Word: songfulness
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DIED. Maynard Ferguson, 78, Canadian-born trumpet virtuoso who lent his dazzling, shrieking high notes to 60 albums and several of his own Big Bands, which reinterpreted pop songs (including the Beatles' Hey Jude) and helped revive the genre; in Ventura, Calif. In the late 1970s Ferguson, who credited yoga with his ability to hit double high Cs, found brief mainstream fame with Gonna Fly Now, his Top 40 version of the theme song from Rocky...
...VOTES OR DIE TRYING Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons stumps for G.O.P. Senate candidate Michael Steele of Maryland, causing Republican consultants' heads to explode. We can just envision D.N.C. chairman Howard Dean working up a response song that would try to rhyme rap standard Gin and Juice with "impeach Bush...
...history of pop music, there is exactly one good song about celebrity: Fame, which required the combined effort of David Bowie and John Lennon to be brought into existence. Otherwise, from the Rolling Stones' Star Star to Britney Spears' Lucky, the subject has been a disaster for any artist who comes near it. It's not that people aren't interested in celebrity--Mary Hart's summerhouse is a monument to the contrary--but that the pleasures it provides are voyeuristic, defined completely by the distance between the famous person and the average viewer. But great pop music erases distance...
With her previous album, Aguilera became a much bigger story than her music, largely because she appeared to have arrived on the set of the video for her song Dirrty direct from an intergalactic hooker convention. (She earned that extra r.) Aguilera's latest is titled Back to Basics, a signal that she's put away the assless chaps and is ready to focus. Basics, already the top-selling album in the country, sprawls over two discs, the lesser of which is dedicated to the singers who have inspired her. On Back in the Day, over vinyl scratches...
Even though Beyoncé includes Encore for the Fans--really just a spoken-word intro to Listen, a song from her upcoming motion picture Dreamgirls (Don't ya just love cross-promotion?)--B'day holds up because the bulk of the songs aren't about her or you or anything at all. Get Me Bodied has no hummable melody, a title I don't understand and a chorus that repeats "Can you get me bodied/ I wanna be myself tonight." But set to a double-Dutch rhythm by producer Swizz Beatz, with lots of hand claps and whistles and maybe...