Now playing on PHAWKER RADIO! WALL STREET JOURNAL: It’s been a big week for R&B performer Raphael Saadiq, whose critically acclaimed new album, The Way I See It, has just been named iTunes #1 Best Album of 2008. With an average customer rating of four-and-a-half-stars, The Way I See It is praised in an iTunes online review for “inhabit(ing) the atmosphere of late-Sixties Motown and Philadelphia International, incorporating the distinctly echo-laden drum shuffles of Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye, as well as the swelling string choruses of the Delfonics and the Stylistics … music pours from this performer as easily […]
DEATH OF PURRFECTION: Eartha Kitt RIP
NEW YORK TIMES: Ms. Kitt, who began performing as a dancer in New York in the late ’40s, went on to achieve success and acclaim in a variety of mediums long before other entertainment multitaskers like Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler. With her curvaceous frame and unabashed vocal come-ons, she was also, along with Lena Horne, among the first widely known African-American sex symbols. Orson Welles famously proclaimed her “the most exciting woman alive” in the early ’50s, apparently just after that excitement prompted him to bite her onstage during a performance of “Time Runs,” an adaptation of […]
THIS JUST IN: Michael Jackson On The Verge Of Death
STUFF: Jackson’s biographer Ian Halperin told US gossip magazine In Touch Jackson is suffering from a rare genetic illness called Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency, as well as emphysema and gastrointestinal bleeding. The 50-year-old former King of Pop is also reportedly 95 percent blind in his left eye and can barely speak. “He’s had it for years, but it’s gotten worse,” Halperin told In Touch. “He needs a lung transplant but may be too weak to go through with it.” Halperin said the gastrointestinal bleeding was Jackson’s most dangerous ailment: “It could kill him.” Jermaine Jackson has not denied reports of his […]
CH-CH-CHANGES: RIAA To Stop Suing Customers, Warner Music To Take The Led Out Of YouTube
WASHINGTON POST: The Recording Industry Association of America is taking a dangerous step with its decision to stop suing suspected music sharers and start cutting off their Internet access instead. While the discontinuation of the lawsuit practice has its merits, the move opens up a whole new can of worms — one that could have serious implications for our future rights as consumers of information. On the one hand, the shift — revealed Friday, initially in a story published in The Wall Street Journal — does mark the end of a troubling and generally ineffective process. RIAA’s past practice of […]
WEEKEND UPDATE: The Good News Flower Hour
The Good News Flower Hour #4 Folks, here’s the latest installment of The Good News Flower Hour, wherein I provide the voice for a flower that reads the news. The debut is HERE and the last couple episodes are HERE and HERE. We are still tweaking the concept and streamlining the production schedule on these — it takes a LONG-ass time to make these little three-minute suckers — but we hope to make this a weekly feature in the very near future. Enjoy.
EARLY WORD: CocaineSexJams For The Broke
DAVE P: YES!!! CSS has decided to move their show from the TLA this Friday so that they can play the Making Time $2 Bill Holiday Freakout.This Holiday party will surely be a total RAGER!!! And YES!!! It’s still just $2!!! RELATED: MillerCoors LLC will stop producing and marketing caffeinated alcoholic drinks, including the current formulation of its top-selling Sparks brand, under a settlement with more than a dozen state attorneys general. The beer giant had come under fire from attorneys general and consumer-advocacy groups for allegedly targeting underage drinkers through its marketing of Sparks. “Attorneys general from around the […]
SEE THAT MY GRAVE IS KEPT CLEAN: 35 Years After Death, Sister Rosetta Tharpe Finally Gets A Headstone
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the pioneering gospel musician and instrumentalist, finally has a gravestone marking her resting place at Northwood Cemetery in Philadelphia. Since her passing in 1973, the gravesite of Sister Rosetta had been a barren plot lacking any memorial. Today, a beautiful, rose-colored monument bears respect to one of America’s most influential artists of the 20th Century. Sister Rosetta’s monument was partially funded by a benefit concert at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, PA on January 11, 2008, that featured performances by gospel and spiritual music legends—The Dixie Hummingbirds, Odetta, Marie Knight, Willa Ward, The Johnny Thompson Singers, and […]
DUCK: Iraqi Journalist Hurls Shoes At Bush’s Head
Shoe-Hurling Iraqi Becomes a Folk Hero UPDATE: BAGHDAD — An Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at President Bush and called him a dog became a huge celebrity in the Arab world and beyond on Monday, with many supporters exalting him for what they called a courageous act in the face of American arrogance about the war. MORE CNN: An Iraqi television journalist hurled two shoes at President Bush on Sunday during a joint news conference Bush was holding with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to mark the signing of a U.S.-Iraq security agreement. Bush had just finished his […]
THE PHOTON BAND: Where Did The Love Go?
[Dir. by SCOTT COLAN] The Photon Band plays tonight at JBs with Audible and Brown Recluse.
TONITE: On Sugar Mountain
ROCK SNOB ENCYCLOPEDIA: AMERICANA (Musical movement 1776-present; see also alt-country, No Depression) Often shortsightedly assumed to date back no further than the first Uncle Tupelo record, the Americana musical tradition in fact begins with that iconic, bloodied fife-and-drum trio staggering out of the smoking ruins of the American Revolution. Forsaking macho jingoism for earthy, backwoods aesthetics, Americana is a catchall phrase to encompass the impossibly wide breadth of American roots music, evoking the magnificent vistas of the national geography and the transcendental struggle of the American experience — the good, the bad, the ugly, the high and the lonesome. While […]
THE EARLY WORD: Let Them Eat Rock
Philabundance is the region’s largest hunger relief organization and works to end hunger and malnutrition in the Delaware Valley by acquiring food and distributing it through organizations serving people in need. *** NEIL YOUNG: After The Gold Rush RELATED: Tix Still Available For Neil Young + Wilco Friday At The Spectrum PREVIOUSLY: Q&A With Wilco Keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen *** BIZJOURNAL: Comcast Corp. said Thursday it launched a faster Internet service that will double the speed for most of its existing customers by early 2009. The Philadelphia-based telecommunications giant will roll out the so-called “wideband” service to residential and business customers […]
Q&A: My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden
[Photo by MATT WIGNALL] BY DAVE ALLEN There’s no way around the too-easy metaphor: My Brightest Diamond is a gem. The project by talented singer and multi-instrumentalist Shara Worden is now on its second record, “A Thousand Shark’s Teeth,” and has crafted a richly haunted sound, steeped in both late Romantic chamber music and the seamy vocal stylings of Jeff Buckley, Bjork and Billie Holiday. Worden came by her classical roots honestly: she has a degree in opera. After a musically eclectic childhood in Ypsilanti, Michigan and musical studies at the University of North Texas, Worden set out for New […]
HEAR YE: Pronto All Is Golden
SELECTED TRACKS NOW PLAYING ON PHAWKER RADIO! BY JONATHAN VALANIA Mikael Jorgensen is the keyboard player for Wilco, who open for Neil Young Friday at the Spectrum (tix still available, yo). He’s the one in the Clark Kent glasses and untucked Oxford and Charlie Brown sweater combo, hunched over his MacBook and triggering disembodied sonic filigree and sine wave surrealism, like a mischievous child coloring outside the lines of Wilco’s horse-drawn Americana. Jorgensen — a Leonardo, New Jersey native who recently moved from Wilco’s HQ in Chicago to Brooklyn — first made Phawker’s acquaintance back in the mid-90s when he […]