Pages

Showing posts with label Power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Power. Show all posts

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Adele Turns Up Power at Oscars With 'Skyfall'

Adele Turns Up Power at Oscars With 'Skyfall'Shirley Bassey leads tribute to Bond franchise with 'Goldfinger' $(document).ready(function() { $('.socialActionsTop .pageActions .email-content').hover( function() { $('.socialActionsTop .bubble.email').show(); }, function() { $('.socialActionsTop .bubble.email').hide(); } ); $('.socialActionsTop .pageActions .print-page').hover( function() { $('.socialActionsTop .bubble.print').show(); }, function() { $('.socialActionsTop .bubble.print').hide(); } ); }); By

Adele brought a mix of classic elegance and sheer magnetism to her performance of "Skyfall" last night at the 85th Academy Awards, where she also won an Oscar for the song. Back by a string section on one side and a rock & roll combo on the other, the singer shimmied slightly as she performed for the first time since giving birth last fall. Adele's vocals sounded low in the mix at first, but she turned on the power as her theme song from last year's James Bond film built to a crashing finale. 

Oscars 2013: Academy Awards Red Carpet

She wasn't the only Bond singer in attendance last night. As part of a 50th-annivesary tribute to the spy franchise, Shirley Bassey gave her own powerhouse performance of "Goldfinger" from the 1964 film of the same name. 


Amazon Music and MP3 Center

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Aerosmith Balance 'Real Rockers' With Power Ballads on New LP, Says Songwriter

Marti Frederiksen

Think of any current radio-friendly rock act and chances are, songwriter-for-hire Marti Frederiksen has helped score them a hit. Recently, Frederiksen hooked up his old pals in Aerosmith once again; their upcoming album, Music From Another Dimension!, features five Frederiksen co-written tracks, including a tune that had been on the drawing board for years, "What Could Have Been Love."

"It's been a good seven years," Frederiksen tells Rolling Stone about the track. "The song came about because Steven [Tyler] really liked it and we worked it up. Someone else would have done the song, but we held it and held it, hoping that it worked for Aerosmith. It's a power ballad-y kind of song, maybe the typical song for Aerosmith. But it just had a good message and Steven was feeling it. So we held on to it and finally, it's seen the light of day."

Frederiksen also earned a producer credit on three of the album's songs, next to other tracks helmed by Jack Douglas, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. "I think the ones that Jack produced are more 'band guy' songs.' I worked on a couple of other songs I didn't produce on the record, and one is a real rocker that came out of the same time as 'What Could Have Been Love' – [new single] 'Lover Alot.' I co-wrote that with the guys. A whole different beast, man – just rockin', loose and uptempo. That's the great thing about songwriting and being able to work with a band like this – you can do something old-school rock and then do a beautiful ballad. The good thing about all these songs is nothing is over-produced."

Music From Another Dimension! is not the only place where songs co-penned by Frederiksen and Tyler will turn up soon: the duo collaborated with Julian Lennon on a song titled "Someday." "It was kind of a last-minute thing," explains Frederiksen. "We were finishing up the Aerosmith stuff in L.A., and Steven was like, 'Julian's staying below where I'm staying, at the Sunset Marquis. We've got to go over and write a song with him – I've been telling him about you.'"

"Steven and I went over there, and Julian has a songwriting partner, Mark Spiro, and all four of us sat down and wrote a song. Literally, an hour and a half later, we had the song done – lyrics and everything. To be honest, it was the first time I'd written with Steven not for Aerosmith or himself," he adds. "It was like a different guy in the room for me, because he's so particular in what he would sing. He was still way into it, it was just a different guy." Frederiksen describes "Someday" as "midtempo. It's got really rhythmic beats in it. Different kind of grooves. It's not your typical production. Really India-kind of strings, and Steven did some backgrounds on it."

Frederiksen credits his own songwriting success to similar open-mindedness. "My big start was through Aerosmith, with [A&R executive] John Kalodner hooking me up with them. They started doing it back on their 'return' – writing with outside writers. They wanted to just get the best songs possible, and get different takes on ideas they may have, and go left instead of right," he says. "I feel like I'm more of a collaborator than a songwriter. I get in with an artist, and I really try to get what they want to get. I never try and steer them towards anything they don't want to do."

"I've been out in Nashville a little now and doing some writing out there, and there's so many great writers," he continues. "A lot of the country stuff, a lot of those guys aren't even concerned about writing the songs – they just want the best songs they can possibly sing, like the Elvis days. I look at it like that – artists would rather stay with their families rather than grind out songs and have to write 50 songs to find 10."

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here


Amazon MP3 Download Center

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Aerosmith Balance 'Real Rockers' With Power Ballads on New LP, Says Songwriter

Marti Frederiksen

Think of any current radio-friendly rock act and chances are, songwriter-for-hire Marti Frederiksen has helped score them a hit. Recently, Frederiksen hooked up his old pals in Aerosmith once again; their upcoming album, Music From Another Dimension!, features five Frederiksen co-written tracks, including a tune that had been on the drawing board for years, "What Could Have Been Love."

"It's been a good seven years," Frederiksen tells Rolling Stone about the track. "The song came about because Steven [Tyler] really liked it and we worked it up. Someone else would have done the song, but we held it and held it, hoping that it worked for Aerosmith. It's a power ballad-y kind of song, maybe the typical song for Aerosmith. But it just had a good message and Steven was feeling it. So we held on to it and finally, it's seen the light of day."

Frederiksen also earned a producer credit on three of the album's songs, next to other tracks helmed by Jack Douglas, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. "I think the ones that Jack produced are more 'band guy' songs.' I worked on a couple of other songs I didn't produce on the record, and one is a real rocker that came out of the same time as 'What Could Have Been Love' – [new single] 'Lover Alot.' I co-wrote that with the guys. A whole different beast, man – just rockin', loose and uptempo. That's the great thing about songwriting and being able to work with a band like this – you can do something old-school rock and then do a beautiful ballad. The good thing about all these songs is nothing is over-produced."

Music From Another Dimension! is not the only place where songs co-penned by Frederiksen and Tyler will turn up soon: the duo collaborated with Julian Lennon on a song titled "Someday." "It was kind of a last-minute thing," explains Frederiksen. "We were finishing up the Aerosmith stuff in L.A., and Steven was like, 'Julian's staying below where I'm staying, at the Sunset Marquis. We've got to go over and write a song with him – I've been telling him about you.'"

"Steven and I went over there, and Julian has a songwriting partner, Mark Spiro, and all four of us sat down and wrote a song. Literally, an hour and a half later, we had the song done – lyrics and everything. To be honest, it was the first time I'd written with Steven not for Aerosmith or himself," he adds. "It was like a different guy in the room for me, because he's so particular in what he would sing. He was still way into it, it was just a different guy." Frederiksen describes "Someday" as "midtempo. It's got really rhythmic beats in it. Different kind of grooves. It's not your typical production. Really India-kind of strings, and Steven did some backgrounds on it."

Frederiksen credits his own songwriting success to similar open-mindedness. "My big start was through Aerosmith, with [A&R executive] John Kalodner hooking me up with them. They started doing it back on their 'return' – writing with outside writers. They wanted to just get the best songs possible, and get different takes on ideas they may have, and go left instead of right," he says. "I feel like I'm more of a collaborator than a songwriter. I get in with an artist, and I really try to get what they want to get. I never try and steer them towards anything they don't want to do."

"I've been out in Nashville a little now and doing some writing out there, and there's so many great writers," he continues. "A lot of the country stuff, a lot of those guys aren't even concerned about writing the songs – they just want the best songs they can possibly sing, like the Elvis days. I look at it like that – artists would rather stay with their families rather than grind out songs and have to write 50 songs to find 10."

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here


Amazon Music and MP3 Center

Monday, August 20, 2012

The New Adventures of Cat Power

cat power Chan Marshall at the Chateau Marmont.

There are two topics that irritate the otherwise sweet-tempered Chan Marshall – and, unfortunately, they both tend to come up in conversation pretty often. The first is the lengthy gap between Sun, her ninth album as Cat Power, and her previous album of original songs, 2006's The Greatest (the mostly-covers LP Jukebox came out in between). "I wasn't just sitting around eating bonbons for six years," says Marshall, 40, who's hanging out at the moment in West Hollywood's Chateau Marmont, which she describes approvingly as a "CIA lockdown hotel." "I was busting my ass."

The other subject she doesn't like hearing about: the possibility that the melancholy songs on Sun have anything to do with her four-year relationship with actor Giovanni Ribisi. "It's more about, like, actually me really composing an album than anybody I'm dating," she says. "My life isn't fucking limited to my relationship, you know?" In any case, they're no longer a couple. "The dumpball hit March 20th," she says cheerily, "and he's so happy 'cause he just got married to a supermodel and that's so great, but, uh, God bless us, everyone."

When Marshall got off the road about four years back, she wrote a set of songs that a friend dismissed as too depressing and too similar to her early material – so she threw the tunes away and focused on her then-new relationship. "And I thought I'll just be a wife and enjoy what I have," she says. But her muse was calling – or, as she puts it, "The knock on the door in the back of my head was just, like, piling up."

She returned to the Boat, Flea's L.A. studio. "I didn't play my guitar, didn't look over at the piano," she recalls. "The only other instrument there was, like, a tambourine and some maracas and a drum set and several synthesizer things that I've never turned on before. So when I turned that on: 'Oh, that sounds cool.' So I press 'record.'" From there, she recruited engineer Philippe Zdar – who has worked with Phoenix and the Beastie Boys – and created the most fully realized arrangements of her career, playing most instruments herself.

The album's most emotional track, the nearly 11-minute "Nothin' but Time," guest-stars Iggy Pop (she asked David Bowie first) and was written for a friend's bullied teenage daughter. "It's up to you to be a superhero," she sings. But Marshall, who has struggled with substance abuse and psychiatric problems, is also singing to her troubled younger self. "I'm putting, like, a recycled aluminum-foil crown on her head. And that's what I had to learn to do myself. No one taught me how to do that except my friends and, like, my dog and the birds and the clear water from the mountain. I spent a lot of my life being afraid of things that did and didn't exist. I realized how foolish I was – now I'm not afraid."

This story is from the August 30th, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here


Amazon MP3 Download Center

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

'Game of Thrones' Recap: No One Man Should Have All That Power

Game of Thrones Jaime Lannister in 'Game of Thrones,' Episode 1, Season 2.

Here's one Game of Thrones that's already got a winner: Peter Dinklage now takes top billing in the show's opening credits. Gone is Sean Bean and his heroic, honorable, doomed leading character Eddard Stark; in his place is Dinklage's Tyrion Lannister, a diminutive antihero whose weapon is his wit rather than his sword, played by an actor whose size would relegate him to comic relief on nine shows out of ten. The message is clear: This isn't your average heroic fantasy, and this isn't your average show. No, it's Game of Thrones, and in case you had any doubt what that means, someone dies not 15 seconds after those credits finish rolling. That sets the tone for the whole affair. Game of Thrones episode 11 is fast, crisp, confident, relentless, and above all intense.

From those opening seconds on, characters coming to grips with their newfound power – often over life and death – provide as much of a connecting thread for this episode as the blood-red comet streaking across the sky; both elements, and the effortless direction of Alan Taylor, seamlessly link the show's many settings and scenes. The architect of that first death and current ruler of Westeros, the boy king Joffrey Baratheon, is every bit as nasty, brutish, and short as the lives of his subjects. Played with impeccable insufferability by Jack Gleeson, Joffrey is increasingly ungovernable by his adult relatives, even threatening his mother Queen Cersei (Lena Headey) with death when she slaps him after he insults her.

Then along comes Joffrey's uncle Tyrion, appointed Hand of the King by his powerful dad and rolling deep with bodyguard Bronn (Jerome Flynn), secret prostitute-girlfriend Shae (Sibel Kekilli, who injects so much sex into lines like "Cities make me want to fuck" that you should probably wear protection), and an army of what's-in-your-wallet-style barbarians. For the first time since the series started, Tyrion's up against the realm's real power-players and smooth-operators: His own ruthless sister Cersei, backstabbing moneyman and pimp Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen), polite but lethal spymaster Varys (Conleth Hill). Watching character and actor alike raise their game accordingly ought to be one of the season's great pleasures. We're off to a good start as is. Tyrion nails Cersei with one of the episode's best lines: "You love your children. It's your one redeeming quality. That, and your cheekbones." Simply watching his face as he processes Cersei's revelation that the Starks' wild-child younger daughter Arya (Maisie Williams) escaped her clutches was worth half a dozen Walking Dead episodes. (Ditto our all-too-brief shot of taciturn badasses Bronn and the Hound (Rory McCann) standing next to each other. Dare we hope for a scene between those two?)

To the north, rebel King Robb Stark (Richard Madden) has mommy issues of his own. She wants him to trade the captured Kingslayer, Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) for the missing, presumed kidnapped Stark sisters. But he's riding high off a string of victories over the Lannisters, so he's not above Joffing it up a bit himself, as we see when he pays a sneering visit to the imprisoned Jaime. Coster-Waldau plays Jaime as a man going through the motions of bravado, as though learning what it's like to lose is even more frightening to him than getting menaced by Robb's massive pet direwolf. Which looks great, by the way: The effects department uses CGI's inherent uncanny-valley slickness as a feature rather than a bug, making Grey Wind truly feel like a creature from another world.

Robb's upwardly-mobile right-hand man and foster brother Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen) has been tasked with recruiting his ex-rebel family's fleet for Robb's assault on King's Landing. Allen's joli-laid Jaggerface and goggle-eyes give him the perpetual appearance of a man who vehemently disagrees with whatever it is he just heard, and his hunger to earn recognition (if not redemption) is palpable. At the Stark stronghold of Winterfell, Robb's kid brother Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) alternates tedious meetings with the lords he now commands with listening to ominous prophecies from his wildling helper Osha (Harry Potter's Natalia Tena, who apparently got her hurr did between seasons). When a brief POV sequence starring Bran's direwolf Summer cuts directly to a sleeping Bran, however, we get the sense that the boy may have a different sort of "power" altogether.

The most interesting up-and-comer is Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane), the late King Robert's warrior brother and rightful heir (Joffrey is Cersei & Jamie's twincestuous bastard, while Robert's other brother Renly is the baby of the family). The problem? It seems like only two people in Westeros like him enough to fight for him. The first is former smuggler Ser Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham), fiercely loyal but also brutally honest, a tough combination given Stannis's precarious situation. Then there's Melisandre (Carice Van Houten), a red-headed priestess who looks like Tori Amos at the Renaissance Fair and who eggs Stannis on by casting him as her religion's long-awaited messiah figure. It's to the show's great credit that this brand-new trio – and the dark, fossil-encrusted island fortress of Dragonstone where they live – hold their own against people and places and plotlines we've all waited a year to revisit. Stannis and Davos in particular, never the most charismatic of characters in the books, greatly benefit simply by becoming living breathing actors rather than lines on paper. Hearing Dillane growl his way through Stannis's declaration of kingship, refusing to call his brother beloved (not by Stannis he wasn't) while insisting that Jaime Lannister be referred to as "Ser" – "Whatever else he may be, the man's still a knight" – makes his black-and-white personality pop.

Power's a slippery thing, though. Case in point: season one ended with the triumphant, transcendent image of a nude, fireproof Daenerys Targaryen (breakout star Emilia Clarke) encircled by freshly-hatched dragons and worshipful followers. But the show zigs where others would zag: She and her people are now slowly starving to death in a desert wasteland, outnumbered by and on the run from forces that could destroy her and her tiny band, dragons or no. Even her horse drops dead by the episode's 15-minute mark, proving once again that yes, this is Game of Thrones.

Cutting from fire to ice, we catch up with Ned Stark's bastard son Jon Snow (Kit Harrington), now a Sworn Brother of the Night's Watch, the ragtag black-clad fighting force tasked with guarding the realm's northern border. Beyond the Wall that marks it he encounters the deeply creepy Craster, whose wooden stronghold is staffed exclusively by his inbred daughter-wives and used as an outpost by the Watch. Played by Robert Pugh, who looks like a feral Dick Van Patten, Craster's a leering, sneering fuck who puts his own medieval spin on the live-free-or-die rhetoric of the Tea Party. Knowing when to shut the fuck up is a lesson of leadership Jon's dad never quite learned, and it could lead Jon into trouble here. "He marries his daughters – what's he do with his sons?" Jon asks. Dun dun dunnnnn!

Jon's half-sister and Joffrey's fiancée-cum-hostage Sansa  is also struggling to keep her feelings in check. The impressive young actress Sophie Turner plays Sansa with the thousand-yard stare and flat-affect voice of an abuse victim living from beating to beating. Sansa gets a lot of grief from fans of the show and the books alike – she's stupid, she's insipid, she's prissy, she's gutless. Bullshit. She's doing what she needs to do to survive, as the episode's opening scene demonstrates. She instinctively plays to Joffrey's narcissism and cruelty, convincing him to spare a drunken knight's life while dropping enough "Your Grace"s on him to make him think it was his idea. If she'd been less courteous, like the other Starks would have been, she'd be dead.

Even the ever-slick Lord Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish finds himself on the wrong end of the sword, attempting to bigfoot Cersei with rumors of her relationship with Jaime and nearly getting his throat cut for it. "Knowledge is power," he tells her; "Power is power," she retorts, her obedient goon's knife at his neck. It's a killer exchange for Headey and Gillen, in the show's grand wordplay-into-swordplay tradition. But as the venerable fan site Westeros has pointed out, it's also too clumsy by half for Littlefinger, a master manipulator whose motives remain far more mysterious in the book than they do for his openly power-hungry TV incarnation.

Taking the power theme to its "absolute power corrupts absolutely" extreme, the episode concludes with a move out of King Herod's playbook: The City Watch massacres the late King Robert's bastard children before they can grow into rivals for Joffrey's crown, quite literally killing babies in the process. It is, frankly, excruciating to watch – and to hear; gods know I never want to listen to a baby's cries silenced by the draw of a knife and the wet sound of a blade through flesh ever again. That scene took place off-screen, as it were, in the books, where we learn about it in passing during a conversation between an outraged Tyrion and Lord Commander Janos Slynt. In choosing to show rather than tell, writers and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss tap into imagery as old as the Bible, as intimate as a mother's nightmare, and as powerful as both. They've laid down their latest and boldest marker yet that Games will go places most dramas, let alone most fantasies, wouldn't dare. And they speak directly to George R.R. Martin's conception of war as an engine of careless cruelty and wasted human potential. But it's also unbelievably grim and uncomfortable television. I know that's the point, but I'd imagine many casual viewers (and some die-hards as well) ended up wishing they were on that oxcart with runaway Arya Stark and bull-helmeted bastard boy Gendry (Joseph Dempsie) in the episode's final shot, fleeing the horrors of King's Landing, hoping never to return. Until this time next Sunday, that is.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here


Amazon Music and MP3 Center

Saturday, January 28, 2012

On the Charts: The Black Keys and Coldplay Prove Rock's Staying Power

black keys The Black Keys perform at KROQ's Almost Acoustic Christmas in Universal City, California.

WINNER OF THE WEEK: Rock music. For more than a year, we've been reporting on the moribund sales and radio impotence of what was, for decades, the most dominant genre in pop music. Last year, we remarked numerous times on the Cakes, Strokes and Hollywood Undeads that surged up the charts in their first weeks only to plunge into sales obscurity immediately afterwards. And while it's the slow time of year and CDs have to sell very little to cling to the Top 10, suddenly we're noticing rock albums with staying power. The Black Keys' El Camino is at Number Three (with 29,000 in sales) in its seventh week; Coldplay's Mylo Zyloto is at Number Nine (17,000) in its 13th week; and Nickelback's Here and Now is at Number 10 (almost 17,000) in its ninth week. These are tiny sales, but they're something to build on. What the genre really needs is a gigantic, "Rolling in the Deep"-style single to dominate radio and cross over to lift everybody else up.

LOSER OF THE WEEK: Megaupload. The crazy story of Kim Dotcom and his (alleged) $175 million copyright-infringement empire is playing out in a New Zealand courtroom. (To sum up: the 38-year-old German founder of Megaupload.com was indicted last week for building a massive worldwide business off illegal file-sharing, from music to movies to porn; he was denied bail yesterday.) By Megaupload's own pre-indictment accounting, the site had more than 180 million users and 50 million daily visits and comprised 4 percent of the Internet's traffic. So now that Megaupload is busted out of existence, will sales of legitimate music surge again, in such a way that the 10th-best-selling album on the charts will no longer sell a minuscule 17,000 copies? The Recording Industry Association of America thinks so, claiming digital-music sales increased last year due to the shut-down of the venerable file-sharing service LimeWire. There may be a bit of truth in that, but we believe Adele's 21 – which became the biggest Number One album since Whitney Houston's The Bodyguard soundtrack in this week – and its various massive singles had far more to do with this than any tech company.

SURGING SINGLES FOR EVERYONE: It's that superstar-single time of year again, when artists prep for pre-summer album releases and try to build buzz as much as possible via YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and, of course, radio. We remarked recently on Jason Mraz's out-of-nowhere "I Won't Give Up" (now holding at Number Two on BigChampagne's Ultimate Chart, which measures Internet buzz). Joining that single in the Surge Department is Tyga's lowest-common-denominator "Rack City" (now at 17.4 million YouTube views and one viewer's classic comment, "This porn has terrible music"), which jumped 18 spots on the Ultimate Chart to Number Five; dance-music master David Guetta's "Turn Me On" (with Nicki Minaj), which jumped 23 spots on last week's Ultimate Chart and just became the Number One digital single, selling 198,000; and Kelly Clarkson's "What Doesn't Kill You (Stronger)," which jumped 53 spots on the Ultimate Chart, to Number 17, selling 175,000 copies this week. These are all over the iTunes songs charts, as well, and could wind up foreshadowing early 2012's biggest hits.

LAST WEEK: Jessie J Starts the Invasion

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here


Amazon MP3 Download Center

On the Charts: The Black Keys and Coldplay Prove Rock's Staying Power

black keys The Black Keys perform at KROQ's Almost Acoustic Christmas in Universal City, California.

WINNER OF THE WEEK: Rock music. For more than a year, we've been reporting on the moribund sales and radio impotence of what was, for decades, the most dominant genre in pop music. Last year, we remarked numerous times on the Cakes, Strokes and Hollywood Undeads that surged up the charts in their first weeks only to plunge into sales obscurity immediately afterwards. And while it's the slow time of year and CDs have to sell very little to cling to the Top 10, suddenly we're noticing rock albums with staying power. The Black Keys' El Camino is at Number Three (with 29,000 in sales) in its seventh week; Coldplay's Mylo Zyloto is at Number Nine (17,000) in its 13th week; and Nickelback's Here and Now is at Number 10 (almost 17,000) in its ninth week. These are tiny sales, but they're something to build on. What the genre really needs is a gigantic, "Rolling in the Deep"-style single to dominate radio and cross over to lift everybody else up.

LOSER OF THE WEEK: Megaupload. The crazy story of Kim Dotcom and his (alleged) $175 million copyright-infringement empire is playing out in a New Zealand courtroom. (To sum up: the 38-year-old German founder of Megaupload.com was indicted last week for building a massive worldwide business off illegal file-sharing, from music to movies to porn; he was denied bail yesterday.) By Megaupload's own pre-indictment accounting, the site had more than 180 million users and 50 million daily visits and comprised 4 percent of the Internet's traffic. So now that Megaupload is busted out of existence, will sales of legitimate music surge again, in such a way that the 10th-best-selling album on the charts will no longer sell a minuscule 17,000 copies? The Recording Industry Association of America thinks so, claiming digital-music sales increased last year due to the shut-down of the venerable file-sharing service LimeWire. There may be a bit of truth in that, but we believe Adele's 21 – which became the biggest Number One album since Whitney Houston's The Bodyguard soundtrack in this week – and its various massive singles had far more to do with this than any tech company.

SURGING SINGLES FOR EVERYONE: It's that superstar-single time of year again, when artists prep for pre-summer album releases and try to build buzz as much as possible via YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and, of course, radio. We remarked recently on Jason Mraz's out-of-nowhere "I Won't Give Up" (now holding at Number Two on BigChampagne's Ultimate Chart, which measures Internet buzz). Joining that single in the Surge Department is Tyga's lowest-common-denominator "Rack City" (now at 17.4 million YouTube views and one viewer's classic comment, "This porn has terrible music"), which jumped 18 spots on the Ultimate Chart to Number Five; dance-music master David Guetta's "Turn Me On" (with Nicki Minaj), which jumped 23 spots on last week's Ultimate Chart and just became the Number One digital single, selling 198,000; and Kelly Clarkson's "What Doesn't Kill You (Stronger)," which jumped 53 spots on the Ultimate Chart, to Number 17, selling 175,000 copies this week. These are all over the iTunes songs charts, as well, and could wind up foreshadowing early 2012's biggest hits.

LAST WEEK: Jessie J Starts the Invasion

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here


Amazon Music and MP3 Center

 
Design by Free WordPress Themes | Bloggerized by Lasantha - Premium Blogger Themes | cheap international calls