Thursday, July 17, 2008

"Vintage wax - Vintage trax : Volume 1"

Here is my first offering in my new "Vintage Wax - Vintage Trax" campaign! It's from my vinyl LP of "The Addams Family" on RCA Victor from 1965.

While most of this album is funky frizzesh, this is my favorite. It's "Uncle Fester's Blues" as composed by Vic Mizzy. Check it! - Ace:)

--Uncle Fester's Blues--

Critics Slam Mattel's New Barbie, Calling S&M Outfit 'Filth'

from The Sun

Barbie's new S&M look has whipped up a storm — with protesters dubbing it "filth."

The doll's image is transformed with kinky fishnets, motorcycle jacket, black gloves and boots.

Maker Mattel says Black Canary Barbie, out in September, is based on a DC comic superhero of the same name.

But religious group Christian Voice said: "Barbie has always been on the tarty side and this is taking it too far. A children's doll in sexually suggestive clothing is irresponsible — it's filth."

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Q-Tip is set for 'The Renaissance'

from the latimes By Chris Lee, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
 
The former A Tribe Called Quest front man readies his first album in nine years.
 
NEW YORK -- THE TANK-LIKE Mercedes SUV rumbled into Times Square one evening in late spring with all the subtlety of a space shuttle launch. It wasn't simply the boom-bip issuing at ear-splitting volume from the truck's bazooka speakers -- although the sound of kick drums that loud was enough to get passersby wondering, even complaining, about the person behind the wheel. You could see something else happening: hip-hop fans of all stripes having a "Hey, isn't that . . . ?" moment, connecting the music coming from the vehicle with its driver, New York "conscious" rapper Q-Tip.

The on-again-off-again front man-producer for seminal hip-hop quartet A Tribe Called Quest and one of the genre's most transcendent MCs, Q-Tip largely has kept to himself since 1999, when his last album, "Amplified," hit No. 4 on the national hip-hop/R&B chart. Outside of a scant few guest verses on other performers' songs (including the Chemical Brothers' European smash hit "Galvanize," for which Q-Tip won a Grammy) and dribs of production work for the likes of Stevie Wonder, Mariah Carey and Mobb Deep, he's remained virtually silent. Rap aficionados, meanwhile, never forgot him.

Bathed in Times Square's neon glow, the Queens native nodded coolly in time with "Shaka," the first track on his eagerly awaited second solo album; a song on which the voice of Barack Obama soars over a crushing beat, intoning his message of hope and change -- a sound byte Q-Tip excerpted from one of the candidate's campaign speeches.

"I feel like Obama in a way," the rapper would say later. "His idea that hope means not shrinking from a fight; it's the courage to reach for something. My music is that. Those are principles I try to embody. He said it so eloquently, I thought it would be a proper way to start things off."

Appropriately enough, Q-Tip's first commercially released album in nine years is titled "The Renaissance," signaling both a reclamation of the spotlight and a rebirth of the hip-hop cool he helped create. But don't call it a comeback. To hear him tell it, he never really went away. He simply recorded several albums' worth of music without releasing it, waiting for the right cultural tipping point to reemerge on the scene. "Where have I been?" Q-Tip asked. "Working. Between you and me, I was waiting for the time to be right."

Just weeks in front of A Tribe Called Quest reuniting to perform 10 dates on the nation's top-grossing hip-hop event, the Rock the Bells tour (which hits the Glen Helen Pavilion on Aug. 9), the rapper-producer allowed a visiting reporter to preview the album while riding shotgun on an SUV crawl around Manhattan.

The verdict: "The Renaissance" marks a return to form that rivals Q-Tip's best work on Tribe's beloved 1993 album, "Midnight Marauders." Featuring multi-platinum-selling singer Norah Jones (on her first hip-hop "collabo"), as well as neo-soul crooners D'Angelo and Raphael Saadiq, "The Renaissance" blends live instrumentation and samples. It encompasses summer jams and club bangers as well as introspective songs such as "We Fight, We Love" (contrasting the experiences of a young girl in a bad relationship with a young man fighting in Iraq) and succeeds -- despite an overwhelming burden of expectation -- as one of the most artistically whole CDs of the late '00s.

Moreover, "The Renaissance" sounds thoroughly modern for the simple fact that so many other artists are just now aping what Q-Tip did 20 years ago.

Discussing the professional odyssey leading to its September release on Universal Motown -- he changed record labels five times in six years, bouncing among every major hip-hop imprint except Island Def Jam, and took an acting role in the 2007 thriller "The Invasion" -- Q-Tip, 38, sounded less like a world-weary casualty of the industry's hustle and flow than a kind of hip-hop J.D. Salinger who has come out of years in the wilderness with his optimism guarded yet intact.

"Since 'Amplified,' I've recorded three albums. I shot a movie with Nicole Kidman that I got cut out of -- it was crap anyways. But I am totally happy with where I'm at artistically," Q-Tip said over an extravagant omakase sushi supper on the Upper West Side. "One thing the music industry has taught me is to manage my expectations. I'm looking forward to moving forward. I've got so many ideas. I see things very clearly."

Cultural legacy

AT A moment when "bringing '88 back" has become something of a rallying cry in hip-hop -- a nod to rap's so-called golden era that lasted from 1988 to '94 -- A Tribe Called Quest's cultural legacy (and in particular Q-Tip's hand in it) has been thrown into stark relief. Tribe's 1990 single "Can I Kick It" enjoys prominent placement in the new coming-of-age comedy "The Wackness." Chicago rap duo Kidz in the Hall reverently name-check Tribe's classic 1991 album, "The Low End Theory," on its song "Drivin' Down the Block (Low End Theory)." And many of today's most forward-looking hip-hop tastemakers -- Kanye West, the Cool Kids, Lupe Fiasco, the Roots, N.E.R.D., Common, the Knux and Andre 3000 of OutKast among them -- owe a debt to the sonic template Q-Tip innovated.

Ask any hip-hop head and they'll tell you: Lyrically, "the Abstract" (as Tip calls himself) helped redefine the genre. The most forward face of the Native Tongues' hip-hop collective -- a massive that also included De La Soul, the Black Sheep and the Jungle Brothers -- he shifted emphasis away from gangsta nihilism toward the light of Afro-centrism, self-love and a unified hip-hop culture. As a producer, Q-Tip (his given name is Jonathan Davis, but he changed it to Kamaal Fareed after converting to Islam in the mid-'90s) helped broaden hip-hop's sonic horizons by incorporating jazz samples with swing beats like no producer before him.

"Tip is a master," said producer Pharrell Williams, one of hip-hop's most successful and prolific hitmakers. "His way of looking at sampling was unique to everybody else's. He would take the sweetest spot of a record, usually a bridge while everyone else was taking the break [beat], and make a song around it. I don't call him Q-Tip. I call him 'teacher.' He's one of the guys that raised me as a musician."

The genre-splicing indie/hip-hop/new wave/rock singer-songwriter Santogold went a step further, calling Q-Tip a "musical legend." "He is intrinsically connected to music and uses it as a way to explore himself," Santogold said. "Music is his life force. He's a true artist in that way."

Yet it wasn't that long ago that his career seemed to be stuck in quicksand. After a 10-year run together, A Tribe Called Quest's members (MC Phife Dawg, DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Q-Tip and the group's rotating member and "hype man" Jarobi) went their separate ways in 1998 -- leaving a void in hip-hop for which a contingency of the group's fans have mostly blamed the Abstract.

"For people who love Tribe, I'm the defector," Q-Tip said between gulps of premium sake. "They say, 'You should get back with Ali to do the beats.' But a lot of people don't realize I did all the music in Tribe. In the first three albums, I did all the beats!"

Nonetheless he tasted early solo success, signing with Clive Davis' Arista Records to release the party-minded "Amplified" (best remembered for its effervescent lead single "Vivrant Thing"). But when Davis was ousted as label chief in 2000, around the time Q-Tip was working on his second album, "Kamaal the Abstract," the rapper-producer made the first of a series of wrong career turns.

"Clive asked me to come with him to J Records," Q-Tip recalled. "But I stayed with L.A. Reid at Arista and finished the album. He loved it, sent it out, it got great reviews. But he got cold feet because he didn't hear a single. So I asked for a release."

Rather than put the CD out on an independent label, Q-Tip decided to sit on it; the album achieved cult status after it was widely bootlegged. From there, the rapper-producer signed a deal with DreamWorks Records only to see the imprint absorbed by Geffen Records just months later. He never stopped creatively striving, studying piano, taking tutorials in bel canto singing technique and performing DJ sets throughout New York. After a year of neglect on the Geffen affiliate Interscope, Q-Tip asked for and was granted another release.
 
In 2004, he inked a contract with Universal Motown and self-produced another solo album, "Open." Its spacey avant jazz grooves and psychedelic guitars (not to mention the vocal contributions on two songs from Andre 3000) won critical raves but failed to live up to Q-Tip's sky-high standards. And again, "Open" never saw the light of commercial day.

Sylvia Rhone, president of Universal Motown, oversaw that CD's slow metamorphosis from a dark, jazzy exercise in intellectual hip-hop into the accessible, sparkling pop of "The Renaissance" after a series of creative detours.

"He had failure to launch, that's what it was," Rhone said. "Over the four years, trust me, he's been working on this. It's been a constant work in progress. The tone has changed so much. But I think we have something that's going to go down in the record books."

PILOTING HIS SUV through midtown Manhattan's glittering night scape, the rapper-producer appeared quiet and a tad sentimental. He pointed out the theater that functioned as Studio 54 in the '70s and signaled toward where the seminal New York night spot Latin Quarter used to be, the place where a young MC from Queens (Q-Tip: Get it?) established his rap bona fides.

Soon, however, conversation turned away from hip-hop's past and toward his future output -- specifically why the time is right now for him to release "The Renaissance."

"At one point, it didn't seem like it was going to come out because there were a lot of hurdles I had to go through," he said. "I knew it would come out. I had to wait until the time was right. If I put it out a couple of years ago, it wouldn't have been right. But now you have people like Santogold, Kanye West, Lupe [Fiasco], Common. It seems like it's a bit more in tune with what I'm doing. I think that in the next six years I can keep putting albums out. I feel like the environment's right. So I'm going to take advantage of where the culture's at."

He explained that the plan, as it stands, is to finally release "Kamaal the Abstract" around Christmas this year, then, in January, to head into the studio with British studio whiz Nigel Godrich, the producer behind Radiohead's "OK Computer" and Beck's "Sea Change," to cut a new album. "He's really dope," Q-Tip said.

Around 2 a.m. that night, Q-Tip was doing what he does best. In a subterranean club in the Meatpacking District called APT, he had given his friend, DJ Rich Medina, several tracks from "The Renaissance" to preview. When the percolating beat of "Life Is Better" (featuring Norah Jones) came over the speakers, the rapper slipped into a fugue of disco bliss; dancing and rapping along with his own voice.

Blame either the sake or the impending release of his first new album in nearly a decade, Q-Tip's energy suddenly seemed both boundless and contagious. By the time everyone figured out who was behind the song, the packed house was already rocking, waving arms and shaking hips. Women leaned in to kiss Q-Tip's cheek and men pounded him on the shoulder heartily. "I'm the renaissance man, the Rose King," Q-Tip said, smiling, tipsy.

He seemed relieved. The Abstract had been waiting for this moment.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

A Kodak Moment...

Here's a photo of a random person taken 2 years ago at Sesame Place in Pennsylvania. It was like 400° that day, the sun was blazing down, and the humidity was somewhere near 400%. Well, I'm exaggerating a bit, but let's just say it was FRIGGIN" HOT.

My wife & took a breather under a tent by the food area while her nieces rode some Elmo ride or something. Anyway, there was this woman passed out right next to me. I think she was there with her mother and some other family members. I had my digital camera in my hand for several minutes before I got the opportunity to snap just one photo - the one you see above.

See, in an alternate universe I am a Photographer. I do enjoy taking photos, and often times actually find that some of them are pretty decent. I will post a photo on here once in a while for all who appreciate that sorta thing. **Click on the picture for a larger view** - Ace:)

"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

Got 209 minutes to KILL!? If so, go grab some munchies from the kitchen, and enjoy...

FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!


This movie is unavailable on DVD and damn hard to find on VHS. It's camp-tacular!

Also stay tuned for a bonus showing of the pimpulicious 70's flick - THE MACK. Heavy, heavy, heavy.... - Ace:)

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

CD boxed sets face uncertain future

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Have boxed sets lost their commercial luster, or can the configuration still shine when managed properly?

Only a handful of enticing boxed sets are due out at year's end. Among them are Rhino's long-in-the-works four-disc Jesus and Mary Chain collection, "The Power of Negative Thinking: B-Sides & Rarities"; the label's multidisc Jane's Addiction box, which is being supervised by drummer Stephen Perkins; and anthologies from Rob Zombie, Nina Simone, Roy Orbison, Dolly Parton and Hall & Oates.

One of the most in-demand items is Neil Young's eternally delayed "Archives Vol. 1," which will come out only on Blu-ray and not on standard CDs, but it remains unclear if it will finally see the light of day by year's end.

"Boxed-set sales have fallen off the cliff; they went from something to nothing," says Bryan Everitt, director of music purchasing at Hastings Entertainment. "This Christmas we will have a limited selection of boxed sets, the slimmest we have ever offered."

Everitt adds labels need to cut the prices of boxed sets.

"Unless the majors seriously look at reducing the price of the boxed set -- they still think they should cost $39.98 or $49.98 -- sales will continue to slide."

Mike Davis, executive VP/GM of Universal Music Enterprises, says that in response to those very concerns, the reissue specialist has launched a new series, Playlist Plus.

It offers three discs at an affordable price, packaged in a Digipak inside a slipsleeve without any booklets. Retail sources say the series carries a list price of $29.99 and a boxlot of $19.58. Acts appearing in the series include the Temptations, Rod Stewart, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, the Allman Brothers Band, the Moody Blues, Kiss and the Velvet Underground.

Not everyone thinks boxed-set sales are off that dramatically. An executive with one of the majors who is not authorized to speak for his company says they're down just like CD sales are. "Everything is relative," he says. "In this environment, you move with the marketplace. So you change your expectations and watch cost much more closely."

The last big boxed-set hit was 2004's four-disc Nirvana collection "With the Lights Out," which has sold 504,000 units, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (Overall boxed-set sales can't be measured; SoundScan doesn't collect data by that configuration.)

"Boxed sets are alive and well as long as you're realistic about your expectations and who the ultimate consumer is," a sales executive who works in catalog for one of the majors says. "There are some artists where you can sell 50,000 units but there are others where you might reach the 15,000-20,000 range, so you have to plan your P&L (profit and loss) accordingly."

While pricing is a concern, there are still certain circumstances when premium prices can still be charged. Newbury Comics head of purchasing Carl Mello cites the limited-edition box for Nine Inch Nails' "Ghosts I-IV," which sold 2,500 copies at $300 a pop, as an example of a project done right. Likewise, the major-label catalog sales executive points out that the high-end version of U2's "The Joshua Tree" reissue at $59.98 sold 37,000 units, while the regular, limited-edition version at $29.98 scanned 123,000.

Reuters/Billboard - By Ed Christman

Britney Spears to film footage for Madonna tour

NEW YORK (AP) - Madonna has recruited Britney Spears for a virtual appearance on her upcoming tour.

"There is footage being shot of Britney some time this week in conjunction with Madonna's upcoming (Sticky & Sweet) tour," Madonna's publicist, Liz Rosenberg, said in an e-mail Tuesday to The Associated Press. "That is all the information I have available. The rest is `a secret.'"

Rosenberg denied reports that Spears, 26, is shooting a music video.

Madonna guest starred in a music video for Spears' single "Me Against the Music" in 2003. The singers stirred up controversy that year with an open-mouth kiss at the MTV Music Video Awards.

Madonna, 49, will kick off her tour Aug. 23 in Cardiff, Wales, and wind through European destinations including London and Paris before jumping to the U.S. in October.

She'll wrap it up Nov. 30 in Mexico City.