music4lover

It’s been a week since singer-actress-lush Mariah Carey accepted her Breakthrough Actress award at the Palm Springs International Festival. Carey’s rambling acceptance speech was viewed by over a million YouTube voyeurs and prompted the drunken diva to admit that she had a few to many “splashes of champagne.” However, aside from some late night jokes at her expense, the damage is nowhere close to the career wreckage she caused with “Glitter.”

It takes a brave soul to stand drunk in front the eyes of a dozen camera lenses and a million YouTube loners. And musicians are a brave bunch. They’re not afraid to show up hammered for their close-up. You gotta respect that on some depraved level.

Here are some of my favorite pubic displays of musician drunkenness. See you at the bar. I’ll be having the O’Doul’s. I don’t want any videos showing up online.

Kanye West
It’s all been said, hasn’t it? What more can anyone add to the Kanye legacy. Oh,wait a minute. Kanye can. Especially when he’s drunk. No one love Kanye more than Kanye when he’s had a few too many.

Billboard has compiled a list of what it considers the 2009 “Artists of the Year”. It did so by looking at album sales figures and analyzing the Hot 100/Billboard 200 charts for those “who traveled further and faster than all the others”. Because this is Billboard, there’s no denying that the list contains only the most successful and popular acts of the year. You’ll find country, pop, hip-hop, R&B, adult alternative and alternative rock represented, but only those with the most crossover appeal.

Billboard’s Top 20 Artists of 2009

1. Taylor Swift
You Belong With Me

2. Beyonce
Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)

3.Lady Gaga
Poker Face

4. Black Eyed Peas
I Gotta Feeling

5. Miley Cyrus
It’s All Right Here

6. Kanye West
Heartless

7. Britney Spears
3

8. T.I.
Live Your Life [Featuring Rihanna]

9. Nickelback
If Today Was Your Last Day

10. Pink
Please Don’t Leave Me

11. Kings of Leon
Use Somebody

12. Katy Perry
One Of The Boys

13. Flo Rida
Right Round

14. Kelly Clarkson
Already Gone

15. Jason Mraz
I’m Yours

16. The Fray
You Found Me

17. Ne-Yo
Mad

18. Lil Wayne
A Milli

19. Rascal Flatts
Here Comes Goodbye

20. Zac Brown Band
Toes

R&B singer Mary J. Blige will headline this year’s Essence Music Festival in New Orleans.

Billed as one of the nation’s largest annual events celebrating black music and culture, the festival is slated for July 2 through 4.

The full lineup has not been released, but as in the past, musical acts will perform at the Louisiana Superdome and motivational seminars will be held during the day at the Morial Convention Center.

Besides headliners like Blige, the festival showcases New Orleans acts. In the past, those acts have included New Orleans’ queen of soul Irma Thomas, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews and trumpeter Irvin Mayfield.

Blige has performed at Essence eight times. This year she is expected to perform songs from her latest studio album, “Stronger with Each Tear.”

Courtesy of NME.com — Headliners for for 2010 Isle Of Wight Festival announced

Jay-Z and The Strokes are set to top the bill at next year’s Isle Of Wight festival.

The rapper will headline on the opening night (June 11), followed by Julian Casablancas’ men (12). A final headliner has yet to be announced.

The acts will be joined on the bill by fellow New Yorkers Blondie, plus special guests Pink, Orbital and Squeeze. See Isleofwightfestival.com for more information.

Tickets for the festival, which takes place between June 11 and 13 next year, go on sale this Friday (December 4).

To check the availability of Isle Of Wight Festival tickets and get all the latest listings, go to NME.COM/TICKETS now, or call 0871 230 1094.

For more on Jay-Z, check out his NME.com page.

On the 75th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s birth, the Smithsonian Institution is showcasing the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s ubiquitous image through exhibits opening Friday in Washington and Los Angeles.

“One Life: Echoes of Elvis” will be on view at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington through August. The one-room exhibit is devoted to the evolution and influence of Presley’s image after his death.

“Think of all the entertainers you know, and how many of them do you know the names of their homes?” said curator Warren Perry. “Everybody needs to have a moment with Elvis.”

The exhibit features portraits, images from Graceland the mansion where Elvis lived, Elvis merchandise and a reminder that Elvis’ manager put his face on just about anything that could be marketed. The commercial images include an Elvis-imprinted lunch box, nutcracker, action figure and snow globe.

Original artwork from a 1992 Elvis stamp design competition is on view, along with the 1993 stamp with Presley’s likeness that became the most popular U.S. postal stamp of all time, with a printing of 500 million.

A gold bust of Elvis as Julius Caesar by sculptor Robert Arneson anchors another wall. A museum docent recently discovered a surprise in the sculpture that had been in storage at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum: A small heart was carved in the back.

“The people who call themselves Elvis fans, I’m sure there are fanatics, but these people have a loving affection for Elvis,” said Perry, who is from Memphis, Tennessee, where Elvis lived after his family moved from Mississippi. “It’s conversational. It’s intimate.”

One of Perry’s favorite pieces is a scrapbook found in an abandoned Chicago warehouse with newspaper headlines and pictures carefully cut out and pasted in a thick book shortly after Presley’s death at age 42 in 1977.

“You can tell it was put together by a fan,” Perry said.

Presley sat for only one portrait painter. A painting by Ralph Wolfe Cowan, usually on display in the gallery’s entertainment section, is the exhibit’s central image. It was completed from sketches Cowan made in 1969 while creating another portrait that hangs at Graceland.

In Los Angeles, the Grammy Museum on Friday is opening the Smithsonian’s traveling exhibit, “Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer.” The photojournalist was hired to shoot promotional images of the young recording artist just before Elvis became famous. The show features 56 of Wertheimer’s images from 1956.

Jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson can easily explain why the Mississippi Blues Trail would embrace jazz artists.

“Blues is an essential component of jazz. It’s like one of the building blocks. It’s what we use in order to navigate changes. You always have to keep close ties to that original sound and feeling,” Wilson said Thursday after a blues marker was unveiled in her honor at a school she attended as a child.

The ceremony drew a crowd of some 200 students, friends and other musicians, including singer Dorothy Moore and bluesman Bobby Rush.

Wilson, a two-time Grammy Award-winner whose eclectic repertoire has included covers of blues tunes, absorbed music from her earliest years. Her father, Herman Fowlkes Jr., was a bassist who recorded with blues harmonica icon Sonny Boy Williamson II.

Wilson chose the site for the marker. The Brinkley Middle School is located in what is now an economically depressed area of Jackson, but Wilson said it’s where she got her start.

“It’s where I learned about music. It’s where I played and went to school and it’s such a wonderful neighborhood,” Wilson said.

The marker is the 100th on the trail, created as part of a project designed to bolster the state’s blues tourism industry.

The trail will stretch from Memphis Minnie’s grave in Walls, near the Tennessee border, to Farish Street in downtown Jackson, a historic black business district and home of the Alamo Theatre where many famous black entertainers have performed. That’s where Moore’s marker was placed in 2008.

Scott Barretta, a researcher for the trail, said Wilson’s marker will illustrate how jazz and blues have intersected.

“Jazz musicians have always played blues, but usually when they talk about blues, they’re referring to chord changes for a particular style of song and not to songs very closely associated with blues,” Barretta said. “What’s unique about her is that she covers songs by Delta blues artists, such as Robert Johnson and Son House, and that music generally wouldn’t be found in the repertoire of jazz artists.”

U.S. album sales tumbled for the eighth time in nine years as the rate of growth in legal digital downloads slid in a turnaround from recent years, according to industry figures issued on Wednesday.

Total album sales fell 12.7 percent to 373.9 million units during the 52-week period ended January 3, according to retail data collected by tracking firm Nielsen SoundScan. Late pop star Michael Jackson was the top-selling artist, and Taylor Swift had the No. 1 album, followed by Susan Boyle.

The decline in total sales follows a 14 percent drop in 2008, and it sets a new low since Nielsen SoundScan began publishing point-of-sales data in 1991. Sales have plummeted 52 percent from the industry’s high-water mark of 785.1 million units in 2000, due largely to Internet piracy and competition from other forms of entertainment such as video games.

While recession-weary consumers spent more money on movies and live concerts in 2009 than they did the year before, they drew the line at music purchases. Liquidations of the Virgin Megastore and Circuit City retail chains did not help matters, nor did the reduction in display space at outlets such as books retailer Borders Group Inc.

On the other hand, the death of Michael Jackson in June provided a boost. The pop singer was the best-selling artist of the year, accounting for 8.3 million units. Neither he nor the next two artists, country star Taylor Swift and the Beatles, actually released new albums last year.

Swift was a distant second with 4.6 million units, mostly for her second album “Fearless,” the biggest seller of 2009 and the No. 3 seller of 2008; the Beatles sold 3.3 million units of their newly remastered catalog.

DIGITAL DROPS

Digital downloads through online retailers such as Apple Inc’s iTunes store, have taken on greater importance to the industry, but the impressive growth of recent years is waning. Digital track sales rose 8.3 percent to a record 1.16 billion in 2009, but that was far less than a 27 percent increase in 2008 and a 45 percent leap in 2007.

Digital album sales rose 16.1 percent to 76.4 million units, also a record, after jumps of 32 percent in 2008 and 53 percent in 2007.

After Swift, the No. 2 album of 2009 was Scottish singer Susan Boyle’s debut release “I Dreamed a Dream,” which sold 3.1 million copies after just six chart-topping weeks in stores. Jackson’s 2003 hits package “Number Ones” was the No. 3 seller with 2.4 million copies.

Rapper Lil Wayne, who had the top album in 2008, might have featured in the top tier of 2009 with his long-awaited follow-up, but he encountered a problem that exemplifies the industry’s woes. His new disc “Rebirth” leaked on the Internet last month, six weeks before its scheduled release date. It is not yet known when or if it will come out officially.

Overall music sales, including albums, singles, music video and digital tracks inched up 2.1 percent to a record 1.5 billion units in 2009. But growth slowed from 10.5 percent in 2008 and 14 percent in 2007.

Among the labels, Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group remained dominant with 30.2 percent of total album sales, down from 31.5 percent in 2008. Sony Corp’s Sony Music Entertainment, the home of Jackson and Boyle, followed with 28.6 percent, up from 25.3 percent. Warner Music Group Corp captured 20.6 percent, down from 21.4 percent. Closely held EMI Group Ltd, home of the Beatles, rose to 9.2 percent from 9.0 percent.

Rock remained the top genre, accounting for 124 million albums, a drop of 11 percent. R&B moved up to No. 2 with 70 million (down nine percent), swapping places with third-ranked alternative (68 million, down 16 percent). Country was fourth, suffering only a small drop (46 million, down 3.2 percent).

(Reporting by Dean Goodman; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte) From Yahoo.com

Japan’s most famous orchestral conductor, Seiji Ozawa, said on Thursday he has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and will cancel all performances for the next six months to concentrate on treatment.

One of the first Asian classical musicians widely recognized in the West, 74-year-old Ozawa has made efforts to revitalize the music scene in his home country, founding an annual festival in the castle town of Matsumoto.

“As my doctor guaranteed, I will come back by July. In fact, I got sick in time to fulfill my summer schedule,” Ozawa told a news conference.

The mop-haired conductor was already due to step down as musical director of the Vienna State Opera later this year, a post he took up after serving almost three decades as director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

After online reports suggested that Lil Wayne’s oft-delayed “Rebirth” album was once again delayed, this time to June 22nd, the rapper’s publicist said the rock-leaning set is still scheduled for a February 2 release.

About 500 copies of “Rebirth” — which has received six different release dates starting April 7, 2009 — were last month mistakenly shipped to Amazon customers who pre-ordered the album. Inevitably, it leaked on the Internet.

Consequently, “Rebirth,” which will be available just a week before Lil Wayne is sentenced in New York for possession of a weapon on February 9, is now said to include all new tracks, according to Mack Maine, the president of Lil Wayne’s Young Money label, who last month tweeted: “Leaked 09 Rebirth isn’t going to be 2010 Rebirth.”

Jamaican reggae star Buju Banton has pleaded not guilty to a drug charge in a Florida federal court.

Banton was arraigned Thursday on a charge of conspiring to buy more than five kilograms of cocaine from an undercover law enforcement officer in Sarasota last month. The 36-year-old singer, born Mark Myrie, did not seek bail. If he bonded out of jail, he would be held by immigration officials.

Banton’s attorney says his client is innocent and does not plan to seek a deal.

Banton was arrested at his Tamarac home on Dec. 10, two days after federal authorities say he met with a confidential informant to discuss the drug purchase.

Banton will likely miss the Jan. 31 Grammy Awards, where he is nominated for his latest album, “Rasta Got Soul.”