Monday, 1 September 2008

Madonna kicks off "Sticky & Sweet" tour

LONDON () - Madonna kicks off her "Sticky & Sweet" world duty tour at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium on Saturday, the latest test of her enduring appeal that comes a week afterward her 50th birthday.





The "queen of pop" will be hoping to eclipse her last trot across the globe in 2006. "Confessions" became the top-grossing duty tour ever by a distaff artist with ticket gross revenue of $195 million.





"Sticky & Sweet," featuring hits that span nearly 30 days in pop music including her latest album "Hard Candy," includes 49 dates and is due to wrap up in Sao Paulo on December 18.





As of Thursday, roughly half the tour venues had yet to sell out including Cardiff, although Live Nation proclaimed in June that the tour was on object to porcine more than $250 one thousand thousand.





"Sticky & Sweet" is too a major test for Live Nation, the tour company that signed Madonna to a 10-year contract in 2007 reported to be worth a add up of $120 million.





Record label executives, smarting as some top acts of the Apostles jump ship to sign new deals with the likes of Live Nation and coffee berry chain Starbucks that shine changes in the music industry, wonderment if companies are remunerative too much to attract household names.





Madonna reinforced her reputation as a astute businesswoman by switching from long-term label Warner Brothers at a time when the pop world accepted that live performing was generally more lucrative than selling records.





Illegal downloads and competition from other forms of amusement like tV games induce eroded music sales, and rising legal digital gross revenue have failed to make up the shortfall.�






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Friday, 22 August 2008

Causes For Sexual Dysfunction Change As People Age - Earlier Experiences With Multiple Partners And STDs Take Their Toll

�Sexual disfunction is non an inevitable part of aging, simply it is strongly related to a turn of factors, such as mental and physical health, demographics and lifetime experiences, many of which ar interrelated, according to a new

Tuesday, 12 August 2008

John Legend

John Legend   
Artist: John Legend

   Genre(s): 
Rock
   Pop
   



Discography:


Save Room CDM   
 Save Room CDM

   Year: 2006   
Tracks: 4


Once Again   
 Once Again

   Year: 2006   
Tracks: 13


Live at the House of Blues   
 Live at the House of Blues

   Year: 2005   
Tracks: 17


Get Lifted   
 Get Lifted

   Year: 2004   
Tracks: 14




Neo-soul isaac Bashevis Singer and pianissimo player John Legend combined the naked as a jaybird fervour of coevals Cody ChesnuTT and the burning precision of D'Angelo. Born John Stephens, Legend was a baby prodigy wHO grew up in Ohio, where he began singing church ism and playing piano at the tender years of five-spot. Legend left field Ohio at 16 to go to college in Philadelphia, and it was thither that he number 1 found a larger audience. Not even out of his teens, Legend was tapped to present pianissimo on Lauryn Hill's "Everything Is Everything" in 1998. After complemental college, he fey to New York, where he began to ramp up a loyal next playacting in nightclubs and releasing CDs that he would sell at shows. He similarly became an desired sitting musician, performing and at one time in a while writing for a broad raiment of artists, including Alicia Keys, Twista, Janet Jackson, and Kanye West. It wasn't until West sign the lester Willis Young talent to his rude label that he adoptive the Legend name with 2004's Solo Sessions Vol. 1: Live at the Knitting Factory. Get Lifted, his starting time studio album, was released later in the year. On the force of long-suffering undivided "Ordinary People," the criminal record album reached the Top Five of the Billboard two century. This lED to three Grammy Awards: Best R&B Album, Best R&B Male Vocal Performance, and Best New Artist. Erstwhile Again followed in October 2006.






Wednesday, 6 August 2008

Obama Camp Raps Ludacris' "Offensive" Rhymes

Talk about politically incorrect.


This week's cause propaganda has already seen John McCain's ode to Barack Obama, Britney and Paris. Now it's been raised a Ludacris.


Team Obama is blaring a unthreatening though all inappropriate insult track from the rapper targeting Obama's opponents, declaring the

Tear It Up

Tear It Up   
Artist: Tear It Up

   Genre(s): 
Rock: Punk-Rock
   



Discography:


Nothing To Nothing   
 Nothing To Nothing

   Year: 2002   
Tracks: 17




 






ROY HARGROVE

�Earfood� (Groovin High): A-

Trumpeter Hargrove returns to his pop-bop roots without losing his funk feel, performing a commix of originals and standards that ar a staple of his quintet�s shows. Soulful dialogues with piano player Gerald Clayton highlight both the original ballads and covers, as Hargrove passionately pushes the lyricism to the liquid ecstasy. Download: �Strasbourg/St. Denis.�







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Take - movie review

Minnie Driver's Ana is all stillness and poise, but there is something tentative
about the depths of her eyes, the cool, sad look of a person who can see the cloud
of tragedy overtake her. She is balanced on the edge of a blade.



In Charles Oliver's terminally bleak Take -- a crime victim's tale about a mother's
worst nightmare, the violent murder of her young child in the heat and confusion
of a supermarket holdup and her obsession with confronting the murderer -- the smell
of desperation pervades the emotion of the film like a third character. In spite of
the sadness that befalls Ana over the course of this sorrowful film, Driver maintains
Ana as a regal presence in this kingdom of gloom. When Ana objects to her son, Jesse's
(Bobby Coleman) grade school principal informing Ana that her son will be shipped out
to a special school and is told after her protests, "I am sorry, but you no longer
have a choice in the matter," it is almost as if an underling is defying the Virgin
Queen.



Ana's counterpart is the hapless killer Saul (Jeremy Renner), her spiritual twin.
Saul inhabits the same blighted landscape of crumbling, worn-out homes, deadening
strip malls, and fetid rust, but Saul is weak and is buffeted by the forces of evil
and unable to cling to his dignity. His old, used car is infested by fast food wrappers
and cups -- the throwaway debris that is Saul's life. Inevitably, Saul is sucked
into a desperate robbery where he fatally confronts Ana and her beloved Jesse. The
tragedy that results shatters them both.



Oliver holds onto a melancholy, decimated atmosphere employing jagged flashbacks.
The color palette is desaturated, the colors of this world finally reduced to weak
duotones as the lives intersect at Saul's robbery. With a controlled cinematic style,
Oliver constructs the lives of his characters with inserts of objects and facial expressions,
pieces of captured time that tell the stories. As a formal exercise in pent-up and
unleashed emotion, Take is intense and difficult to watch. In particular is the climactic
robbery that the film leads up to, which is harrowing, stark, and surprising in its
unchained violence.



As a writer, though, Oliver lets the movie down. Saul's establishing scenes are pure
movie clich�s (the inciting point has a lowlife come to collect $2,000 from Saul
and is warned "If you can't pay, you can't pay" like a Neville Brand gangster from
a '50s film noir). Most egregious of all are a series of flashbacks with Saul (who is
awaiting his execution) and a well-meaning priest. The characters argue philosophical
points ("How does God chose who gets what plan?") as if the film suddenly becomes
an episode of the old Sunday morning religious show The Christophers. And please, let's not talk
about Minnie Driver's alternate-career music bleating out sporadically in the landscape.
The songs are as incongruous as Judy Garland singing "The Theme to Judgment at Nuremberg."
To make matters worse, the concluding confrontation between Ana and Saul comes across as
too pat and unconvincing, given the pure hell that Oliver has put his two characters
through before this moment.



Distractions these may be, but the film still retains power. Driver holds the film
together with her modulated intensity. When she pleads, after the horrific robbery,
insisting someone do something about her son, her control crumbles and she screams
to anyone who will listen, "But he's my son! He's my little boy" with all the powerless
desperation she can muster.



And Oliver, in a single brilliant shot, manages to capture the wretchedness of these
lives that is emblematic of the film itself. Shot looking out from the seedy storage
rental company where Saul works and looking out at Saul's dumpy car, the phone rings m
onotonously and unanswered in the office while Saul, in his car, keeps turning his
key in the ignition trying to get the battery to turn over. Finally giving up, Saul
leaves the car, slams the door, and smashes the window -- Saul taking out the dead-end fe
elings of his annihilated life on his dead-end car.









Eh, you can keep her.



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Wednesday, 9 July 2008

Astralasia

Astralasia   
Artist: Astralasia

   Genre(s): 
Other
   



Discography:


The Seven Pointed Star   
 The Seven Pointed Star

   Year: 1997   
Tracks: 9




The deep ambient-dub and tribal house social unit known as Astralasia fits in with other British electro-hippie mystics such as Eat Static, Banco de Gaia and frequent collaborators Suns of Arqa. After a self-titled debut album on the miniscule Fungus label, Astralasia stirred to the Magick Eye label, which issued as its first gear release the band's review, 1992's The Politics of Ecstasy. Three albums down the road, Astralasia released the compilation Astralogy, and then signed an American deal with the industrial pronounce Cleopatra, which issued The Space Between in late 1996 and then 2 albums in 1997: Septenary Pointed Star and Septet by Seven. One year later, Astralasia released their eighth album in as many years, White Bird.






Darkflight

Darkflight   
Artist: Darkflight

   Genre(s): 
Metal: Death,Black
   



Discography:


Other   
 Other

   Year: 2005   
Tracks: 4


Under The Shadow Of Fear   
 Under The Shadow Of Fear

   Year: 2003   
Tracks: 8




 





George Carlin - Comedy Great George Carlin Dies Aged 71

Christina's Brave Face

Five days after her boyfriend Lee Grivas was found dead of an apparent overdose, Christina Applegate turned up meeting some friends for lunch on Sunday.
Christina Applegate
While the exact cause of Grivas' death won't be known until the toxicology tests come back, Christina's TV series "Samantha Who?" was renewed for a second season.






See Also

Kennedy adds voice to Spain anti-piracy push

IFPI chairman joins French gov't adviser at seminar





MADRID -- Two leading lights in the European fight against digital piracy and illegal P2P file-sharing have thrown their support behind a new Spanish music and movie business campaign to end Spain's black image as the worst piracy offender among the top 10-ranked global markets.
Speaking at a Madrid seminar Thursday, IFPI chairman John Kennedy and French government adviser on digital piracy Dennis Olivennes both said they were confident that Internet service providers and telecom companies would eventually agree to a "legal model," and that the Madrid government will establish a legislative framework to impose an effective ban on digital piracy.
"I cannot believe the French government cares more about French music and creativity than the Spanish government does about Spanish music and creativity," said Kennedy, referring to the plan by president Nicolas Sarkozy to introduce a "three strikes" legislation that would disconnect individual infringers' ISP accounts for habitual piracy.
"Sarkozy said the Internet must not be a high-tech Wild West, but he said it for the French music and film industries, not for John Kennedy and the IFPI," Kennedy said.
"It is the homegrown emerging content industry that needs protection, not Hollywood. I call on Spain not to let India and China wake up to this fact while Spain takes no action," he added.
Kennedy recalled that 95% of tracks downloaded are illegal, and 80% of these illegal tracks are delivered via P2P file-sharing. "Research shows file-sharing damages sales - nobody pretends otherwise," he said, adding that the value of the global music industry had fallen from 25 billion euros ($38.8 billion) in 1999, to 18 billion euros ($27.9 billion) in 2007.
Kennedy said he was more optimistic now that ISPs were beginning to come round to the music industry's point of view on illegal file-sharing. "ISP cooperation is now an increasingly accepted concept - three years ago they would have thrown the idea out of the window. Necessity is the mother of invention."
He said ISPs are the "gatekeepers of the Internet", and added, "this is not about policing Internet, but about ISPs being responsible gatekeepers."
Kennedy said they were many solutions. "There is not one-to-fit-all," he said, noting that the "three strikes and out message gets through to the kids". He said "a graduated response is better than instant action. Disconnection is more effective than imposing fines".
Olivennes, who is the editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, was commissioned last year by Sarkozy to help devise a solution for online piracy. The French government has given its approval to the controversial legislation, and observers say it could be effective from early 2009. "We were extremely lucky with major ISPs and telecom operators [in France] - they were quite open to our suggestions," he said.
When summing up at the conference, Antonio Guisasola, president of Spanish IFPI affiliate Promusicae, said: "Are we going to leave France alone in this war, or join them? Now is the time to get down to work."
Referring to the recently-formed Coalition of Creators and Content Industries in Spain, which includes Promusicae and the event's organizer, authors' and publishers' collecting society SGAE, Guisasola said: "We are going to take this message to the government. And we'll tell the ISPs that they have much to gain by adopting a legal model."

The Whip Hit Glasto With A Double Set

The Whip took time out to talk to Gigwise about their favourite festival today, fresh from a high energy set on the John Peel stage at the earlier-than-scheduled time of 1pm. 


The Mancunian four-piece whipped up considerable excitement from the crowd, despite the fact that most punters were looking slightly fatigued due to it being relatively early on the third and last day of music and sun-drenched revelry.


“When we turned up today it was kind of weird,” drummer Fee admitted of playing their dance music so early in the day, and in an open venue, “we were expecting the same sort of thing as we had last year in the West Dance tent, when it was full.”


Bassist Nathan added of the band’s self-titled dance music, “We’re used to really big, late night gigs, when everyone just wants to dance, but this is still the same thing with playing to that many people, even though it’s in the middle of the day.” 


During the set, lead singer Danny advised the receptive audience that those who wanted to party should catch The Whip’s later set in the West Dance tent at 5.15pm.


The band were also delighted with the weather due to a violent hatred of wellies, with Fee saying, “I hate wellies with a passion.  You can’t dance in wellies and they look crap.  To be at Glastonbury and for the first time to not be wearing wellies is great!”


Festival-goers have been spoilt this weekend with temperatures soaring and clear skies to boot.  The weather shows no signs of changing for the final night festivities tonight.  Stay tuned to Gigwise for reviews in the coming days…




See Also

Maria Muldaur

Maria Muldaur   
Artist: Maria Muldaur

   Genre(s): 
Dance
   Pop
   Rock
   Blues
   Jazz
   



Discography:


Sweet Lovin' Ol' Soul   
 Sweet Lovin' Ol' Soul

   Year: 2005   
Tracks: 12


Love Wants to Dance   
 Love Wants to Dance

   Year: 2004   
Tracks: 9


Sweet Harmony/Open Your Eyes Disc 2   
 Sweet Harmony/Open Your Eyes Disc 2

   Year: 2003   
Tracks: 10


Sweet Harmony/Open Your Eyes Disc 1   
 Sweet Harmony/Open Your Eyes Disc 1

   Year: 2003   
Tracks: 10


Maria Muldaur's Music for Lovers   
 Maria Muldaur's Music for Lovers

   Year: 2000   
Tracks: 11


Meet Me Where They Play The Blues   
 Meet Me Where They Play The Blues

   Year: 1999   
Tracks: 12


Southland of the Heart   
 Southland of the Heart

   Year: 1998   
Tracks: 11


Waitress in a Donut Shop   
 Waitress in a Donut Shop

   Year: 1993   
Tracks: 11


Maria Muldaur   
 Maria Muldaur

   Year: 1993   
Tracks: 11


A Woman Alone With The Blues (Promo)   
 A Woman Alone With The Blues (Promo)

   Year:    
Tracks: 4




Best known for her seductive '70s pop staple "Midnight at the Oasis," Maria Muldaur has since become an acclaimed interpreter of precisely around every bar of American roots music: blues, early jazz, gospel, folk, country, R&B, and so on. While these influences were sure enough gift on her more pop-oriented '70s recordings (as befitting her Greenwich Village folkie past times), Muldaur really came into her have as a true roots music hairstylist during the '90s, when she developed a especial fascination with the 10000 sounds of Louisiana. On the drawing string of well-received albums that followed, Muldaur trussed her eclectic method together with the romanticist sensualism that had underpinned much of her best figure out ever so since the showtime of her career.


Muldaur was innate Maria D'Amato on September 12, 1943, in New York. As a child, she loved country & western music and began tattle it with her auntie at years five; during her teenage old age, she stirred on to R&B, early rock'n'roll & roll, and girl mathematical group pop, and in high school formed a group in the latter style called the Cashmeres. Growing up in the Greenwich Village field, however, she course became spell-bound with its stentorian early-'60s folk revitalisation and soon began participating in jam sessions. She also affected to North Carolina for a spell to study Appalachian-style fiddle with Doc Watson. Back in New York, she was invited to fall in the Even Dozen Jug Band, a gospeler mathematical group that included John Sebastian, David Grisman, and Stefan Grossman; they had secured a recording deal with blueswoman Victoria Spivey's label and she precious them to total some sexuality appeal. The young D'Amato got a crash trend in early blues, particularly the Memphis scene that spawned many of the original jug bands, and counted Memphis Minnie as one of her tribal chief influences.


Elektra Records bought out the Even Dozen Jug Band's take and released their self-titled debut album in 1964; nevertheless, straight to their cite, the band's unwieldy size made them an expensive engagement on the club and coffee shop circuit and they before long disbanded. Many of the members went off to college and, in 1964, D'Amato stirred to Cambridge,MA, home to some other vibrant folks shot. She speedily joined the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and began an affair with isaac Bashevis Singer Geoff Muldaur; the duo eventually married and had a daughter, Jenni, world Health Organization would later get a vocalizer in her possess right. When the Kweskin band broke up in 1968, the duo stayed with their label (Reprize) and began recording together as Geoff & Maria Muldaur. They stirred to Woodstock, NY, to take reward of the burgeoning music setting thither and issued two albums -- 1970's Pottery Pie and 1971's Sweet-scented Potatoes -- in front Geoff departed in 1972 to form Better Days with Paul Butterfield, a act that signaled non only when the last of the couple's musical partnership, only their wedlock as intimately.


Initially diffident about her musical future, Muldaur's friends bucked up her to follow a solo calling, as did Reprise chairwoman Mo Ostin. Muldaur went to Los Angeles and recorded her self-titled debut album in 1973, marking a massive Top Ten pop hit with "Midnight at the Oasis." Showcasing Muldaur's playfully sulphurous crooning, the Middle Eastern-themed song became a pop radio raw material for eld to come and besides made academic session guitarist Amos Garrett a frequent Muldaur quisling for eld to fall. Muldaur's side by side album, 1974's Waitress in a Donut Shop, featured a hit remake of her Even Dozen-era theme song air, "I'm a Woman." Three more than Reprise albums followed o'er the course of the '70s, broadly with the cream of the L.A. session crop, just besides with more and more diminishing results.


About 1980, Muldaur became a reborn Christian; she recorded a live album of traditional gospel songs, Gospel Nights, for the littler Takoma judge in 1980, and touched into full-fledged CCM with 1982's On that point Is a Love, recorded for the Christian judge Myrrh. However, this new steering did not raise permanent, and for 1983's Sweet and Slow, Muldaur recorded an album of jazz and blues standards (many with longtime age group Dr. John on forte-piano) that created precisely the mode its title suggested. 1986's showy Transbluecency won a year-end critics' prize from the New York Times. Muldaur spent the rest of the '80s touring, often with Dr. John, and too began performing in musicals, appearing in productions of Pump Boys and Dinettes and The Pirates of Penzance. In 1990, she recorded an album of greco-Roman nation songs, On the Sunny Side, that was specifically geared toward children; it proved a surprising succeeder, both critically and among its intended audience.


Part divine by Dr. John's New Orleans obsessions, Muldaur signed to the rootsy Black Top judge in 1992 and cut Pelican State Love Call, which established her as a versatile stylist well-versed in the blues, gospel, New Orleans R&B, Memphis blues, and soul. The record album won wide acclaim as one of the charles Herbert Best works of her career, offering a more organic, stripped access than her '70s pop albums, and became the best-selling record in the Black Top catalogue. Her 1994 followup, Get together Me at Midnite, was nominative for a W.C. Handy Award. Muldaur side by side cut a jazzier outing for the Canadian roots label Stony Plain, 1995's Jazzabelle. She later on sign-language with Telarc and returned to her previous steering, making her pronounce debut with 1996's well-received Fanning the Flames. 1998's Southland of the Heart was a less bluesy field day recorded in Los Angeles and was released the same year as a second gear children's album, Swingin' in the Rain, a ingathering of sway tunes and pop novelties from the '30s and '40s. 1999's Touch Me Where They Play the Blues was intended to be a collaboration with West Coast blues pianissimo legend Charles Brown, simply Brown's wellness problems prevented him from contributory much (merely one vocal on "Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You"); hence, the project became more of a tribute.


Muldaur touched back to Stony Plain for 2001's Richland Woman Blues, a tribute to early blues artists (particularly women) inspired by a travel to to Memphis Minnie's tomb. Featuring a variety of special guest instrumentalists, Richland Woman Blues was nominative for a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. The children's record album Brute Crackers in My Soup: The Songs of Shirley Temple appeared in 2002. The side by side year saw the release of Fair sex Alone with the Blues, a ingathering of songs associated with Peggy Lee, on Telarc Records. Love Wants to Dance followed in 2004, too on Telarc. The for the most part acoustic Sweet Lovin' Ol' Soul was issued by Stony Plain in 2005, followed by Spunk of Mine: Love Songs of Bob Dylan on Telarc in 2006. Songs for the Young at Heart was besides released in 2006. The following year, the lowest in the prepare of tierce albums that nonrecreational protection to female the blues singers of the twenties through forties, Naughty, Bawdy and Blue (the other two were Richland Woman Blues and Sugared Lovin' Ol' Soul), came knocked out.





Big Brother's Sylvia Stands Up For Evicted Dennis

Stormy Six

Stormy Six   
Artist: Stormy Six

   Genre(s): 
Other
   



Discography:


Un biglietto del tram   
 Un biglietto del tram

   Year: 1975   
Tracks: 9