Tagged: topstory

Whitney Houston, one of the biggest pop stars of the '80s and '90s, has died, as ABC News reports . The cause and location of her death haven't been reported yet. She was 48, which is just impossibly sad. Houston comes from a musical family; mother Cissy is a gospel music legend, Dionne Warwick is a cousin. Aretha Franklin was her godmother. She started out singing backup for Chaka Khan before Clive Davis signed her to Arista as a solo artist in 1983. She released her self-titled debut album in 1985, which was a massive success and [...]

Are you guys ready for the 54th Annual Grammy Awards? NARAS! Gifting Suites! Skrillex! Will Justin Vernon wear a tuxedo? Will Brian Wilson wear pants? It's all too exciting. Check back here Sunday night for a super fun Grammys Comment Party, where you'll be expected to BYO .Gifs. Until then, you can comment in this thread with your predictions ("It will be boring" -you). But first: let's see who had the highest and lowest rated comments of the past 7 days. Read More...

After last week's avalanche of amazing videos, things slowed up a bit this week. Still, our top pick is an uncanny, impossible-to-forget piece of work, and there's plenty of other good stuff further down the list. Check out our picks below. Read More...

When M.I.A. held up her middle finger during Madonna's Super Bowl Halftime Show last weekend, she dominated blog chatter for a few days and incited a few minor cable-TV debates. She could have to pay a fine, and she's definitely changed the narrative around her next album. But she hasn't gotten anywhere near the pantheon of music's most controversial live-TV performances; she didn't even hold that finger proudly up to the camera. If she really wanted to start riots, she should've taken note of the moments on our list below. Add your own picks to the comments section. [...]

It's Thursday afternoon, time to Rank & File the biggest stories of our post-Super Bowl, pre-Grammys news churn. By now you know an item's RANK reflects a story's size, while its BUZZ (thumbs up, or down, or both (always with the thumbs around here)) reflects its nature. Scroll beneath the image for links to the articles referenced within. Read More...

On their Watch The Throne tour last year, Jay-Z and Kanye West became notorious for performing their triumphant banger "Niggas In Paris" over and over, as many as 10 times. Now one of last year's greatest singles finally has a video, and it centers almost entirely around those live shows, with Jay and Kanye rocking a huge crowd that seems to mostly consist of models. The quick edits and laser-lights are so relentless that the video comes with an epilepsy warning, and the repeated use of lion-roars is just awesome. Watch it below. Read More...

Right now, the Shins - at least in their James Mercer-plus-whoever incarnation - are preparing to return to the world with the new album Port Of Morrow . The new joints " Simple Song " and " September " are both perfectly lovely. And now Mercer has played a few solo-acoustic shows for radio stations. At one for San Diego's 91X, he recently debuted the new one "It's Only Life," which will show up on Port Of Morrow . It's at the four-minute mark of the video below, which also features a bunch of [...]

Earl Sweatshirt is the youngest member of the California skate-rap collective Odd Future, and he's been missing in action ever since the crew came to prominence in mid-2010, even though his album EARL is probably the most compulsively listenable thing to come out of the crew. Some pretty reliable sources have supposedly discovered Earl at a youth camp in troubled Samoa, where, legend has it, his mother sent him after getting worried about the music he was making. Others have disputed that . But as far as we can tell, Earl appears to be back [...]

As the world's first science fiction film, Georges Melies' Le Voyage Dans La Luna stunned the audiences of 1902 with state of the art techniques and unique creativity. All of the surviving copies of Le Voyage... were thought to be in black and white, it wasn't until 1993 that a colour copy was found in Barcelona. After 12 years of painstaking restoration on over 14,000 individual frames the film was successfully reconstructed last year but the producers wanted to take this a step further and attach a modern score to the renowned classic. So given their [...]

UK electronic trio We Have Band are out on tour this month in support of their second album Ternion . They play the Academy 2 in Dublin on Saturday 18th. Here's what makes them tick. Who are you and where are you from? We are Thomas W-P and Darren Bancroft from London. Dede W-P from Manchester. Collectively we are We Have Band. Who are your favourite artists from your hometown? Joy Division - Manchester. Blur - London. What's it [...]

A year and a half ago, I had a perfectly lovely telephone conversation with Isobel Campbell, the former Belle & Sebastian member who has recorded three ultra-satisfying albums of Nancy Sinatra pastiche with Mark Lanegan. And during that conversation, I learned something about Lanegan that seems to throw this entire career into stark relief: He is a massive fan of the Los Angeles Clippers. More specifically, he is someone who will fly on three separate planes to get to a Clippers game. And given that the Clippers have historically been one of the great lost causes of professional [...]

Name: The Walkmen Progress Report: Band gets to work with Phil Ek on forthcoming studio album. Aside from taking a victory lap around North America to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their debut album, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone , members of The Walkmen have been holed up in a studio with Phil Ek working on their seventh studio album. According to frontman Hamilton Leithauser, the follow up to 2010's Lisbon will be a "very different sounding" record … even if [...]

The video for St. Vincent's Strange Mercy track "Cheerleader" opens with a giant Annie Clark laying prone on an art-museum floor, looking like a Damien Hirst shark. It would be a malicious act of spoilerization if I described anything else that happened after, but know that things get as unsettling and uncanny as they always do in St. Vincent videos. Hiro Murai directs. Watch it below. Read More...

Up, down. In, out. A trial by Twitter can see a career soar, crash, then burn before a single is released or live show played; a rising star can burn white hot only to be quenched without becoming a household name. The ascent of Azealia Banks would appear to be on such a trajectory – with a banging hit that could be considered novelty due to its expletive nature, and the unforeseen embrace from the glossies and fashion world on account of her Disney Ts and cut-off shorts (radical right?) – only her groundwork would imply a steadier ramp, approached [...]

Next week, the Shins will release the 73 single version of " Simple Song ," the huge, world-beating single from their forthcoming Port Of Morrow album. That single will feature a new song called "September" on the B-side. And below, we've got the lyric video for the song, which has a delicate bossa nova lilt and some classic-rock-informed close harmonies. James Mercer! He knows what he's doing! Read More...

De La Soul's Plug One and Plug Two, aka Deen Whitter and Jacob 'Pop Life' Barrow have a side-project entitled First Serve where they are indulging their goofy pop side. 'Must B The Music' is the debut single from it out on March 23rd with the album First Serve out the following week. The pair say the album is "funky, it's hip-hop, it's disco and it's classic." It was produced by French producers Chokolate & Khalid in Paris and with an emphasis on fun and the concept of a hip-hop fable. Check out the polychromatic [...]

In the build up to Bon Iver's SNL performance , Eau Claire's WEAU TV produced a segment about Justin Vernon's upbringing and rise to fame featuring his family and friends. And if that's not enough Bon Iver cultural saturation for you this morning, fitness specialist Jeff Rodgers has released another trailer for his workout video featuring Bon Iver working out on the road. Check out the Bon-anza below. Read More...

The biggest story to come out of last night's Super Bowl was this: In a repeat of their historic 2008 victory, the New York Giants won a dramatic come-from-behind victory over the favored New England Patriots, with the Patriots botching their last-minute touchdown attempt. The second-most-important story was this: During her short appearance at Madonna's halftime show, M.I.A. slyly flipped off the camera in a way that wasn't immediately apparent to most of the people watching the show. Nice job, M.I.A. Read More...

It's been 18 months since Cathy Davey has graced a Dublin venue with her presence, and tonight marks the beginning of a three date residency at Whelan's. One of the forthcoming shows is to be a reprise of Davey's 2008 Fringe Festival show Songs That Scare Children , the other a celebration of her favourite artists of decades gone by – but tonight's show is all about the woman herself, delving into her back catalogue to perform the best of her own material albums to date. It's a shaky start with 'Habit' and 'Reuben', the band hit [...]

Whatever side of the Lennon/ McCartney divide you fall, it would be spurious to question the song writing talents the latter's displayed over the years. Equally, though, it's an almost inarguable fact that over the past decade or three, McCartney's standards have dropped off quite spectacularly. Hell, it would be something of a miracle if they hadn't. In Kisses On The Bottom , he takes things a step further in edging out of the song-writing process almost entirely. The album, widely touted as a belated acknowledgement of the Beatles pre-war influences, features only two McCartney [...]