Category: Artists (Page 124 of 262)

WTF?! Flashback – Chevy Chase

February 18, 2008 / Captain Capm

Chevy Chase

By 1980, Chevy Chase had long left “Saturday Night Live,” got into an infamous backstage brawl with his replacement Bill Murray, and started working in earnest in Hollywood, cranking out hit films. However, he also decided to record and release this oddball self-titled album on Arista that year. Chase, no stranger to recording music (he was once briefly a drummer for Steely Dan and released an album with psychedelic group Chamaeleon Church in 1968), worked with stalwarts such as Tom Scott on this little number, featuring song parodies and lots and lots of drug-fueled jokes.

While some of those jokes are indeed funny, such as the album closing “Rapper’s Plight,” the parody of “I Shot The Sheriff” featuring such lines as “I shot the sheriff / After toking all the PCP” are about as lame as they read. The Alvin and the Chimpunks style of the cover of “Let It Be” is completely fucking stupid as well. Yet there are some laughs to be had in the Barry White send up “Never Gonna Sing for You” and zero laughs to be found in the parody of Randy Newman’s “Short People” and the Donna Summer spoof “Love to Have My Baby” in which Chase is seemingly having an extended orgasm in falsetto, but is really just pretending to be a woman going into labor and giving birth. Yeah. Not so funny.

I wound up finding this album at a record store for $3.99 in the cutout bin when I was in the seventh or eighth grade. I remember taking it home and thinking I could never play it for my mom with all that drug-related shit on it. She wound up asking me if it was funny and if I enjoyed it. I told her I did, even though I thought the same bulk of it was lame that I do now. God only knows why Chevy made this monstrosity. Something tells me it was that ego of his that still seems to be in full effect these days even when he’s trying to play a newer, humbler Chevy. Well, that and all the drugs. Kids, this is proof positive that cocaine can really fuck you up and cause you to have lapses in judgement and make poor business decisions. Enjoy.

Artists

From Across The Pond: Scouting for Girls, “Elvis Ain’t Dead”

February 15, 2008 / Will Harris

Might as well keep the pop love flowing, right? Last week, I spotlighted The Hoosiers, and while Scouting for Girls haven’t gone the collect-’em-all route for their self-titled debut, they’ve certainly got just as many hooks to their name. Like all the best bands these days, they found success via a substantial internet buzz – in this case, via IntoMusic – and you can easily hear why they’ve received the attention that they have. Why can’t the kids in the States get into music this good…?

Alternative, Artists, From Across the Pond, Pop, Rock, Videos

Less Talk, More Music: Paul Anka on “The Late Show with David Letterman”

February 12, 2008 / Will Harris

Sure, it reads as a novelty – Paul Anka does swing covers of mainstream and alt-rock hits – but if you’ve ever actually heard Rock Swings, you know it holds up for the long haul as an instant party in convenient CD form. Rather than take the easy way out, most of the tracks have been dramatically rearranged to work within Anka’s concept, but if you’re convinced that he couldn’t possibly accomplish it with one of the most anthemic songs of the 1990s (if not all of music history), take a listen and enjoy being proven wrong:

Alternative, Artists, Jazz, Less Talk, More Music, Pop, Rock, Songs, Videos

Chalk up another entry for future “Proof that the Grammy Awards Are Out of Touch with Reality” lists

February 11, 2008 / Will Harris

Give the Grammy Awards credit for getting a few things right this year: they gave Amy Winehouse the Curse of the Best New Artist (not that she hasn’t already put herself on the fast train to Hell), hooked her up with Best Female Pop Performance and Record of the Year and Song of the Year for “Rehab,” and gave Back to Black the award for Best Vocal Pop Album. Somewhere between all those Winehouse wins, they even let Vince Gill take home the Best Country Album for the sprawling masterwork that is These Days.

Gill also got in one of the two best zingers of the night after he was presented his award by Ringo Starr. “I just got an award presented to me by a Beatle,” he said, then pointed at a specific individual in the audience and asked, “Have you had that happen yet, Kanye?”

(The other great line, by the way, was Prince throwing off the snarky comment about Alicia Keys’ virtual duet with Ol’ Blue Eyes, saying, “Frank Sinatra looked good for 150, didn’t he?”)

But, c’mon, people: whether it’s a good album or not, you’re just setting yourself up for ridicule by giving the Album of the Year award to Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters. It’s just Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature all over again…

Alternative, Artists, Country, External Music, Jazz, News, Pop, Rock, Songs

From Across the Pond: The Hoosiers, “Goodbye Mr. A”

February 9, 2008 / Will Harris

You’d be well within your rights to be skeptical about the quality of music put out by a band that releases their debut album in four different color schemes. (Collect ’em all, kids!) As it happens, however, The Hoosiers – a London-based trio that’s 2/3 British and 1/3 Swedish – are writing and releasing some awesome pop music. Someone suggested that their tunes approximate what The Feeling would sound like if they actually let loose once in awhile, and I can hear that. Dig their biggest UK hit to date: “Goodbye Mr. A.” Our good friend David Medsker will, within mere seconds after hitting “play,” understand exactly why I felt obligated to avoid the formalities and offer the song immediate inclusion in the WillPop 101 syllabus…yes, it’s just that damned poppy…and to go with a superhero-inspired video to boot? Well, that’s just an extra layer of sugar-sweet icing on the WillPop cake.

(FYI, the last time I embedded the video, it was deleted from YouTube, so if the same happens with this one, then this official non-embeddable version is right here.

Artists, From Across the Pond, Pop, Songs, Videos