Congratulations, PSY: You can officially consider yourself a two-hit wonder.
It took nearly two months for the South Korean rapper’s breakthrough single, “Gangnam Style,” to garner 100 million views on YouTube. His follow-up, “Gentleman,” achieved the same feat in just four days — and a mere week after its YouTube debut, the second video has risen to the top of the video sharing site’s most-viewed chart. In second place? “Gangnam Style,” naturally.
The sun never sets on Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.
The rap du jour duo has dropped the video for their other Top 10 single, “Can’t Hold Us” (which currently sits at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100), and it looks like they’ve packed a suitcase full of thrift-shop threads for a trip around the globe.
Of course, they also brought along the song’s featured artist Ray Dalton, whom you might remember from last Sunday’s MTV Movie Awards, where he joined Big Mac and RL onstage for their live performance.
The clip — directed by Jason Koenig, Jon Jon Augustavo, and Lewis — shows the three Seattle dudes crisscrossing the map, dropping by locales as near as Los Angeles and as far as Middle-earth New Zealand.
Check out the “Can’t Hold Us” video below, and let us know what you think:
Image Credit: Christopher Polk/Getty Images
Will they or won’t they? As the sun set on Saturday night, one question hung over the Coachella audience like a cliffhanger in an ’80s dramedy.
Would Daft Punk join Phoenix at the end of the latter’s headlining main stage set? And if so, would there be pyramids, robots, and lasers, or just two Frenchmen pumping their fists in promotion of their forthcoming record?
The evidence stacked up in favor of a cameo from the famed Parisian electronic duo, whose 2006 Coachella set was widely considered the match that sparked the current mania for electronic music. For one, both members of Daft Punk were reportedly in attendance. On Friday, the festival main stage buzzed over a trailer hyping the group’s new record. Plus, there’s a long history of bonhomie between the two groups, including a 2010 Daft Punk pop-up appearance at Phoenix’s Madison Square Garden show.
Instead, we got R. Kelly. The 46-year old Chicago R&B lothario materialized towards the end of Phoenix’s set to play an abbreviated three song medley of “Bump n’ Grind,” “Ignition (Remix),” and “I’m a Flirt,” wearing an unbuttoned black shirt, blue jeans, and what appeared to be a crown.
Suddenly, the Empire Polo grounds transformed from a meticulous 80s synth-pop party into a gyrating outdoor boudoir. To say it was weird was an understatement.
Happy Friday video: During a recent concert in Brisbane, Bruuuuuuuuuuce invited onstage a cute kid from the audience, wearing a Born in the U.S.A.-inspired getup, complete with a red cap in one of his back pockets to sing a few bars of “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day,” and join him for a patented knee slide. The whole thing was captured on video, so the boy’s g’day could be enjoyed by all. Watch and feel your heart grow three sizes: READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images; Kevin Kane/Getty Images
Is One Direction copying the Backstreet Boys’ style — and their titles?
In the 1990′s, boy-band feuds were a dime a dozen — back when TRL was filled with screaming girls who wanted nothing more than to be serenaded by the likes of ‘N Sync, Backstreet Boys, and 98 Degrees. But today, TRL is no more, and boy bands aren’t nearly the fad they used to be.
That hasn’t stopped the multiplatinum U.K. X Factor breakouts One Direction from making a whole new generation of young girls scream at ear-piercing volumes. But is One Direction borrowing a little too blatantly from the still-active Backstreet Boys?
When BSB’s AJ McClean stopped by TMZ last year, he wasn’t shy about expressing his opinion on One Direction’s eerily familiar lyrics. Check out the video below:
And now, One Direction’s Liam Payne has tweeted that the official title of the band’s upcoming movie, which was known as 1D3D, has now changed to This Is Us:
guyssss so proud to announce that our upcoming movie is officially titled ‘This Is Us’! Cant wait for you guys to see itttt!!
— Liam Payne (@Real_Liam_Payne) March 18, 2013
Fans of the Backstreet Boys will quickly recognize that as the name of BSB’s most recent album and tour. Could this be the next boy-band feud in the making? And if the answer is yes, whose side are you on?
Read more:
Justin Bieber, One Direction, and Taylor Swift top list of Radio Disney Music Awards nominees: EXCLUSIVE
One Direction’s Harry Styles tattoos large butterfly across his chest. That’s what makes him beautiful. — PHOTO
PopWatch Confessional: Stuck on a 90′s feud — A Backstreet Boys fan talks ‘N Sync
Depeche Mode
Delta Machine
ROCK (Columbia)
How is it that Depeche Mode are one of the few stadium-filling bands from the ‘80s still standing?
It isn’t just that Dave Gahan, Martin Gore, and Andy Fletcher remain upright, though that is impressive considering Gahan’s well-documented struggles with substance abuse. The real feat is that the Depeche Mode sound—obsessively constructed monoliths of synth-based, salvation-obsessed twitchiness—still feels fresh 13 albums into their career.
From another angle, it’s obvious: Most of the time they’ve been so far ahead of the curve that even their most pedestrian output sounds inventive, and you need only look at their followers—from Nine Inch Nails to Frank Ocean—to see that game recognizes game.
Delta Machine is the strongest album the group has put out this century, brushing up against the locked-in grooves of the group’s late-‘80s crest that began with 1984’s Some Great Reward and ran through the revolutionary classic Violator in 1990. Much of that credit should probably go to collaborator Christoffer Berg, who has previously worked with Swedish electro-terrorists the Knife; he lends a long-lost toughness that runs through much of Delta, especially the end-of-days bass loop that underscores “Secret to the End” and the insistent pounding of “Soft Touch / Raw Nerve.”
In the wrong hands, those instincts would be pushed to the point of abrasiveness, but like any goth greats, Gahan and Gore recognize the need for equal parts candy and razor blades, so the songcraft and melodic flourishes on Delta Machine are as strong as the sonic boundary-pushing. And Gahan still has one of the most darkly sweet baritones in rock, despite the cracks that have snuck into his upper register; some of the gauzier tracks, like the brooding “Alone,” start out drab until Gahan brings the honey, at which point they suddenly shift into deeply compelling technicolor.
Like David Bowie, DM inexplicably chose one of the more bloodless tracks from their big comeback album as the first single, and though Gahan is a fine balladeer, the two songs that find the BPM knob turned way down (the deep-but-plodding “Heaven” and the drippy “The Child Inside”) are digital quicksand. Experience has taught them to finish strong, which is why the stomping, anthemic “Soothe My Soul” and the bluesy, explosive “Goodbye” end Delta Machine on a hallucinatory high note.
The former is especially brilliant at expressing everything that Depeche Mode does well: Sharp rhythmic undercurrent, snarling guitars, paranoid-sounding keyboard hiccups, and Gahan bellowing “I’m coming for you.” Depeche Mode are the definitive synth-rock sharks: They’re survivors, and they can’t stop charging forward. A-
Best Tracks “Soothe My Soul” / “My Little Universe”
Delta Machine is now streaming here.
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The Twitterers are tweeting, breakfast tacos are being eaten, and Prince is packing his bags for Texas — that’s right, SXSW’s music conference has begun.
From today through Sunday, an army of artists big and small will be flooding Austin for another year of music-fueled revelry, music-affiliated branding, and, if they’re lucky, some actual music.
The boldface names are plenty — everyone from Depeche Mode to Green Day to Kendrick Lamar are scheduled to perform this week — but the true spirit of SXSW is still the up-and-coming indie acts. With that in mind, we’ve put together a Spotify playlist of some the most exciting and anticipated artists playing this year, from the mysterious hypno-pop duo Rhye (pictured above) to the brash garage-rock upstarts the Palma Violets.
Take a listen to our full SXSW playlist below:
Nashville (by way of New Orleans) native Brooke Waggoner spent last year working for a rather mysterious boss. The classically-trained pianist was called in to jam on some tracks for another Music City transplant: Jack White.
“I got a call one day to stop by and play some piano on a couple of things,” Waggoner said. “I had no idea what it was for or what Jack was working on. I was literally shoved into a room with three other girls I had never met. We just started playing, and Jack was there and the chemistry was really good. We just kept coming back every day, and about six weeks into it, we realized, ‘Oh, this is Jack’s solo record!’”
Those sessions blossomed into membership in a proper band called the Peacocks, the all-female back-up group during White’s huge tour for his solo debut Blunderbuss. “I had never played with that many females before,” Waggoner admitted. “It was really unique and cool. Honestly, I don’t really ever think about gender in music, but it was an interesting scenario to focus on gender in order to create mystique within the bands.” READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Simon Emmett; RUKES
The Scottish producer-wunderkind Calvin Harris is set to release his Ellie Goulding collab “I Need Your Love” as the next single from his breakthrough album 18 Months; you can check out a remix by rising London dubstepper Jacob Plant exclusively here.
When Harris isn’t trapped inside a neon matrix at the VMAs, he’s working pretty much nonstop at the business of being an international superstar, producing, and touring (he still has a handful of spring dates coming up Stateside).
And he recently took home a Grammy for Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” and his own Florence Welch-featuring single is nearing platinum status, so it stands to reason that this Goulding number will be whomp-whomping soon through a subwoofer near you.
Check out the official Jacob Plant remix of Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding’s “I Need Your Love” below:
Looking to delve deeper into this year’s crop of on-everybodies’-mixtapes bands? Atlas Genius is an excellent starting point (and not just because they’re so close to the beginning of the alphabet.)
For the second entry in our new monthly Let the Buzz Begin! video series, Australian sibling act Atlas Genius dropped by EW HQ to say hello and give us a special acoustic performance of their breakthrough single “Trojans.”
The band, fresh off the release of their debut album When It Was Now, are currently embarking on a jaunt through North America, including their first-ever stop at SXSW this spring.
Check out EW’s conversation with brothers Michael and Keith Jeffery (pictured above), and an unplugged performance of their single “Trojans” in the videos below:
