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I listened to hip-hop, but only on my headphones—you couldn’t spin that stuff around kids, and my wife hated the misogyny.
Afrika Bambaataa, sampled Kraftwerk (without permission) in his 1982 song “Planet Rock” combining the melody of “Trans-Europe Express” with the rhythm of Kraftwerk’s song “Numbers,” and those 808 beats. His Kraftwerk mashup birthed hip-hop.
PRODUCER SEEKS MALE SINGERS THAT MOVE WELL, BETWEEN 16–19 YEARS OF AGE. WANTED FOR NEW KIDS-TYPE SINGING/DANCE GROUP. SEND PHOTO OR BIO OF ANY KIND.
MALE VOCAL GROUPS HAVE been singing together in religious settings for thousands of years.
B was, as Stuart Goosman points out in his 2005 book Group Harmony, a marketing term that became a badge of black musical identity. By definition, a black group would always be labeled R&B even if they sang pop.
Under apartheid, whites could only listen to music made by whites, and blacks were restricted to black music, but American R&B was the exception.
In her memoir, Backstreet Mom
What a bad title
The boys thought of themselves as R&B singers, a white version of Boyz II Men, not as pop artists. Barry Weiss recalls, “They wanted to make an R&B record,
No, this wasn’t Cole Porter. (Though Cole might have enjoyed the original version of the lyric, which was supposedly “Tutti frutti, good booty,” Little Richard’s homage to gay sex, and contained the line “If it don’t fit, don’t force it.”)
He married Veronica Bennett, who supplied the timeless vocal on “Be My Baby,” and turned her into Ronnie Spector, making her a virtual prisoner in his mansion, which he filled with guns after the murder of Sharon Tate in the summer of 1969. He kept a gold coffin in the cellar for Ronnie, saying that was the only way he would ever let her leave him—in a box.
Today, the maestro is behind bars for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson, serving a nineteen-years-to-life sentence in Corcoran State Prison, where his fellow inmate (and songwriter) is Charlie Manson.
In a slip-up that revealed the low esteem in which artists were held around the studio, they forgot Minogue was coming and had nothing prepared when she arrived.
So, without telling the Backstreet Boys, Pearlman had set about creating another boy band, which he eventually named ’N Sync.
Dick had an unsettling thought: “Good God, I’m a grown man taking instructions from a sixteen-year-old girl.”
Is it possible that no one who was associated with Pearlman suspected his whole operation was in reality a giant Ponzi scheme?
The forty-seven planes Pearlman claimed to own didn’t actually exist. In fact, he had only one plane, and the fleet depicted in the brochures for Trans Con (the name took on a whole new meaning, when Pearlman’s scheme finally came to light) was actually made of model airplanes, photographed to look real.
On the R&B front, the label had R. Kelly and the doomed seventeen-year-old R&B phenom Aaliyah.
You can hear him muttering to Abdul, “I just don’t like this girl.” What a pro!
As Clarkson recalled later, “I just think it’s funny that all these middle-aged guys told me, ‘You don’t know how a pop song needs to sound.’ I’m a twenty-three-year-old girl! But I was fighting those battles alone.” She added, “People can’t fathom that someone who is vocally talented could have some kind of writing ability.”
But just as Jin-young was on the verge of stardom, he was arrested for drugs. Russell wrote that Lee was “devastated” by this misfortune, and that the experience taught him the value of complete control over his artists: “He could not go through the endless promoting and developing a new artist only to have it crash and burn around him.”
a five-member boy band called H.O.T. (short for High-Five of Teenagers).
Thanks to Winter Sonata middle-aged Japanese women now swoon over Korean men, while complaining about the “grass-eating”—that is, lacking in virility—males of Japan.
But before long Toth was studying Korean in order to understand the lyrics and also Korean TV shows.
(On one occasion, in a hotel lobby, I strode up to what I thought was a cutout of a K-pop idol only to find that it was a real woman, who frowned and moved away.)
Tiffany, who was born in San Francisco and grew up in Los Angeles, was recruited at fifteen while auditioning for a talent show, and brought to Seoul, where she trained in the idol-making system. Jessica, who was born in the same hospital as Tiffany, was discovered in Seoul at twelve.
In Seoul, both Tiffany and Jessica attended an international school by day; after school, they reported to SM, where they trained until ten, and then they had to do homework.
Some hotels have partnered with hospitals so that guests can have in-house procedures.
Girls’ Generation’s members are rumored to have signed up with SM for seven years each, and are paid salaries of $1 million a year, which can hardly be called exploitative.
Pay isn't the only thing in a contract that can be exploitative
