fourfour

I wanna feel soft and pretty

Funky Town Grooves recently issued expanded and remastered editions of La Toya Jackson's third and fourth albums, Heart Don't Lie and Imagination. They are really something, to say the least. I reviewed them for MTV Hive. Since the noises that come out of this woman's mouth are often unbelievable, I thought it necessary to collect her best screeches, interjections and declarations in a soundboard. It's below. Turn your speakers down (off, even!) and have fun. (I highly suggest at least listening to the very last file, the last minute of the slow jam "Love Talk." You'll thank me.)

Still mourning

Oprah Winfrey's interview with Bobbi Kristina Brown, broadcast last night on OWN's Oprah's Next Chapter, was the antithesis of O's 2009, revealing sit-down with Brown's mother, Whitney Houston. Bobbi Kris's was conducted while standing, perhaps to feel more casual. The ultimate effect was one of discomfort, though, with a jittery Bobbi Kristina playing with her hair throughout the interview. Perhaps this was one subject where Winfrey's magic -- relaxing her interviewee better than truth serum and a magic lasso combined -- just wasn't going to happen. Broadcast exactly a month after Houston's death, Brown was still shaken, and who could blame her?

You can't push a kid in mourning, and one can only imagine the extent of the behind-the-scenes demands put on Winfrey in exchange for Bobbi Kristina's participation. Almost everything, it seemed, was off limits. Topics like Bobbi Kris's back-to-back hospitilizations (on the days of and after her mother's death), her supposed suicidal tendencies, her documented drug use and the reportedly imminent rehab stint weren't broached. Instead, we learned that Bobbi Kristina still hears her mother's voice and considers light flickerings in her house the work of her mother's ghost. She stated an agenda speaking publicly for the first since her mother's death: to let the world know what an amazing spirit her mother was. This didn't exactly accomplish that or much of anything (at least not Bobbi Kris's segment). I don't think it was "too soon" to try to talk to Bobbi Kristina, as some people have charged (as if such a concept exists in our day and age!), but I do think that she's not together enough to have any perspective. That's fine. Save it for the memoir, girl.

Bobbi Kristina revealed an interest in singing and acting, as we already knew. "I gotta carry on her legacy," is how she explained it. Where talent and career path are concerned, that is astronomical ambition. But in a way, Bobbi Kris is already carrying out her mother's legacy. She's struggling publicly, like her mother, and also like her mother, she has a legion of strangers behind her and rooting for her. I don't know what's in store for Bobbi Kristina's celebrity, but if she turns out happy and safe and lives a long, full life, she will have succeeded. Here's hoping.

Bobbi Kristina said she couldn't yet listen to her mother's music. That's in contrast to how the rest of the nation (and many parts of the world, I presume) mourned Whitney Houston's death. Post February 11, her sales skyrocketed, "I Will Always Love You" reentered the Top 5 on the Hot 100 and for a few weeks, the woman's voice was once again inescapable. When I interviewed TLC's Chilli a few years ago, I asked her if it was comforting to her and T-Boz that the rest of the world was grieving along with them over the death of their friend and bandmate Left Eye, as so many people were touched by the work they did with her. She told me that on the contrary, it made things more difficult becuase there was no option to grieve privately. Wherever they went, they were reminded of their loss and implicitly asked to discuss it by seemingly well-meaning people. For someone who found herself in an atypical existence through no pursuit of her own, things have to be even stranger and more complicated for Bobbi Kristina. Just getting through that Winfrey interview and saying the little that she did while remaining standing the entire time seems like an accomplishment.

The stuff with Whitney's brother, Gary, and his wife, Pat (also her manager and best friend) wasn't much more enlightening. Who knows if Pat was telling the truth when she said that at what would turn out ot be the end of her life, Whitney's drug days were over, as far as she knew, and that she was on an upswing. Pat seemed sincere, and certainly at other points in the interview, her candor was apparent (especially regarding her concerns over Whitney's involvement with Ray J as well as her confirmation that Whitney and Stacy Francis indeed had words at Kelly Price's Grammy party). But she also could have been attempting to spruce up Whitney's legacy by presenting a rosy picture. Maybe at this point, no one can the truth, or at least the whole truth.

I remain thirsty for it, though. It's very strange to be so moved by the death of someone I didn't know. I had a dream on Friday night that I was watching a just-taped interview with Whitney. She was happy and laughing and sharp and acting irreverent, like the rock star that she was. I felt such relief and I didn't know why. I then realized that my brain was contradicting the reality of the past month. The disappointment was worth the momentary flash of joyful deceit (in this case, the ride really was worth the fall). Whitney left behind so many of those moments, too. They're terrific places of refuge.

Love is deaf

I almost admire Rihanna's audacity. She is a willful woman in a world still fearful of them. She knew exactly the kind of backlash that collaborating again with Chris Brown would inspire and she did it anyway, taunting the world via Twitter last week in advance of last night's release of the remix of Talk That Talk's "Birthday Cake." (One tweet repurposed the lyrics of "Hard" from her superior, post-abuse album Rated R: "They can say whatever, Ima do whatever... No pain is forever <-----YUP! YOU KNOW THIS.") Rihanna has been unfairly accused of having no on-record personality, but the statement (and all of the psychological implications) made in one remix is bolder than that which your average contemporary pop star makes over the course of a single album.

So willful is Rihanna that she not only rejected better judgement and her record company (allegedly), but her own words, as spoken in her 2009 interview with Diane Sawyer, which aired around the time of Rated R's release:

"My selfish decision for love could result into some young girl getting killed. I could not be easy with that part. I couldn't be held responsible for telling them, 'Go back.' Even if Chris never hit me again, who's to say that their boyfriend won't? Who's to say that they won't kill these girls? And these are young girls...I just didn't realize how much of an impact I had on these girls' lives until that happened. It was a wake-up call. It was a wake-up call for me big time, especially when I took myself out to the situation and I'll say that to any young girl who's going through domestic violence: Don't react off of love. Eff love. Come out of the situation and look at it third person and for what it really is. And then make your decision, because love is so blind."

So is she regressing or making a cynical bid for attention (the second best currency in a rapidly crumbing industry)? Is she back in love, blinded all over again, the product of the effect on which she wisely opined two and a half years ago? None of this was any of our business, by the way, until she made it that way with such a public act of reapproval. As irresponsible as it would be for her to privately hook back up with Brown, there'd be little left to do but sigh over her not understanding the extent of the career she's chosen, that her words from 2009 were indeed true and that when you are a celebrity, at least part of your life is no longer your own. That's the trade-off for mass adulation and wealth. You don't have to be an explicit role model, but like it or not, you are an example.

The convenient thing about this "Birthday Cake" remix (and the infinitely duller "Turn Up the Music" remix, his song on which she now appears, in a one-two punch of releases) is that we need not examine a set of messy, complicated personal lives to critique the Rihanna/Chris Brown reunion: This time it's musical. It once was, too: Brown guested on a terrible remix of Rihanna's "Umbrella" before the pair confirmed their relationship. That one's long forgotten, as it deserves to be (it was dropped from playlists after the abuse reports, but it always seemed like a doomed, shrimpy attempt at eclipsing something that was iconic on first play).

The "Birthday Cake" remix will not evaporate so quickly. Like its Coldstone namesake, it will stick to the ass of pop culture. That's too bad because it is a terrible, terrible song. Brown, who's an embarrassment to the soul tradition, adds nothing as usual. His limited range and whiny tone help expose the song's ultimate bankruptcy -- what ran on Talk That Talk at a brisk minute and a half has been stretched to over three and a half minutes and you feel every extra second. Brown merely reiterates what Rihanna says verbatim. (Her in the first verse: "It's not even my birthday, but he wanna lick the icing off / I know you want it in the worst way, can't wait to blow my candles out"; Him in the second: "It's not even her birthday, but I wanna lick the icing off / Give it to her in the worst way, can't wait to blow the candles out.") His third person pronouns in reference to her help us look at this situation for what it really is: Chemistry-free. (When he does refer to her in the second person, it's to say, "Girl, I want to fuck you right now / Been a long time I been missing your body." So yeah, that's no better.)

An irritating clack of a song that finds its hook in a monotone, "Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake!," the "Birthday Cake" remix is a miserable experience. It's a shame because the original was something special: Not a song or an interlude, but a statement. It's a statement in which a woman sings, "I'mma make you my bitch," and it sounds plausible, not just wishful or compensatory to someone who already expressed what he thought of her humanity all over her face. The original features a hard cut right after Rihanna sings the words, "I wanna fuck you right now." She's so serious, so in control of her sexuality that she can't even be bothered to end her own song. It's real a shame that she somewhere lost belief in the power of leaving things unfinished.

Always love

Because my adoration for Whitney Houston is well documented, people have been offering their condolences to me, which is a little weird (it's not like I knew her better than anyone!) but entirely nice. I'm OK! Sad, for sure, but it's easy to find tangents of perfection, beauty and hilarity to distract yourself with when reminsicing about Whitney Houston. Here was someone so gorgeous, her warts were attractive.

To think of anyone's life as a cautionary tale is condescending (true acceptance includes flaws) and selective. Unless you are model-pretty with the best voice on the planet and have been rewarded for both with international celebrity, Whitney's complicated story doesn't apply to you. The best we could ever do was admire it from afar, the worst we could do is reduce it to a one-sentence moral. What can you learn from Whitney's addiction that Nancy Regan didn't teach you almost 30 years ago?

I was really looking forward to watching Whitney turn into a crazy old lady. The fun she already was predicted the fun she would have been! I was also looking forward to her comeback, which for the last decade, flirted with the horizon. Selfishly, I feel cheated out of some great chapters, but the early ones are rich enough to provide a lot of solace.

I've been pondering the thematic line in Whitney's "Didn't We Almost Have It All": "The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend." It seems like it should apply here, and it almost does. Jon Caramanica said it really well (with eerie prophecy) days before those pictures of Whitney looking disheveled outside of Kelly Price's party surfaced: "To be Whitney now, you had to be Whitney then." A life is over, and Whitney wore it so publicly that we now know exactly what we are missing. Nothing is "worth" someone's death, but I feel so fortunate to have shared some of Whitney's life.

I wrote a more formal tribute for work. During my research scramble, I rewatched a lot of her 2009 interview with Oprah Winfrey, which was just so wonderful and comprehensive that it's about as close to a memoir as we got from Whitney. The part of the interview that affected me the most during my review was the discussion on the death of Michael Jackson, which affected Whitney so greatly that she teared up during her recollection. Watching this in light of her death, I felt a weird unity with this distant star and so much farther away.

 

Millie Jackson is amazing

 

I'm a little late to this one, but I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on my favorite person on TV this week, soul singer Millie Jackson. Her life story took up an hour of TV One's Unsung (basically my favorite show on TV now – did you see last week's Full Force episode?!?). And what a story it was! She got her break by shit-talking some woman that was onstage at a concert she attended. She described her marriage to a bass player like this: "He was a decent cat, but he thought we were going to be Ike and Tina, and the record company didn't sign Ike, it only signed Tina." She gave Roxanne Shanté these words of advice: "You'll be successful a lot longer for the nasty things that come out of your mouth than the nasty things you put in it." She made fun of her own music, lamented her inability to pawn gold records and showed that at age 67, she's still quite flexible (you can see that in the video above).

My favorite thing about her crazy-old-lady-ness is that she's in complete control of it – she knows exactly how funny she is. There's no guilt or irony involved in appreciating this woman. A brilliant singer and storyteller (her Caught Up album, which contains her signature song, "If Lovin' You Is Wrong (I Don't Want To Be Right)" splits its time between the point of view of a woman cheating with a married man and the point of view of his wife – Millie plays both roles), she is the definition of unsung and I really hope that her series-stealing appearance boosts her visibility. I would love to see more of Millie. This senior citizen would be a breath of fresh air to pop culture. Reality show, please.

Some gifs of her wild stage shows and a few still shots are below the jump:  

A supposedly rewarding thing I'll never do again

In the middle of 2011, I spent a week doing what is posted below: An edit test for a publication that sought me out but then didn't hire me. From what I was told, I didn't get the job because they couldn't afford me (that I never discussed salary makes me wonder if they were just letting me down easy -- regardless, I never got confirmation that this edit test was so much as glanced at). I'm not bitter (or...not any more bitter than usual), but putting about a week's worth of after-work activities on hold to prove myself when I had proven enough of myself in the first place to be asked to do so and furthermore have spent the past six and a half years proving my abilities (I'm not trying to say, "Google me," but Google me) was a total waste of time. And if I have a New Year's resolution that can be said aloud it's: Waste less time. Perhaps pulling this out of a void and actually doing something with it (even if that something is tossing it into the world without so much as rereading it -- I can't, but maybe you will want to ) is making up for lost time. Maybe it's a waste of even more time. At the very least, you may want to scroll to the bottom for the Basketball Wives video I did. But I understand if you don't, and furthermore won't hire me. I'm used to it.

(Keep in mind that these 4,000 words followed what was requested: Three short pieces and two long ones. There was some additional programming-type short form stuff that I'm not including because it would just be tedious to read, but know that it was time-consuming, too.)

(Also, I did this because I really wanted the job. I understand that rejection is a risk that comes with applying, but all the understanding in the world won't get me that time back.)

Here's to exorcism...

2011 odds and ends (music)

For work this week, Zach Baron and I had a little back-and-forth to sum up the year in music. You can read it here. Zach is a tremendous writer and thinker and a positive motivating force within my writing life. I really think that he makes me better.

Anyway, on a solo and, by my logic, worsened tip, I have a few stray points and elaborations about all this (and also a rant about Facebook) left to share, and so they are below:

Sporadic reader

As before, a sampling of my recent day-job offerings:

Music

Kate Bush 50 Words for Snow review (In my opinion, this is the most overpraised album of the year)

Surkin USA review (Probably my favorite album of the year)

Switch & Andrea Martin "I Still Love You" single review (Probably my favorite track of the year)

Mary J. Blige My Life II...The Journey Continues (Act 1) review (Definitely not my favorite album titled My Life)

Morgan Geist talks Storm Queen's "It Goes On"

Niki & the Dove "The Drummer" single review

A feature on disco revivalism (especially re: Escort)

2011 Christmas album roundup

Movies

Olivia Colman Tyrannosaur interview

The Immortals review

Rating the post-Henson, pre-The Muppets Muppets movies

The diva chain

 

Not to incite a stan war or anything (HAHA, I WOULD LOVE THAT), but the practice of female singers being asked to comment on their peers (or taking it upon themselves to do so) is endlessly fascinating. (Is it sexist to play women off of each other? It it bitchy for women to take the bait? Is it sexist to think that they're bitchy?) So here are a bunch of clips of divas talking about divas. I gave myself an organizational rule when assembling this: The person speaking in each clip must have been talked about in the preceding clip.

Love, Mariah

 

Mariah Carey was on HSN for eight hours yesterday. She declared her love for what she was selling, Italy, pools, meet and greets and everybody several times over. Here are most of those instances.

My favorite thing about this is how disaffected she sounds throughout, which is typical of her speaking voice, I guess, but not her decidedly affected musical persona. She's serving more vision of blah here.

Oh, look, and here's another HSN cut I did (I could do this everyday!) of Mariah's many "moments." "Retro moment of gypsy whatever" is my fav.

Bonus TWSS moment: Did you know that Nick Cannon beats guys off?

 

For real.