Music

"This is weird as hell for me," T-Pain says. Us, too

Remember T-Pain? In the mid-2000s, he was one of the biggest names in popular culture. His hit songs included the use of auto-tune, which synthesized and distorted his voice for a futuristic sound that led him to the top of the charts. But some time around 2010, he fell off. Looking back, he blames the exact thing that made him popular for the masses souring on his music—“People felt like I was using it to sound good,” he says in an upcoming interview on All Things Considered. “But I was just using it to sound different.”

Yet to the average listener, a “different” T-Pain would be more like his recent Tiny Desk Concert for NPR. In the 13-minute video, the now 30-year-old singer performs some of his greatest and latest hits—get this—without auto-tune. His actual voice will surprise you. Before starting up, the singer says, “this is weird as hell for me.” That pretty much sums up how you’ll feel once the 13-minutes are up. If this isn’t your ideal T-Pain, NPR says he’s got a greatest hits coming out soon.

[NPR]

She may not be a native New Yorker, but Swift's already giving back to her adopted city

“Welcome to New York,” the first track on Taylor Swift’s new album 1989, has gotten some blowback from those who’ve lived in New York for longer, and under less luxurious circumstances, than Swift herself (who bought an apartment in Manhattan earlier this year). The Village Voice described the city of Swift’s song as “generic, flat, and lifeless a New York as has ever existed in pop culture,” saying the song could as easily be titled “Welcome to Des Moines.” That the tourism department of New York City named Swift a “global welcome ambassador” this week only added to the mockery: Who was Swift to be singing about a city in which she’d just arrived?

But those who thought Swift would be silenced forgot how good she is at shaking things off. Swift announced, in an appearance on The View today, that she would be donating all of the proceeds from sales of “Welcome to New York” to the city’s public schools. It’s both generous and a canny P.R. move, immediately obviating the first significant criticism she’s faced in the 1989 roll-out.

This will likely do nothing to assuage the critics of Swift’s aesthetics or the role she’s taken on as a spokesperson for city tourism. (The haters, as they say, gonna hate.) But it’s a declaration of her citizenship that would seem to solve the conundrum of how Swift has the gall to sing about New York. She may not know the ins and outs of ordering sandwiches at bodegas and may not have a MetroCard, but Swift has committed what is likely to be a huge amount of money to bettering the lives of those who have lived for years in her adopted city; for all Swift can be critiqued as making New York seem dull and safe to outsiders and potential tourists, she’s also set to do more than most of her critics in changing life in the city.

Swift’s long taken inspiration from her life in writing her songs. She’s now putting her lyrics to work in her day-to-day life as, yes, a New Yorker.

The pop trio ventures into the world of electronic dance music

The singer (real name: Dev Hynes) made his network TV debut

The singer has remembered the Alamo since he was a child

Phil Collins recently brought his Alamo artifact collection back to its original San Antonio home, a site the 63-year-old has been fascinated by since he was young.

The In the Air Tonight singer said he became fascinated by the U.S. historical site ever since he saw the 1955 film Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier as a child in London, according to Reuters. The British rocker has since amassed a large collection of artifacts from the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, when Mexican troops attacked the Alamo Mission, a chapel built to spread Christianity to those living in the region. The Alamo’s defenders sought revenge, and later defeated the Mexican Army to establish the Republic of Texas, which would be later become a U.S. state.

Collins’ collection will be housed temporarily at a building near the Alamo before they are moved into a $100 million museum called the Phil Alamo Collins Collection.

“This completes the journey for me,” Collins told Reuters. “These artifacts are coming home.”

The artifacts include a leather pouch that Davy Crockett, who died at the Battle of the Alamo, brought from his home state of Tennessee to Texas during the Texas Revolution. Collins also owned one of only four remaining rifles that were owned by Crockett, and an original Bowie knife owned by Jim Bowie during the Battle of the Alamo, where he also died.

[Reuters]

The singer would be the first to have three albums that sold 1 million copies in their first weeks

Taylor Swift’s latest album, released Monday, is on track to hit 1 million in sales during its first week, according to Billboard. That would make 1989 the first album in 2014 to reach that watermark, and it would make the 24-year-old the only singer ever to have three albums achieve the one-million-in-one-week feat.

Taylor’s last million-selling debut week was Red, which was released in 2012 and sold 1.21 million copies. (Red was also the last million-selling debut week, period.) Before that, the singer had released Speak Now in 2010, which promptly sold 1.05 million copies.

[Billboard]

Seriously, who knew how well "Out of the Woods" and "XO" would sound together?

People have tried mashing up Beyoncé and Taylor Swift in the past, but those efforts have often yielded pretty dreadful results. This time, however, things went pretty well.

Some beautiful soul decided to take Tay’s “Out of the Woods,” from her new album 1989, and Bey’s “XO,” from last year’s self-titled surprise album, and blend them together for this unexpectedly lovely mashup. It features the beat from “Out of the Woods” paired with Bey’s vocals — so no, sadly, Tay doesn’t sing at all, but it’s okay. Tay has had plenty of time to shine this week.

Listen here:

The book will chronicle the singer's rise from childhood performer to international celebrity

Like many of her contemporaries in the entertainment industry, Beyoncé is a brand. And this brand has many facets: singer, dancer, entertainer, designer, philanthropist, wife, and mother.

Of course, Beyoncé is a person first, a brand second. But the force behind that brand — the carefully crafted public relations operation that helps rake in the cash — obscures the person that the brand is selling, presenting an altered facsimile of the person behind the brand. Consumers, meanwhile, are expected to equate that presentation with the person herself.

All of this is to say: today’s announcement that an unauthorized Beyoncé biography will hit bookstores in the fall of 2015 is welcome news for those interested in the woman behind the brand. Biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, who will write the book, is no stranger to the mega-celebrity profile; his subjects over the last three decades have included Diana Ross, Frank Sinatra, Madonna, and most famously, Michael Jackson.

But the key word in this soundbite is “unauthorized.” This means that Beyoncé herself won’t participate in the project, and the biography’s content will be gleaned from interviews with secondary sources. The word “unauthorized” suggests that we should probably take the book with some skepticism, because Queen Bey won’t have signed off on the story it spins. But the fact that she’s so tightly controlled her image until now leaves one wondering which version requires taking more grains of salt: the one she’s approved or the one she hasn’t?

Take, for example, the 2013 HBO documentary Beyoncé: Life Is But a Dream, which was not only authorized, but featured heavy participation from its subject. The film purports to “strip away the veneer of stardom” and offer up the real Beyoncé in its stead. And it literally does strip away the makeup, offering a visual to match its stated goal. But for all its Neutrogena-clean wholesomeness, the production feels self-consciously manufactured. It swaps out the image of the diva for the equally fabricated image of the girl next door, one edited truth for another. Every revelation has been carefully weighed for the way it will land.

Following her mini-concert at the MTV Video Music Awards in August, Beyoncé accepted the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award from her husband, Jay-Z, with daughter Blue Ivy in tow. The trio was all tears and kisses, the picture of family harmony. The Twittersphere immediately launched into debate: Were the smiles genuine, or was the performance still going? Were we witnessing a publicity stunt staged to counter the tabloids’ insistence on trouble in paradise? Throughout Beyoncé’s career, it’s always been difficult to parse out the genuine from the affected.

In the Washington Post last week, Eve Fairbanks lamented what is sometimes lost when we switch from the third-person to the first. “All that sad and subtle truth, all the disconnect between how we imagine ourselves and who we really are — the disconnect that underpins the whole tragicomedy of human life — [is] lost,” she writes. “Sometimes the deepest truths are the ones we cannot ourselves quite face.” And that, in a nutshell, is why the unauthorized biography will probably tell us more about Beyoncé than the authorized one ever could.

The "Chandelier" star is selling a Mason jar into which she exhaled

Sia’s fans consider the Australian songstress, who refuses to face the audience when performing, a breath of fresh air. Let’s hope that assessment is accurate: Sia is set to auction off a sealed jar of her exhalation.

The star has written huge pop hits for Rihanna and Beyoncé, and like any good pop songwriter, she knows how to prevent leaks — including those of her breath seeping out of its glass jar. A spokesperson for the Adelaide Film Festival said, “Gorgeously and magnificently, she breathed into a jar for us. Her breath is in a Mason jar with silver sealing wax, so no one can accidentally open it. Whoever wins it will be able to break the seal — or just let it be.”

It’s a donation that suits Sia’s persona perfectly: Both shunning the sort of spotlight that a donation of her time or artwork might attract, but doing so showily. This self-styled eccentricity draws more attention to Sia than a comparable, more conventional prize (it’s hard to imagine the walk-on role in Anthony LaPaglia’s next film, also up for auction at the Adelaide Film Festival, getting much press). Sia, in promoting her most recent album, has been ostentatiously absent; it’s a strategy that’s paid huge dividends for her, and one she continues by sharing only her exhalations with fans.

The winning bidder will be able to do whatever he or she likes with the jarred air, naturally, but Sia may have left a cryptic hint in her earlier work: Prior to her current renaissance as the singer of “Chandelier,” Sia was best known as the singer of the Six Feet Under final-scene anthem “Breathe Me.”