “It was cool,” says Danja – who is also working on new albums for Mariah Carey, Missy Elliott and Usher – of the sessions. “She was very down-to-earth, very cool person, very easy.” HOU LIST ROLLING STONE EDITORS’ FAVORITE ALBUMS. SINGLES AND VIDEOS “Flashing Lights” video We love Kanve But for some reason, our favorite of his videos is the one for this Euro-synth-y stomper – which happens to end with him being beaten to deatn with a shove! by a lingerie model. On the Record: Rockers for Obama MAN MAN . L* _ J — _

ROLLING STONE

alexadonon — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:56:25 +0000

Winehouse and Hancock win big as ratings fall
By Brian Hiatt
I
F THE GRAMMYS ARE SUP-posed to reflect the state of the record industry, this year’s ceremony music succeeded: Just like album sales, ratings were way down. Viewership was the second-lowest in thirty years, for a fiftieth-anniversary show that relied on many less-than-current stars – from a digitally reanimat¬ed Frank Sinatra to a back-from-retirement Tina Turner. “I don’t know that this year was one of the great years of music,” says the show’s co-executive producer
Ken Ehrlich. “And when that hap-pens, it kind of gives us a platform to be able to look outside the cur-rent year.”
Ehrlich blames the ratings dive mostly on the fact that CBS didn’t broadcast the Super Bowl this year, which took away an essen¬tial promotional tool. But word among Listen and download music-industry insiders was that CBS executives were infuriated by the ratings, blaming what they saw as the show’s lack of star power. “I heard that [one top CBS exec's] take on it was ‘I don’t understand. Where were the stars? What was this show?’” says one insider. (A CBS repre¬sentative says that the network believes the show was “creatively very strong,” and noted record-high Web-site traffic.)
Still, two big winners – Amy Winehouse, who won five awards, including Best New Art¬ist, and Herbie Lloyd mp3 Hancock, whose River: The Joni Letters was the unlikely Album of the Year win¬ner-saw the traditional Grammy sales bumps. Hancock’s win was so unexpected that his label brief¬ly had trouble meeting the surging demand for his album, which was expected to sell as many as 40,000 copies, landing him in the Top Fifteen; and Winehouse’s Bac\ to Blac\ saw a 370 percent increase in sales, climbing H into the Top Five.
But it’s not clear if the show can have the sales impact it once did, when awards drove albums like Bonnie Raitt’s 7{\c\ of Time to multiplatinum sta¬tus. “None of these records are going to sell another 5 million copies because of the Grammys,” says Carl Mello, director of purchasing for the Newbury Comics chain. So in a divided musical culture, how do you put on a successful show? “It’s impossible,” says Rod Stewart’s manager, Arnold Stiefel. “Do we need to have a rock Grammys and a hip-hop Grammys now? There’s no way of making it work.”

t Check out more photos fjtt. and party coverage from
the Grammys at rolling stone.com/grammys2008

Boy, the Arcade Fire’s Win But-ler and Usher – have declared their support for the Illinois senator, playing fund-raisers and appearing at rallies. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Joe Trippi, who ran How¬ard Dean’s Democratic cam¬paign for president in 2004 and advised John Edwards until he quit the race in January. “Part of it is to have so much energy in the country moving toward change, and Obama becoming the standard-bearer of that. It’s attracted a lot of musicians -
Rockers Rally for Obama Campaign
more than I’ve ever seen coming out in support of a candidate.”
Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz organized a January 22nd fund-raiser at his Chicago club, Lakeview Broadcasting Com-pany, after being inspired by Obama’s performance in the Iowa and New Hampshire pri-maries. “It was at that point where I thought, ‘Why would I not put everything that I had behind this?’” he says. “Other-wise, come November, I could be cursing myself under my breath and going,’This is [Cont. on 12]

ROLLING STONE, MARCH 6, 2008 11