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Archive for January, 2012

Photo courtesy of Nasty Little Man

Jack White’s kicking it solo these days. Blunderbuss, his debut solo album, is now set for an April 24 release, and we finally have an idea of what it’s going to sound like in the form of “Love Interruption.” It’s a super stripped-down piece of music that’s unmistakably Jack White, without sounding much like his work with the White Stripes or the Raconteurs (or Loretta Lynn or the Dead Weather or Insane Clown Posse or Wanda Jackson or Stephen Colbert).

Built off a simple melody line and some basic acoustic guitar chords, “Love Interruption” finds White with a female backing vocalist, singing with his voice impassioned about what he wants out of love. We can’t help but wonder: is the title a nod to his now ex-wife, model/musician Karen Elson?

While the sound doesn’t relish in his rock-on-’roids past, there’s still a formula that so many White Stripes songs were built off of present here: the mantra-like repetition of key phrases, starting as lines sung quietly and evolving into Jack singing the words like his life depends on them. The difference here is that with the bigger rock flourishes contained (there aren’t even drums — all of the rhythm is carried in the acoustic guitar), the proceedings feel more intimate than anything White’s participated in since he and Meg were putting out music on Sympathy For The Record Industry. “I won’t let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me,” he sings in the song’s chorus. And we believe him. Nothing interrupts this dude when it comes to recording something.

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Dance on eBay:

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A few nice dance images I found:

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Video Rating: 4 / 5

Image courtesy of Facebook, "My First Hardcore Song"

Not every mother of a famous child is a stage mom — that overbearing, helicoptering phenomenon that has made television shows like Toddlers and Tiaras the horrible carnivals of schadenfreude that we so hate to enjoy. At least that’s not the case with Brisbane, Australia, resident Kristina McDonald, whose 8-year-old daughter Juliet shot to web stardom the other week after her video, “My First Hardcore Song,” hit the YouTubes.

The jam, which is mostly about Juliet’s dog “Robert,” and its accompanying music video has been viewed almost 17 million times since McDonald posted it to YouTube on January 19. In the meantime, according to McDonald, Juliet has kept her cool — mostly because she has little idea just how famous she has become. And her parents aim to keep it that way. Nope, little J is no aspiring Rebecca Black — just another 8-year-old kid who loves her dog and Johnny Cash.

Check out our Q&A with Juliet’s mom below and make sure to pass it along to any aspiring pageant moms you know.

Can you tell me how you guys ended up deciding to make a music video?

Juliet was staying over at my friend’s house and he’s a music producer. He thought it would be cute if they made a little song to show me when I picked up Juliet that afternoon. When I got there to pick her up they played me the song. Oh my gosh, it was so cute. I said to Rob Sharpe who made the song with Juliet, ‘I’ll made a little film clip so we can show all our friends and family how fun the song is.’

So a few days later I was in the park with Juliet and we spent a tiny minute filming the footage around the park and then I came home and edited it up and put it up on YouTube. And, yeah, showed my friends, and they started showing their friends, and that went to major, hardcore bands in Australia — they put her on their Facebook. This was all in within 30 minutes. Within three or four hours, my inbox had over 1,000 emails.

Do you have a background in video editing?

I’m an aspiring photographer and when I got my Canon 5D it had the option for doing video. So I started playing around with it, shooting some clips of Juliet like the ones I put up on YouTube. Nothing very serious. I’ve only probably made four or five videos before. So, no, I just really enjoy it. It’s fun.

And is Juliet a singer?

She’s been involved in music theater since she was about four years old and ballet and things like that. But, no, not anything like crazy — we don’t have her in singing lessons or anything like that. It’s just — I don’t know, she just does school choir and things like that.

Does she like hardcore music?

Not specifically. It’s always been in our house, though, because I enjoy the music quite a lot. She knows what it’s about. But like in her room on her iPod she plays a lot of Jessie J and Johnny Cash — very easy listening.

The song that she wrote — how long did that take?

I think her whole part — the song, it took Rob Sharpe about an hour. He has a studio. So he just wrote it and recorded it on instruments and then put it into this little computer. And then he got Juliet to come in and it took her about 15 minutes. They made up the song as they went.

So did Juliet write the ‘get your two-step on’ line?

Juliet didn’t make up that specific line. Two-stepping is a form of dance that’s very popular within the hardcore scene. Rob thought it would be funny if she said, ‘Get your two-step on,’ because if you know hardcore music, you probably know what two-step is. So it’s just very funny to hear a little girl telling you to go two-step. It’s a crazy way of dancing and if you’ve ever witnessed it, it’s all very crazy. It’s cool.

You all got the website and T-shirts online pretty quickly.

The first night it went just crazy and so we’re like, ‘OK, we’ll put the song on iTunes because we don’t want people to rip it and just be sharing it — like a bad version.’ Next morning we kept getting phone calls from a friend of ours who does web design. He was like, ‘You really need to make a website or something that people can go to because people will be interested. And if you’re not going to do it, then someone else is going to and you’ll get zero profit from it.’ So we thought we should do something like that and then that way we can make sure that all the money goes back to Juliet for her trust fund, which she’s had since she was a baby.

Oh my gosh, a week ago today we were just eating cornflakes and being normal people. And now all this has happened. So it wasn’t any kind of sinister act of trying to make a viral video or a profiteering exercise. It’s been crazy.

So is she going to do an album?

No, she’s only eight, so we want to make sure she’s in school and doing little 8-year-old things and not having to worry about anything like this in the world. So, she’s only seen what we’ve monitored. Like we’ve watched clips of the covers people have done. We’ve watched it, and then if it’s OK and appropriate we’ll show Juliet and she thinks that’s all very cute. But people have gone to the effort to do that. Same with all the news stations. Every news station was having stories about her. I think she only watched one of those. She’s got a bit blase about it because we’re not really letting her see the full extent of everything that’s happening. We just want her to be a little 8-year-old girl.

I think most of the feedback has been pretty positive. It’s like a Rebecca Black situation.

She gets compared to that. It’s like, ‘Wait, that was the first time she’s ever been in a recording studio to record a song herself.’ It’s about a dog.

So what do you think of this huge response? Is it surprising or baffling to you?

Yeah, it’s a massive compliment that everyone gets to see how cool my little girl is. I’ve always thought she was little star, now I suppose everyone else does, too. It’s very overwhelming. I’ve never put up a video on YouTube trying to gain millions of ‘Likes.’ It was more so just to show my friends and family. My family all lives quite a bit away and we don’t get to go home to see them very often, so it’s a good way to keep in touch with them.

So what do you and your husband do when you’re not making your kid into a star?

I’m a nanny and a photographer. And then my husband, he’s in the music industry. He has a band himself. It’s a very middle-of-the-road Australian family.

What’s his band called? Is it hardcore?

No, the band is called Bright Lights. It’s more kind of like love songs for me.

What other things does Juliet like to do — other than sing hardcore songs and jump on trampolines?

What does she like to do…? She likes… She loves LEGO. She loves eating. [laughs] What does she like to do? She likes to put on little shows for us and things like that. Acting and performing shows for us. We have to buy tickets to see her; it’s very cute. She loves hanging out with Robert [her dog], Robert is her best little friend in the whole entire world. She likes going to parks and… I don’t know, just what 8-year-olds like.

So you don’t seem like you’re like a stage mom at all.

No, even though all this stuff is happening she’s still had to do all her homework. Get her theater practice. There’s no stopping in this household. The whole routine has stayed the same. She’s only 8, we don’t want her to be having to worry about anything besides having fun at school. As much as we get all these requests for her to release another song or another video or release an album — it was never intended for that. We don’t want to take it there.

So she might be a one-hit wonder?

I’d say that for this part of her life, that’s her little 15 minutes and when she’s 18 and she’s finished high school she can go out do whatever she wants. If she wants fame, then she can find it then, but, no. While Mommy’s here, she’s going to do her math homework.

MTV Hive

Sharon Van Etten performs at the Bumbershoot Festival, Seattle, Wash., September 2011. Photo: Timothy Hiatt/Getty Images

Each week, Lizzy Goodman guides you through the dirty streets of rock ‘n’ roll.

If the men of Brooklyn’s indie rock scene had a little sister it would be Sharon Van Etten. She’s collaborated with Bon Iver, Antlers and the National, and legend has it that once, when she tried to quit music and move home with her mom in Jersey, TV On the Radio’s Kyp Malone was the guy who talked her out of it. It’s good she stayed. Over the last few years Van Etten has released two strong albums (2009’s Because I Was In Love and 2010’s Epic) and is now mere weeks away from putting out her third, Tramp, which was produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner and recorded in his studio.

“Each note creates a new crack and at moments of almost crescendo it feels like the whole thing is going to splinter releasing all kinds of unknown and exciting new noise.”

It was with curiosity that I showed up to see Van Etten play at the Mercury Lounge on a recent frigid winter night. I’m intrigued by her, but I can’t say that I totally get it. So far I’ve been as interested in figuring out why the Brooklyn rock scene’s key figureheads put a collective welcoming and protective arm around her as in listening to her music. Which is not to say the songs aren’t good. They very obviously are. Van Etten writes and sings elegiac, oddball seepers the simple lyrics of which stick with you long after the YouTube tab is closed, but so what? Another smart, interior, singer songwriter from Brooklyn who likes the harmonium? Is that it?

The wind outside was so brutal it created a vacuum and the Merc’s front door made a sucking sound as I opened it and stepped inside. At first I thought maybe someone had just collapsed and I’d caught the crowd of 250 in that post-disaster, pre-action couple of seconds before they’d all jump into action. The place was that full and that still, everyone staring at one thing just a few feet in front of them, which I couldn’t quite make out. The thing, it turns out, is this woman, Van Etten, round and delicate and onstage holding the audience in a trance as she toggled from taut, muted song to self-depreciating interstitial banter (“I’m still learning how to hold it” she joked of what looked like a Ukulele) and back again.

Among the assembled were key members of the New York bloggerati, but it was the glam factor in Van Etten’s fans that really shocked me. Statuesque women in architectural earrings, shaggy haired brunettes with pink lips in fitted leather jackets worn over chunky extra-long sleeved sweaters. Aspiring pinup girls in giant vintage furs and aspiring American Apparel models in blanket-like Pendleton coats. These are the adorers of this diminutive young woman whose aesthetic is that of a bookish schoolgirl from a good Main Line family, all rumpled sweater-and-blouse sets, and thick tights.

“Let’s all pretend we’re happy,” the singer said, easing into another bleak number off the new record. Listening to her play is like watching a rock show from behind a thick wall of ice. Each note creates a new crack and at moments of almost crescendo it feels like the whole thing is going to splinter releasing all kinds of unknown and exciting new noise. But then it doesn’t. And yet the experience is totally compelling, like you are cheering on a come-from-behind underdog in the race of his or her life.

I don’t know if Sharon Van Etten will ever really step out and own up to her obvious talent. I don’t know for how long she will shroud herself behind these gauzy songs, letting her band take us just to the bring of spilling over into the expressive potential they ask for. But I do now better understand why all the cool Brooklyn boys are into this girl: Rooting for her feels like a moral cause, like a world in which she fully finds herself would be better for us all.

MTV Hive

Dance on eBay:

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A few nice dance images I found:

50 Cent in 2007. Photo: Johnny Nunez/WireImage

At this point in 50 Cent’s career, the most apt descriptor to put in front of his name is “part-time rapper and full-time Tweeter.” @50cent is one of the music industry’s most followed and prolific Twitter accounts, and the most vocal of his 5.6 million Tweeps seem to be females hypnotized by some sort of digital-lure, with countless cyber-groupies sending Curtis Jackson their almost-nude photos and explicit sexual offers, not worrying a lick about their husbands/boyfriends/girlfriends/children/bosses stumbling upon the tweets.

Fiddy, of course, loves the attention and frequently retweets these messages. But we at Hive have been wondering: with 5.6 million people vying for 50’s attention, how does he choose which ones to scoop up from Twitter’s slurry?

We recently conducted a thorough analysis to decode the ever-expanding, horrifically graphic, grammar-deficient world of Twitter-flirting with 50 Cent. We scoured Tweetstats.com to come up with his key Twitter musings and compared that to the women that appear on the Tumblr FiddysBiddies, which catalogs the best of 50 Cent’s Twitter flirtations. What follows is some insight into the make-up of Fiddy’s Biddies, and shall serve as a comprehensive look at what it takes to earn a retweet from the complex Casanova known as 50 Cent.

Activity

At the time of Hive’s deep dive, Fiddy had amassed 6,631 tweets, an average of nine per day over the last three years. Historically, his Twitter account is most active on Saturdays, so if you’re hoping to get your cyber-flirt on with him, that’s your best bet. If you do happen to tweet him on another day, broken down by hour he’s most active between 9pm and 2am. See graphs:

Next, we examined some of @50cent’s most-used words to see how they correlated with various flirtation methods. Below, we have laid out the trends and patterns that emerged.

Laughter

50 Cent has a tough exterior, but like Shakira’s hips, the facts don’t lie: he’s a giggler at heart. LOL is the most common word on his feed, showing up 1,239 times. When you throw in “funny,” “hahaha” and “LMAO,” roughly one quarter of his tweets are comprised of laughter. Thus, if a Tweet appeals to 50 Cent’s funny bone, it is 25% more likely to be retweeted by the man himself. The following exchange is representative of this effect:

Raunch

Of course, in lieu of the funny bone you could just aim for the erogenous zone. The words “ass,” “fuck,” “sexy” and the like appear in roughly 10% of Tweets by @50cent. He’s been known to reply to the most suggestive Tweeters with instructions about inserting a certain item into their mouths, or telling the woman to fondle herself. But many of his Biddies are just as filthy as he is. See below:

Love

It’s not all vile cyber-smut, we promise! Here’s your palate cleanser: The man who rapped “I’m into havin’ sex, I ain’t into makin’ love” is actually a romantic. “Love” is the fourth most common word on his feed with 538 mentions. Fiddy often retweets women who profess their love, propose, or offer to take care of him. And if you have children, it seems that won’t scare him off, which is … nice? What this all means is that you don’t have to offer sexual services or show skin to become a Fiddy Biddie.

…though that strategy certainly works, too.

Flattery

Like any powerful man, 50 Cent wants to hear how great he is. But at least he’s gracious about it — “thanks” and “thank” appear in 6% of his tweets. So go ahead and flatter him; comment on his fantastic musical oeuvre, his impeccable physique, his witty banter, or stunning good looks:

Conclusions

After rigorous scientific analysis, Hive has concluded that your chances of becoming one of Fiddy’s Biddies are optimized when your Tweet exhibits at least three of the following characteristics: eroticism, romanticism, praise, humor, and skin. Basically, this:

However, you could just dispense with all this statistical optimization crap and get right to the point:

Images via Fiddysbiddies.tumblr.com

MTV Hive