Digging In The Magazine Box: Little Richard

News: Cyril Neville Speaks Out In Support Of The Crescent City

Cyril Neville is an incredible singer and musician. He comes from a family that has made the music of New Orleans richer, and in the last twenty years when someone talked about New Orleans music, it's safe to say The Neville Brothers were part of that conversation.

Following the devastation of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, it doesn't take anyone within the city limits to see that recovery efforts have been piss poor from day one. We all saw the news reports, and we continue to read stories of how one of the liveliest cities in the United States has almost become flatline. Cyril Neville isn't about to let life go, and he speaks out about it in a great article printed in The Austin Chronicle. You can read the article here:

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2006-04-28/music_feature.html.

New Music: Wing's "Back In Black"

Unfortunately I don't have this CD single or the full track, but here is an excerpt of Wing's cover of AC/DC's "Back In Black".

Opinion: The Hollywood-ness Of Music

Question: How come there's so much Hollywood-type bullshit in record stores? Sorry, "musical entertainment stores". Wait again, "that place with all the dead media". Eh, you know what I mean.

People love Kidz Bop. Parents are raging in stores to buy the biggest sensation, the High School Musical soundtrack. You have the second coming of Devo, but in the form of a group of kids calling themselves DEV2.0.

Head over to Billboard and there's a link to a group of girls whom I once saw on TV while turning channels. They call themselves Girl Authority and they are doing covers of various old and new songs, including Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl". Kind of odd, hearing 12 year old girls doing a song about not being someone who wouldn't want to "holla back" at a man. Not as bad as seeing a young girl in Shawnna's new video for "Gimme Some Head", but that's another story another time.

Explain to me how a lot of this Hollywood bullshit music can become huge hits, while real people who make real music, be it hip-hop, funk, country, jazz, gospel, or Hawaiian, have to struggle ten times as hard? You have all of this phony bologna emo-metal bands whom people would have kicked in the nuts 25 years ago because they were poseurs, and now they RAWK!?!?! To whom, to people who don't know any better?

Lindsay Lohan and Ashlee Simpson have made not one but two albums. Both went gold. Keep in mind, 500,000 people went out of their way to buy it. Meanwhile, Cassandra Wilson has a new album but is a slow but steady seller only because she's not young and a friend of Kanye West.

Jessica Simpson was once lost in the Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera shuffle and now all she has to do is pucker her ass, show off her horse mouth, and she's a success? What the fuck is going on here?

We're in 2006, and there are more methods than every to buy and obtain music, legally and illegally. The MP3 rage made it possible to not only get the songs you want, but to be able to find music that was either impossible to find or too expensive to buy. Yet who is at #1?

I don't think I would complain so much if it was good songs, but most of the songs are shit. Bring back good music.

I take that back, bring back the record industry I grew up with before it got corrupt, before it was taken over by people who could care less about the music.

The Beatles: Cirque du Soleil

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge Beatles fan. There has been word about some new music on the horizon, but in Beatles terms that could mean "by 2012". There's also word that all of their albums will be newly remastered, which pleases a number of people.

But what to make of this?
http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/CirqueDuSoleil/en/showstickets/love/intro/intro.htm

This is an official site for a new show uniting the music of The Beatles with the Cirque du Soleil? To me, this is just wrong. Dead wrong.