Category: Artists (Page 149 of 262)

Man-about-MySpace: Pac-Man fever

Welcome to the first of a series of blog posts featuring great stuff spotted on MySpace Music. It can be good, bad, and ugly. Or, as we’re about to explain, worse.


The NFL’s investigating whether or not
Pac-Man’s shield logo infringes on league trademarks.

Poor Pac-Man Jones. He goes on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel to share his side of the story–translated loosely, in a few words, “I am not really remembering what Mr. Commissioner Goodell told me about keeping my nose clean. What was it he told me, again?”–and yet he just can’t seem to hold on to the headlines to save his life, because Mike Vick’s antihero PR machine is outflanking him at every turn.

But he persists.

Following in the steps of pro sports miscreants-cum-rappers Jim “Punky QB” McMahon, Allen Iverson, and Ron Artest, Pac-Man’s livin’ da streetz life with his National Street League rap label, a collaboration (coll-abortion?) with producer/henchman Spoaty. The raps are about–you guessed it–spending lots of money. “I spent a hundred grand all in one night!” they sing on the almost completely mindless “Yah Nah Mean.”

Just like Pac-Man allegedly did in Vegas last winter after the NBA All-Star game, when the most notorious of his myriad suspicious activities went down. Witnesses claim Pac-Man took nearly that much money into a strip club and was “making it rain,” euphemism for throwing dollar bills around.

Anyway, maybe if you’re a big rap fan and someone like Pac-Man is singing about poppin’ rubber bands off bundles of $100 bills, he comes across with some sort of street cred. Unlike a lot of rappers setting their stories to a rump-thumping beat, you know for sure that Pac-Man’s living his. The music doesn’t sound very good to us, but give Pac-Man some time. If he pops a few more rubber bands and buys some serious studio time, Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson prove that throwing the best technology at a recording really can help make a big hit, no matter what you’re starting out with. Of course, if he’s making records, that means he’s not working. And if he’s not working, the Titans certainly aren’t passing out more rubber-banded bundles of Benjamins.

Power pop has been berry, berry good to Eric Carmen…

Yes, that’s the headline you never saw for my chat with former Raspberries frontman Eric Carmen…and for good reason, as it’s quite awful.

There was a brief period during the 1970s when the funniest rock-related one-liner involved a teenager asking, “Hey, did you hear that Paul McCartney used to be in a band before Wings?” It’s a joke that isn’t nearly as funny today, what with Wings having been relegated to little more than footnote status in McCartney’s career timeline, but if you lived and died by the FM dial during the ’70s, you can still see the humor in it. In turn, you might also have been really amused in the late ’80s, when kids were thrilling to Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes” and “Make Me Lose Control” without having any inkling that, a decade and a half earlier, he had been fronting one of the definitive power pop bands of all time.

Carmen and his fellow ‘Berries — Wally Bryson, Jim Bonfanti and Dave Smalley — were staples of the Billboard singles chart from 1972 to 1974, but creative struggles led to line-up changes and the band’s eventual dissolution. The 21st century, however, has found the guys getting back together and doing some live dates, one of which – a performance at L.A.’s House of Blues on Oct. 21, 2005 – has recently been released on Rykodisc as Live on the Sunset Strip. After a few scheduling conflicts and one missed opportunity (which was totally this writer’s fault), Bullz-Eye had a chance to speak with Carmen recently, and we quizzed him about the legacy of The Raspberries, his solo career and its notable difference to the sound he’d helped forge with the band, and how he can’t help but empathize with Kelly Clarkson these days.

Check out the interview here.

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