If you missed the Flaming Lips doing “Dark Side on the Moon” on New Year’s Eve, never fear. Spinner.com reports the band will revive their throwback set at Bonnaroo:
“As of yesterday, we’re gonna do it at Bonnaroo at the midnight slot, the first night,” Coyne says. “We do a Flaming Lips set then starting about 2:30 we do this ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ thing. In that sense, it’s perfect for that. It lets you play a little bit longer.”
Green Day used their obligatory slot on last night’s Grammys to premiere and promote American Idiot, the rock opera based on their songs that moves to Broadway starting in April. It’s an interesting strategy all around: Make a musical based on a multi-platinum-selling album. Record and release a hybrid cast-plus-band single after the show’s regional debut (at Berkeley Rep), but just in time to sell tickets to previews in New York. I don’t particularly object to such a smart, savvy approach from a band still willing to tell Wal-Mart to suck it rather than censor or label their albums.
The performance of “21 Guns” on the Grammys telecast (see above) was big and bold and lush and melodic, though actually only about half as interesting as the stage version I saw in October. The show (which includes all the songs off “American Idiot,” a couple of b-sides and a few tracks, like “21 Guns,” off “21st Century Breakdown”) is a stridently, undeniably political critique of American culture at the end of the millennium, to borrow a phrase from Rent, the musical this show most borrows from itself. The Bush Administration and the US military-industrial complex are equally the villains of the piece, colluding with the mainstream media to create an atmosphere of terminal hopelessness. And “21 Guns” isn’t a sweet song about celebrating military prowess or even memorializing dead vets so much as it’s a demand for disarmament.
It seems the band is betting on some combination of “oh is that what it’s about?” and its major mainstream fame—”American Idiot” has sold some 14 million albums—to overcome any middle America squeamishness about its subject matter. (I’m betting the band’s suburban fans will drag Mom and Pop to the show during family vacations to New York City.) And if it’s focusing on the soft, sweet bond between its punk rock dads and youthful cast (see below) in order to get off the ground, that’s OK by me.
Current Music is very proud to have five Embedded artists representing in this year’s Grammys. We’ll be tweeting and blogging about the show tonight, but here’s your handy cheat sheet of our home team picks:
+ Mos DefandCommon are both up for Best Rap Album. Mos also has a nod for Best Rap Solo Performance for “Casa Bey,” and Common’s nommed for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group for “Make Her Say” with Kid Cudi and Kanye West.
+ Imogen Heap has already scored the Grammy for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical (she engineered “Ellipse” herself!). She’s also up for Best Pop Instrumental Performance for “The Fire.”
+ Death Cab for Cutie’s EP “The Open Door” is up for Best Alternative Music Album.
In 2007, Imogen Heap showed up to the Grammys wearing the perfect outfit—for a garden party set in a Tim Burton movie. (We won’t lie. We totally loved it.) It was a fitting introduction for mainstream audiences to her quirky style.
In the time since that evening, Imogen hasn’t lost the off-beat edge to her style and ways of creating music. This year, she returns to the Grammys as a veteran. She’s conquered television licensing, blogs, and the infamous “Hide and Seek” even found its way in to US Pop charts, but she’s said that “Ellipse” is her most personal album yet. It’s also now her most successful, peaking at #5 on the Billboard 200.
Imogen says that she attributes a lot of the inspiration for the album to taking a extensive trip to different parts of the world. She plotted a journey from Fiji to Thailand and many places in between and wrote the first “Ellipse” track during the first night of her trek.
“I signed my first record deal in 1996 when I was 18 and, for ten years or so, I felt like I was in a really fast race. I suddenly realised I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a holiday. So I decided to get away from it all, take my keyboard and a laptop, and go travelling on my own. I plotted the trip by spinning around Google Earth and decided, as a starting point, to choose the place with the most blue sea around it, because I wanted to get as far away from people as possible. That was Hawaii.”
The result is a record that has once again earned her a couple Grammy nominations, one of them being for Best Pop Instrumental. With arrangements and instrumentation that earn this much recognition, it’s also even less shocking that, for her last tour, Imogen wanted to find clever ways to recreate the songs live for fans.
Watch Imogen prepare for a performance in Los Angeles and explain the way she’s enhanced her shows this round:
She’s got a good chance of winning, too, according to Paste Magazine, who went through all of the Grammy nominees and gave a little bit of spotlight to the nominees they think are actually warrant a chance at the coveted gramophone.
After the Grammy Awards, Imogen will start the second leg of her her Ellipse World Tour, which includes live auditions for cellists to help her out on stage. (Do you play? Do you live in the UK? Hey, it could be you.)
This is not Common’s first Grammys ceremony, not by a long shot. If he manages to come out ahead of the competition for Best Rap Album (which, of course, includes another Embedded artist, Mos Def), it’ll be Common’s third Grammy win. He knows how this whole thing works. So it’s not really surprising that lately he’s just to continued to spend time blogging or exchanging notes with fan via Twitter about which movies he’s excited to see released.
Dantrel Robinson points out on the Grammys blog that “Common has evolved from an MC to Hollywood actor and community activist” since he started in 1992. Part of what makes his last record, “Universal Mind Control,” something to celebrate is the fact that he still managed to break new ground himself. This album shows Common changing his sound but proving that he can still top charts doing so, reaching #1 on US Billboards Top Rap Albums.
In this Embedded clip, Common explains that the inspiration for his album comes from riding through his hometown, Chicago:
However, Common’s not so used to doing well that he doesn’t know how to feel honored anymore. Instead, he told Entertainment Weekly’s Music Mix that the nominations still surprise him entirely.
EW: If I’m counting right, you were nominated eleven times before this year. Are you still excited when you get another couple of nominations?
COMMON: Yes, I was still excited to hear about it. It caught me off-guard. I was actually eating dinner with some of my friends in Washington, D.C. I got a text saying “Congratulations,” and I was like, “Congratulations? What’s going on? Did somebody say I’m getting married? Do I have a child out there I don’t know is coming?” [Laughs] So I asked the person — this was someone from my management team — “Congratulations for what?” and she told me, “Congratulations on your Grammy nomination.” Later, she texted me back, “You got two.” So I was very excited.
It hasn’t distracted him from working on the follow-up to his Grammy-nominated album. Currently titled “The Believer,” Common also tells EW that he hopes to have new music out by this summer. He’s set to work with longtime friend Kanye West again as well as producer No I.D. He’s also got a couple of his own movies for fans to be excited about, including “Just Wright” with Queen Latifah and “Date Night” with Steve Carell and Tina Fey, which hits theaters in April.
And don’t forget to also check out his full episode of Embedded here on Current.com:
As the Grammys get closer, we still can’t help but feel a little swell of pride every time a featured Embedded artist gets mentioned. We love Mos Def and Common and Imogen and Death Cab for Cutie, and we love that rooting for Silversun Pickups feels like rooting for the home team. We tried to tell everybody about how good they are, and then the Grammys backed us up by giving the band a Best New Artist nod.
This week they’ve been gearing up for the show Sunday night by staying buzz-worthy, thanks to playing Jimmy Kimmel Live and a long article in the Los Angeles Times that traces their shift from locals with a lot of promise to one of the biggest emerging rock bands in the US. From the piece:
Part of the Silversun Pickups’ formula seems to be the slow burn. “You can stare into those songs for a while and notice new things,” Cooley said.
Dangerbird Records co-owner Jeff Castelaz, who signed the Silversuns in 2005, also points out an “elegance that’s creeping into their music.”
“These guys are always going to be chased — by rock stations, by kids just discovering them,” Castelaz said. “And the thing is, no matter what the music industry may look like, they’ll be just fine because they’re real. They would be doing this no matter what.”
LAT’s blog predictions have the award going to MGMT, but Silversun are acknowledged as big contenders this year.
While waiting for the final pronouncement, check out how the Grammys social media site includes Silversun in the their We’re All Fans visualizer. The site rounds up posts across YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr, in a cool portrait that weaves together all of the online fan excitement about Silversun in real-time. You can add yourself to the network and show support as the week winds down.
If you missed it, take a look back at their episode of Embedded. We joined them for the band’s most anxious week ever, as their album “Swoon” hit stores and they performed it live for the first time.
This week is a great time to be a music lover in Los Angeles, as major artists swoop into town for pre- or post-Grammy performances and promotion. That includes Best Rap Album nominee—and Embedded tour guide—Mos Def, who has a small club show tonight.
His Key Club performance follows a wild set in New York City last week, where Mos pulled Diddy onstage, as well as Jay Electronica and the other half of Black Star, Talib Kweli. A few other special guests could show up with Mos tonight, or he may just hold it all together himself. Either way, it’s proof that he continues to show more excitement for hip-hop than most emcees out right now. He might even be more enthusiastic than a lot of fans, considering he had no problem gushing about his love for rap and the work of some of his peers with Current.
In this Embedded Outtake, Mos admits he’s not too cool to geek out about getting Slick Rick to appear on “Auditorium”:
It’s that kind of energy and excitement that’s probably gotten him the recognition he has. The Canadian National Post’s pop culture blog, The Ampersand, is doing a week-long run-down of GRAMMY nominees and giving their predictions. For best rap album they’re betting the award goes to Eminem but think Mos Def’s “The Ecstatic” deserves the win. Prefix mag predicts that the same, but they think Mos might have a better chance at best rap solo performance. AZ Central says the real letdown, though, is that “The Ecstatic” should have been nommed for Album of the Year, being such a strong return after three years without. (We were bummed not to see in that category ourselves.)
Whether or not he does take home an award on Sunday, Mos still comes out on top. Doom, another one of Mos Def’s favorite emcees, has scheduled co-headlining dates for February. He’s also one of those rumored to appear on the Gorillaz next album, not to mention the “Ecstatic Moments” exhibit opening in LA this weekend, featuring moments captured during the making of Mos Def’s Grammy-nominated album, as photographed by Cognito.
So, let’s amend that beginning statement: It’s a good time to be a Mos Def fan. Check out what he’s been up to recently, and then watch his special hour-long episode of Embedded, right here on Current.com.
Four of our eight featured Embedded artists are in big competition categories at the Grammys—more on each of them this week leading up to the telecast on Sunday—but we’re also seeing some interesting coverage of how the Recording Academy is using social media in ways that, while not entirely groundbreaking, are a big step for such a bohemoth of the industry.
The Academy has always tried to manage and keep very careful control over its message and brand. By embracing social media, that means giving up that control. Because while the Academy can connect directly with fans, fans can also connect back. That means accepting criticism and engaging in a discussion in a public way, something that just isn’t the norm for the Academy.
One of the connective tissues is WereAllFans.com, which features the tribute mash-ups that are being used in TV and print ads—more about the Lady Gaga one here—as well as other real-time data visualization. (Again, not exactly groundbreaking, especially at Current. But: cool. Very cool.)
Go in and poke around some to see how much online noise there is about an artist. Here’s a screen shot from when I watched tweets about Silversun Pickups (along with Embedded’s Imogen Heap and Common, they are among a short list of artists highlighted on this page).
I added one, using the built-in, unalterable hash-tag, and it hovers for a bit before disappearing into the ether. You can also watch streams of YouTube and Flickr submissions. It was all a bit slow, though—I hope on Sunday night it’s working at a power that can keep up with fan commentary online.
Then there’s the streaming video and, you know, actual show to contend with. Ratings may have been up last year, and the performance list for this year is strong. But will people really tune in to watch?
For a full 72 hours leading up to the show, live events and behind-the-scenes footage will be featured [on MySpace]. This includes the Sunday afternoon three-hour pre-telecast awards, the Grammys red carpet, and the after party. “It’s the longest stream any awards show has ever done,” said chief marketing officer Evan Greene, with whom I spoke via phone. However, the actual awards will only be viewable on CBS Sunday night — during the broadcast, past Grammy moments and some behind-the-scenes footage will be shown online instead.
As for post-show, there are some familiar, less groundbreaking challenges to getting the whole thing (or even parts of it) online:
The Recording Academy owns the rights to the actual broadcast material, so archiving and distributing live performances for the web isn’t an instantaneous thing, due to the many rights issues involved. “It’s tough to point to a performance prior to the show and say it’ll be available,” Greene claimed. For one thing, even if the record label approves the song for online distribution, the artist might not be happy with how they performed and will thus not allow it to be distributed. And when artists with different record labels and different representation perform together, such as last year when the Jonas Brothers and Stevie Wonder dueted, that only doubles the complications.
We get a lot of questions about why Current hasn’t covered more live music, more festivals, more award shows—the short version is a similar “It’s complicated.” So in that trickle down intellectual property way, we’re completely in favor of major organizations that both benefit artists and are responsible to them pushing boundaries on interactivity and real-time social media implementation.
Some of those songs wound up on the “Behave Yourself” EP, including “Santa Ana Winds,” to which we were treated a very acoustic—including kazoo!—rendition. Check out an exclusive performance of the song below.
