Pop Rewind: the MTV Video Music Awards

With the VMAs taking place this coming Sunday, it’s time to contemplate the videos up for the title of “Video of the Year”. They are:

• Adele, “Rolling in the Deep”
• Beastie Boys, “Make Some Noise”
• Bruno Mars, “Grenade”
• Katy Perry, "Firework"
• Tyler, the Creator, “Yonkers”

Each of these is noteworthy and represents creative breakthroughs for some nominees (Tyler, the Creator), commercial breakthroughs for others (Adele) and a long-running history of making great clips (Beastie Boys). I hope that MTV chooses well, as they have in the past.

Here are ten notable past winners for Video of the Year, each of which has blown out the solar plexus at one point of another, and some of the worthy  clips they beat in the year of their victories. Whoever wins has a lot to live up to ... 

1987: Peter Gabriel, "Sledgehammer"

Beat Out: U2, “With or Without You”

1993: Pearl Jam, "Jeremy"

 Beat Out: Nirvana, “In Bloom”; Peter Gabriel, “Digging in the Dirt”, R.E.M., “Man on the Moon”

1995: TLC, "Waterfalls"

Beat Out: Michael & Janet Jackson, “Scream”; Weezer, “Buddy Holly”

1996: Smashing Pumpkins, "Tonight, Tonight" - 

Beat Out: Alanis Morissette, “Ironic”; Foo Fighters, “Big Me”

1997: Jamiroquai, “Virtual Insanity”

Beat Out: Nine Inch Nails, “The Perfect Drug”; No Doubt, “Don’t Speak”

Sound Advice: Yoko Ono’s “Open Your Box”

Yoko Ono gets a bad rep. I think it has something to do with her involvement with the Beatles or something.

Few forget that she was a groundbreaking, madly genius (or genuinely mad?) musical artist who introduced free-associating performance art to pop music. Composed of deconstructive beats and graced by her one-of-a-kind vocal stylistics, the art of yodeling and shrieking was elevated to shocking and sometimes hilarious effect. Although ridiculed and vilified for the greater part of her musical career, she had influential admirers who adopted her style and brought its elements forward. In particular, the Icelandic chanteuse Björk has been most remembered in recent years as the primary advocate of using the primal scream in pop music. Much of her performance art and musical recordings were focused on channeling baser mortal desire and suffering through song. It doesn’t have to be verbalized, she argued, it just has to be communicated.

Perhaps no one single piece of music has so summarily captured the art of Ono’s music as her 1971 single, “Open Your Box”.

The Caged Bird Sings: Alicia Keys’s Songs in A Minor

As I had said before in my piece on Adele, sometimes all you need is a piano and a voice.

Alicia Keys remains one of the greatest musical artists of the last decade, and it has indeed been ten years since June 5, 2001, when her landmark debut album Songs in A Minor was released to substantive critical acclaim and massive commercial success. 

The musical landscape in 2001 marked the zenith of the bubblegum pop movement, where artists like Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and N’Sync regularly dropped albums that shifted a million copies in a week and sold out arenas. Since then, BSB have formed with their forerunner band NKOTB to form a nostalgic supergroup tour but have had limited success. Justin Timberlake is rapidly distancing himself from his musical past to pursue acting. And Spears is like a sad blow-up doll, mouthing words passionlessly. All sold well but so did Keys, who was one of the biggest-selling artists of that era and has since released three more albums, each one a multi-platinum best-seller. She writes for other established artists and has street cred despite her classical breeding. Sometimes, good taste and good sense truly prevails, in spectacular style.

Everyone recalls the first time they heard Alicia Keys on the radio. It was that pure, clear, soulful voice that pierced through the silence as she sung the opening lines to her first smash, “Fallin’”, a cappella. The reaction was absolutely immediate as everyone asked, “Who was that???” It was the simple clarity of her voice that first grabbed our attention. No one has forgotten that voice ever since.

Sound Advice: Lady Gaga, Born This Way & the Fame Project

The Blogger was a longtime fan of the seminal TV series Lost. Part of its appeal was its unabashed affinity for the supernatural, in particular numerology and the number 23, which appears in much of the series. The Blogger noted that its creator, JJ Abrams, intended that there be no coincidences.

The Blogger thought fondly of Lost when he heard that Lady Gaga’s long-anticipated new album Born This Way was to be released on Monday the 23^rd of May. This is 18 months to the day and date that her previous work, The Fame Monster, was released … also on a Monday, the 23^rd of November, 2009. This is no mere coincidence. Given that Born This Way’s release was touted as far back as the fall of 2010, the selection of the date was not incidental.

Planning and executing like a Roman general is exactly what Lady Gaga seems to have been doing. Since entering the public eye in 2008 with her experimental fashion and unbeatable hooks, there’s a calculated strategy all along to crest and eventually dictate the cultural zeitgeist. Gaga’s first album, The Fame, was a concept album that proudly, nakedly announced her intentions to become famous. It also appeared to be part of an ongoing, living cultural studies thesis studying the intricacies and effects of fame as they happened to her. She was her own living experiment, with no control group against which to gauge her progress, although that element presented itself by virtue of her record sales and the work of her peers. It is no accident that her follow-up disc was titled The Fame Monster, as her Gagaship had sufficiently explored fame to the point that she could write about its dark underbelly in coded metaphor. Every song was about a figurative monster representing some hidden pathology, begging for analysis even while you dance to it. 

A Gay Old Time: Vancouver Men's Chorus Spring Concert

The Artful Blogger is a sucker for a song and a dance, preferably together. He didn’t have a high school glee club to join (it must be an American thing) and he never had the gift of song, so he must live vicariously through others. In particular, he only wishes that there could have been a chorus like the Warblers on Glee to have joined.

This is why the Blogger is very much looking forward to the Vancouver Men’s Chorus upcoming series of spring concerts. “Duets: Two Fabulous!” is exactly as it sounds: a series of duets starring talented and vocally inclined Vancouver men. The concept of this year’s show is duets performed by the Chorus and another local vocal group known as Pandora’s Vox. For the Glee fan within, this is a bit like watching two hours of dream duets between New Directions and the Warblers.

The Chorus is a non-profit group that showcases local gay and gay-friendly musical talent. They host a fall concert and a Christmas show, in addition to numerous events such as Big Gay Sing, World AIDS Day, AIDS Walk, outreach events, and Singing Can Be A Drag. The Blogger attended last year’s fall drag concert, where the “Telephone” duet was first performed by two intrepid members of the Chorus with copious amounts of glitter and suitable amounts of theatricality. The Chorus includes many of the Blogger’s personal friends, who have taken turns slaughtering him at karaoke night and making him look like the sad movie star warbling drunkenly in Lost in Translation. (Mercifully, the Blogger will not be allowed to castrate songs in front of a paying audience, not even as Yoko Ono in drag.)

Cannes Film Festival 2011: A Preview

Cannes 2011 Poster

Note: Post has been updated as of 16:00 PDT on Tuesday, May 10, 2011.

In April 2010, the Blogger had the rare opportunity of meeting a true international star. The enigmatic and talented French singer Charlotte Gainsbourg launched her first-ever concert tour in Vancouver at the famed Vogue Theatre to promote her critically-acclaimed second album IRM. She did not disappoint. Thanks to the generosity of local cultural paper The Georgia Straight and Warner Records, I met Charlotte herself after the show. She was effusive and charming, and a bit nervous. I asked her flat-out if, as the reigning Best Actress winner, she would be attending the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival. Gainsbourg looked a bit taken aback and then replied, with a twinkle in her eye, that she was “unsure”. Sure enough, a month later, she was on hand on the Croisette to present the biggest award of the festival, the Palme d’Or.

The annual Cannes Film Festival, now in its 64^th year, is not the biggest such gathering in the world, but it lays claim to being one of the oldest (after Venice) and most prestigious. This is the festival where Bridget Bardot once played in the surf in front of an international cadre of admiring paparazzi. This was where the film that gave rise to the word “paparazzi”, Fellini’s immortal La Dolce Vita, scandalized the Catholic Church and won the top prize, birthing an international sensation and helping popularize European cinematic discourse in North America. This was where notorious Danish director Lars von Trier won prizes year after year but showed his displeasure at not winning the Palme d’Or by first giving the jury the finger one year, and telling them seven years later that they gave him “the wrong award” for another film. Gong Li all but became an unofficial spokeswoman for the festival due to her annual appearance to in support of director Zhang Yimou’s films in the early 90s, every one in which she played a leading role. Sharon Stone never misses the Festival, whether or not she has a film to promote. This is where Catherine Deneuve, Maggie Cheung, Juliette Binoche and, yes, Brangelina come to be seen and to present serious work. To get an idea of the international star power on hand, have a look at this clip.

This year’s festival boasts one of the most exciting lineups in years. In particular, the Blogger is looking forward to the following films in competition for the prestigious Palme d’Or: