After Lady Gaga‘s lackluster “Edge of Glory” music video, it was nice to see Mother Monster returning to truly WTF-inducing form on the video for “You and I.” Two words: Mermaid. Sex. Gags kindly explained to MTV just how, exactly, a mermaid would have sex with a human, saying, “Well, that’s actually part of what the metaphor is—you can’t… No matter what you do, there’s this giant boundary between you and someone else. So that’s what it’s about, perceiving in your imagination that there’s something magical inside of you that you can make it work.”

Okay, sure, that sounds like a plausible explanation. And as an added bonus, it got us thinking about the sexual metaphors in some of our favorite songs. So if you’re looking for tunes with sexy references that are less obscure than mermaid intercourse but slightly subtler than “Let’s Get It On”, we’re here to help.

Continue reading ‘That Song’s About Sex?!’

During the past year, it’s become almost impossible to avoid Cee Lo Green. Whether you’re watching his new gig as a vocal coach on NBC’s The Voice or listening to the sanitized Glee version of his hit single “Fuck You,” there’s no denying that Cee Lo has been seemingly everywhere in 2011. Though he’s most well-known currently for his solo project and for Gnarls Barkley, his collaboration with DJ Danger Mouse, Cee Lo didn’t rise to pop prominence out of nowhere. As part of the ’90s hip hop act Goodie Mob, he was instrumental in defining the dirty south style that fellow Atlantans OutKast rode to gigantic commercial success in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Though he broke from the group in 2000 (Goodie Mob has since reunited), Cee Lo carried his love of classic soul and R&B sounds into his solo career. “Fuck You” is the perfect expression of his love of the classic R&B sound pioneered by legendary rock ‘n’ roller Fats Domino.

Emerging from the New Orleans R&B scene in the late ’40s, Domino rose to become the most commercially successful black rock ‘n’ roll musician of the ’50s. From 1955 to 1963, he released thirty-five Top 40 singles and played an integral role in introducing rock to white audiences. With his jovial disposition and permanent smile, Domino was a nonthreatening musician whose music had just enough edge to get teenagers dancing, but not so much as to scare away their parents. His rollicking style of boogie woogie piano with a strong backbeat was tailor made for ’50s sock hops and had an enormous influence on young musicians at the time. Domino’s hit “Ain’t That A Shame” was the first song that John Lennon ever learned to play on guitar, and allegedly “I’m In Love Again” was the first rock ‘n’ roll song that George Harrison ever heard.

Continue reading ’88 MPH: Cee Lo Walks On Blueberry Hill’

I’ll never forget the day Basia lied to me. Twice. I was interviewing the Polish singer (best known for her 1988 hit “Time and Tide”) shortly before the release of her 1994 album, The Sweetest Illusion, which was coming five years after her previous album, London Warsaw New York. That day, she promised me two things: First, she would never again make me wait so long for new music. Second, she’d never release a run-of-the-mill greatest hits album featuring, well, her greatest hits. She felt that at the very least, artists owed it to their fans to reprise their hits as brand-new tunes, not just repackage the same old songs.

Her next studio album, It’s That Girl Again, wouldn’t arrive until 2009, nine years after she had released Clear Horizon—The Best of Basia, one of those run-of-the-mill greatest hits albums featuring, well, her greatest hits.

The morals of this story: 1) You can’t rush inspiration. 2) The first cut isn’t only the deepest—sometimes it’s the best, too. That’s a lesson Mariah Carey may have learned last year when she scrapped plans to release Angels Advocate, a remixed version of her Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel album, after a new version of “Up Out My Face” (Memoirs‘ best song) featuring Nicki Minaj limped onto Billboard’s Hot 100 at No. 100 and refused to go any further.

But apparently, Lady Gaga, the reigning queen of remix albums and EPs, still hasn’t received the memo. When she released Born This Way back in May, she put out a special edition that included a separate disc with remixes of five of the album’s songs. (Bryan Ferry did a similar thing with last year’s Olympia.) Divine inspiration or clever marketing ploy? Perhaps a little of both, but “Born This Way”-with-a-twang never would have spent six weeks at No. 1. The “Country Road Version” makes for an interesting one-time listen, but I never need to hear it again.

Continue reading ‘Sound And Vision: Director’s Cuts — From Lady Gaga to Kate Bush, the Mixed Results of Tampering with Your Own Songs’

For a multi-platinum artist currently in the middle of a massive world tour, Owl City had remarkably humble beginnings.  Adam Young, the man behind the synth-pop phenomenon, began writing songs as Owl City during his off time as a Coca-Cola truck loader in Owatonna, Minnesota.  After Universal Republic caught on to the growing speed of Young’s MySpace fan base, it reissued his first full-length album and offered him a multi-record deal.  Four years later Young is still flying high, and this June he released his third full-length All Things Bright and Beautiful. We recently caught up with him to talk about the challenges of being a frontman, what it’s like to work with Jack Joseph Puig, and what advice he would give to unsigned artists.

OS: From “Strawberry Avalanche” to “Hello Seattle,” you’ve noted a lot of strange and interesting inspirations for songs in the past.  What’s the inspiration behind this new batch of songs?

AY: Predominantly, my imagination. I enjoy writing songs purely from the imagination rather than pulling from my own personal experiences because the end result is so much more quirky and bizarre and dark. That’s always been way more interesting to me than writing about a lovestruck relationship or some specific personal scenario.

OS: Your song “January 28, 1986” is a reference to the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, but you weren’t born until a few months after it happened.  Why did you write a song about the event?

AY: I grew up hearing about it and it was something very dear to my heart as a kid. I wanted to pay respect to the disaster and honor the lives that were lost.

OS: Unlike many artists, you produced and engineered your two major label releases by yourself.  Why have you remained in charge of those aspects of your music?

AY: I feel like creative integrity is something I couldn’t live without. If some A&R guy was always around telling me to recut vocals and make them more “passionate” or something, I’d go insane. I like being my own boss because my vision for music has always been so defined.

Continue reading ‘Exclusive Q&A: Owl City’s Imagination Takes Flight’

OK, so I think we can all agree that getting a closer look into the lives of our favorite celebrities is pretty awesome. Whether or not we choose to admit it, most of us have that one famous person (or maybe more) who keeps us fascinated with every tiny detail of their life. The wonderful world of Twitter has made it incredibly easy to stay up-to-date—no  paparazzi or gossip magazine required. Celebrities simply share what they want to share, and we eat it up. Sometimes they’ll even respond to their followers and answer their questions! It’s all good fun, except when it’s not. It looks like some celebrities, especially musicians, just aren’t ready for the responsibilities of being famous and having all of this technology right at their fingertips.

Most recently, rapper The Game sent the tweet heard ’round the world, causing so much chaos it almost got him in trouble with the law. His Twitter posted a phone number, telling his close to 600,000 followers that they should call it for an internship opportunity. Well, turns out the phone number was for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and they were not happy; rightfully so, considering their phone lines were jammed for a couple of hours. The Game claims that someone hacked his account, but then went off on a rant about the police, saying “Yall can track down a tweet but cant solve murders !”  The department planned to file a complaint but later decided against it after The Game gave a public apology.

M.I.A. is another celeb who recently took to Twitter, but ended up offending her own fans. In the wake of the London riots, she tweeted that she was “going down to the riots to hand out tea and mars bars”. Fans who follow her on the site replied with upset comments, not happy that she was supporting the violence.

Continue reading ‘Music Stars Who Need A Lesson In Technology’

Maroon 5 frontman/The Voice judge Adam Levine had some choice words for American Idol last week, saying that while he agrees the show is a “cultural institution,” it also deliberately hides the sexual orientation of its contestants. He told Out magazine that, “What’s always pissed me off about Idol is wanting to mask that, for that to go unspoken. You can’t be publicly gay? At this point? On a singing competition? Give me a break. You can’t hide basic components of these people’s lives.”

Levine went on to say that The Voice was completely open to contestants regardless of their sexuality, and added that the NBC show is “for a different type of person.” You could say that Levine is only saying this to make his show look better and win over some of Idol’s longtime fans, but this isn’t the first time the prime-time juggernaut has been called out for being less than gay-friendly. Of course, the last time the issue came up those claims of homophobia were directed at the voters (that’s us, America), not at the show itself.

When Adam Lambert lost in 2009, it was a shock; there was little question that he was more talented than winner Kris Allen. (Allen even admitted it, saying, “Adam deserves this. I’m sorry.”) Jim David wrote a feature called “Adam Lambert Loses, Homophobia Wins” for the Huffington Post where he pointed out that, while Lambert never discussed his sexuality on the show, the Internet did it for him. Photos of Lambert making out with another guy went viral, and talk show host Bill O’Reilly asked if a potential Lambert victory would be a “problem” for America.

Continue reading ‘American Idol – “Masking” Their Gay Contestants?’

Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Ke$ha and, of course, herself. As Rihanna sees it—or saw it in the September issue of Glamour magazine—they’re the girls who run the world of pop in 2011.

What? No Britney Spears. I’m pretty sure leaving her duet partner on the recent No. 1 remix of “S&M” off the list was an innocent oversight. But what about Christina Aguilera? That omission must have been intentional. (By the way, I’d certainly argue that Pink, who’s between albums and focused on mommyhood at the moment, and Adele, whose 21 album is outselling all of theirs combined, would qualify as much as Ke$ha.)

There was a time at the dawn of the millennium when Aguilera was the pop princess-in-waiting, second only to Britney Spears. But 2010 was truly her annus horribilis. First, there was Bionic, her fourth studio album, which failed to produce a major hit single and didn’t even go gold. Then her summer tour was cancelled. (She blamed scheduling issues, but the forecast no doubt called for limp ticket sales). And by autumn, her tepidly received film debut in Burlesque (a guilty pleasure and future camp classic if ever there was one, but mostly thanks to costar Cher), was doing nothing to restore luster to her falling star.

Her October divorce from Jordan Bratman, the father of her 3-year-old son Max, blemished her personal record, and flubbing the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Super Bowl XLV in February, further tarnished her professional one. By the time she was arrested for public intoxication in West Hollywood on March 1, her career seemed to be flatlining.

Get it to the OR! Stat!

Continue reading ‘Sound And Vision: How Christina Aguilera Can Ignite Her Comeback? (Psst, She Doesn’t Need Eminem!)’

Lindsey Buckingham occupies one of the odder positions in the already off-kilter business that is the modern-day music industry. Though Buckingham is the co-leader and driving force behind one of the bedrock bands of the classic-rock universe, the Fleetwood Mac singer/songwriter/guitarist’s long-standing, if sporadic, solo career is considerably more of a boutique operation. This is especially true with the arrival of his latest solo outing, Seeds We Sow, Buckingham’s first-ever release outside the major-label realm. Buckingham had been working under the Warner/Reprise umbrella ever since his band’s self-titled 1975 blockbuster album, but after his contract ran out following his last solo outing, he found the majors to be both uninspired and uninspiring in regard to his new work. “As we all know,” he says, “the model of the large record company, you might say it’s broken. But you might just say it’s insensitive to the sense of possibility, the sense of risk-taking, the sense of nurturing that it used to provide artists.” Consequently, he’s gone the indie route with Seeds.

Not only has Buckingham taken the means of production into his own hands for this album, he’s taken over responsibility for pretty much every other aspect of the record too, writing, playing, engineering and producing everything himself. How does the process of building a track work in this kind of one-man-band situation? “You may start with a melody idea, you may start with a guitar idea,” explains Buckingham, “it’s kind of like painting, you commit to one thing to make a start. You could say it’s a more subconscious process. I’m not one of those people who necessarily sits down with something that’s completely finished…the writing part of it kind of goes along with the recording part of it.”

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Buckingham is a world-class guitar stylist, and a number of the album’s songs are based around his unique acoustic finger-picking technique. Asked about how he developed his unconventional approach, he muses, “It was just kind of a hybrid of things. Part of it is starting really young and not taking lessons, and not knowing what was correct or what wasn’t. Early on I was listening to a lot of Elvis, so you have [Presley’s lead guitarist] Scotty Moore, who played with a pick but also used his fingers. He was a pretty orchestral player. When the first wave of rock music died away, folk music took its place in terms of my interest…and I did sort of dabble in banjo, enough to have that be a bit of a reference point. It was really just the fact that I started doing it myself and found my own way of approaching it. When I first started with Fleetwood Mac they said ‘Don’t you think you ought to use a pick?’ It’s a little late now,” he jokingly reckons.

Continue reading ‘Riffs, Rants & Rumors: Lindsey Buckingham Sows Solo Seeds’

We all have that one band, singer or musician that we can’t get enough of. We can’t stop listening to their music, buying up all their merch and gushing about how cool they are. But how much artist love is too much? For some people, being a fan is akin to obsession. These crazed individuals take supporting their favorite acts to a new level, devoting all their time and energy to knowing every detail behind the band, and doing virtually ANYTHING to get themselves closer. Such fans can be incredibly scary, and can make a simple performance challenging, for even the most experienced pop star.

A little over a week ago at a concert in Brazil, Avril Lavigne was onstage, about to start a cover of Coldplay‘s “Fix You”, when a crazed fan ran at her. Avril, atop a piano at the time, let out a shriek as a fan approached her, but before anything could happen, the fan was picked up and taken offstage by security. Avril, a little taken aback, took a second to collect herself, but laughed it off, saying “Its all good”, and resumed the show.

Miley Cyrus had an equally close encounter at a concert over a month ago, but didn’t take it quite as lightly. She had just finished her last song of the night, “The Climb”, and was taking a bow, when a girl who looked to be in her early teens, ran up behind her and attempted to give the pop star a hug. Seconds later, security guards rushed after her, prying her off Miley, pinning her to the ground, and then shoving her off the stage. The only words Miley uttered before being ushered offstage in a panic, were “Oh My God”.

Are Miley and Avril’s security measures over-the-top, or are these fans actually serious threats to the stars? It becomes hard to distinguish between a harmless starstruck fan and a fan who is dangerous when you look back in history at some of the obsessed fans who turned deadly. John Lennon, for example, was shot dead by obsessed fan Mark Chapman. Many stars have had fans break into their homes and have therefore taken out restraining orders and even used weapons for self-defense. Madonna‘s bodyguard shot and wounded fan-turned-stalker Robert Hoskins after he threatened her life. All that said, we don’t blame Miley and Avril for their “better safe than sorry” perspective.

The final day of the KahBang Music, Art & Film Festival was all about contrasts: electronic versus acoustic, large versus small and the expected versus the unexpected. The afternoon acts that alternated between the main and secondary stages ranged from intimate solo performances to bumping techno raves. Kicking off the main stage attractions, OurStage artist Lady Lamb The Beekeeper offered up a set of emotional, bare-bones tunes that featured only her and her Fender Jaguar. Just across the way, wearing their signature business attire and Stormtrooper helmets, DJ collaborative Lazerdisk Party Sex transformed the outdoor field into a daytime club scene.

Dave 1 of Chromeo (Photo courtesy Exquisite Photography)

Undoubtedly the biggest contrast, however, was between the two closing acts. Montreal-based electro-funk duo Chromeo unleashed a wave of impossibly catchy pop songs that seamlessly combined electronic and organic sounds. In the course of any given song, band members Dave 1 and P-Thugg would switch effortlessly between guitar, bass, synth, laptop and drums. Though all of the instrumental change-ups could easily seem distracting, both members adeptly managed to make them seem perfectly natural. Chromeo’s set flowed flawlessly through cuts from their most recent Business Casual record as well as older songs from their first two albums. They even managed to pay homage to past synth-rockers Dire Straits by segueing the intro riff from “Money For Nothing” into their hit “Bonafied Lovin’ (Tough Guys).”

After Chromeo’s powerhouse performance, the KahBang audience eagerly awaited the atmospheric rock of My Morning Jacket. While the longer-than-normal wait between the two sets seemed a bit out of the ordinary, few could have actually expected the bizarre events that took place backstage. After opening the show by playing solo on a vintage Omnichord, singer-guitarist Jim James announced that drummer Patrick Hallahan had taken ill from some bad shellfish and needed to be rushed to the hospital. Forced to do without their drummer for the entirety of the show, the band performed a mostly acoustic set while a stuffed bear took Hallahan’s place on the empty drum throne. My Morning Jacket were certainly determined to play no matter what, however their problems soon proved far from over. Throughout the night, Jim James was plagued by technical difficulties with his acoustic guitar that forced the band to stop and start again at various moments.

Jim James (Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan)

Despite the numerous setbacks that threatened to derail My Morning Jacket’s set, the band soldiered on admirably and took advantage of their acoustic setup to deliver heart-wrenching renditions of tunes from their recent release Circuital as well as songs from their mostly acoustic debut album The Tennessee Fire. Particularly affecting was a haunting version of that album’s “I Will Be There When You Die” that featured guitarist Carl Broemel on pedal steel.

Though Chromeo’s seamless electronic grooves could not have been further from My Morning Jacket’s halting acoustic set, both acts succeeded in their own right. My Morning Jacket particularly stood out for showing the audience exactly how a world-class band conducts itself when disaster strikes. The festival being almost entirely free of disturbances, it’s ironic that the main casualty of the weekend involved a member of the headlining act. Following James’ request to send out “positive vibes” to Hallahan, we here at OurStage wish him a speedy recovery and hope that the next time we catch My Morning Jacket, they’ll be able to rock out in full force.