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Post by Admin on Aug 28, 2014 1:03:17 GMT
Swift's new single blasts in at No. 1, thanks to hefty sales, streaming and airplay. Plus, Nicki Minaj's 'Anaconda' vaults 39-2 following the premiere of its video. Taylor Swift rockets onto the Billboard Hot 100 chart at No. 1 with "Shake It Off." As expected, her new self-empowerment anthem debuts at the top following its first week of availability. The explosion of "Shake" also spurs Swift to vault to No. 1 on the Billboard Artist 100 chart (which measures song and album sales, radio airplay, streaming and social activity), up from No. 69 last week. (A deeper story covering the latest Artist 100 to follow on Billboard.com.) The lead single from Swift's Oct. 27 Big Machine Records album 1989 soars in at the Hot 100's summit fueled by a combination of immense sales, radio airplay and streaming (the chart's three measurement components). Swift released the song for digital purchase and to radio, and premiered its official video, last Monday (Aug. 18, just after 2 p.m. PT/5 p.m. ET), the same day that she hosted a Yahoo! live stream announcing the new set's release. "Shake" marks Swift's second Hot 100 No. 1, following 2012's three-week leader "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," the first single from her last album, Red. As "Shake" enters at No. 1 on the Hot 100, Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" makes its own headlines, hurdling 39-2 following the premiere of its racy video. Meanwhile, the chart's top song for the past six weeks, MAGIC!'s "Rude," tumbles to No. 5.
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Post by Admin on Aug 29, 2014 0:43:44 GMT
The Internet's left nut trembled earlier this week as Taylor Swift unveiled the video for her already-smash single "Shake It Off." Immediately, countless Americans digested the video's glorious imagery, inhaling its infectious pop sensibility. To be sure, the world still belongs to Taylor: "Shake It Off" has already amassed over 20 million views on YouTube. The 24-year-old singer's song surged to number one on iTunes in a matter of hours after its release, causing Taylor to tweet -- aptly -- WHAT EVEN, HOW EVEN in response. Just as immediate as the song's success, however, a vocal chorus of criticism emerged. Some discount it for being too impersonal; for others it's too far a departure from Taylor's country roots. Perhaps no single criticism received more attention than from Earl Sweatshirt, himself previously a kind of a pop provocateur, given his alliance with the rap group Odd Future. However, in this instance, Earl was dead serious on Twitter: Ferguson, Missouri, continues to dominate the news, and the think pieces have snowballed into one large, indomitable force of hand-wringing and pandering racial politics. Seemingly, everyone has an opinion, yet no one has any answers. One piece worth reviewing -- especially in lieu of Earl Sweatshirt's tweets -- is Globe columnist Derrick Jackson's piece, "White America's racial blinders." In it, he describes white America's "stunningly Pollyannaish view of inequity," and contextualizes Michael Brown's killing within a larger prism of indifference toward both poverty and violence toward black Americans. It is a riveting column that demands we reexamine our own racial perceptions, particularly within our increasingly subjective cultural lens. As Earl hints at, today's world affords us many luxuries, with one of the Internet's many benefits being the idea that cultural walls are coming down -- that we finally can experience things, and understand one another with enhanced clarity. Perhaps, to an extent, that is true. After all, as President Obama continues to underscore in his remarks, the United States has taken great strides in confronting the racial divide over the past few decades. Music videos starring pop starlets coopting black culture imply that artists' comfort level with things like twerking. This ghettofication of popular music banks on the country being categorically and assuredly post-racial. But are we ready to concede that Taylor Swift is a cultural ambassador? Have we really gone from MLK and Muhammad Ali to... Miley Cyrus? Ferguson's burning, and Earl's tweets, suggest no. Ultimately, there is still a huge economic gap in this country which is, often, defined along racial lines. Social media -- or the advent of the digital age -- may hint that we've reached cultural equilibrium... but I think that's misleading. Differences still exist, and Swift's goofy post-racial iconography remains a fantasy. Escalating racial tensions, and the puzzled response from white America, reminds us that many in suburbia still have no clue about American's complicated history with race. Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" may be bubblegum fun, but it does not deserve a ghetto pass (regardless of her playful "I'm such a dork!" tone). It's totally unearned. She can sing teardrops on her guitar, but she isn't entitled to do whatever she wants. That's what Earl Sweatshirt is tweeting about.
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Post by Admin on Aug 30, 2014 2:29:42 GMT
This summer has sadly lacked a clear song of summer. “Fancy” by Iggy Azalea (also featuring Charli XCX) held the title for a while, mostly because no one could think to give it to anyone else. “Fancy” was catchy, the words were easy enough to remember, but sadly the song didn’t have the same feeling that previous title holders have held. When “Fancy” comes on, you dance along. When “Party in the USA” came on in the summers of 2009 and 2010, you sprinted to the dance floor. There’s a difference. It looked like “Fancy” would cling to the title of official song of summer until Taylor Swift charmingly danced her way into the conversation. (“Charmingly” is how you describe when a gorgeous human being tries to act awkwardly while never losing his/her cuteness.) In August, Swift dropped “Shake It Off,” an uptempo pop song with an accompanying music video of Swift dancing charmingly. The song was also important because it was Swift’s first release of her post-country career as a pop artist. Yes, that was actually a hook with this album. Swift is no longer a country singer. She is now a pop singer. (It doesn’t matter that Swift hasn’t released a country song in years. This was IMPORTANT.) Nothing in “Shake it Off” is original or all that interesting, not even the “rap breakdown” so many Swift fans were excited about as a big departure, as it really just sounds like an alternate verse off Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.” (Also like Stefani’s had before, Swift’s music video came with accusations of racism.) It is a song for the summer for a summer that didn’t really have a song. Swift went pop, and pop fans will reward her. It’s not a track that inspires insanity like “I Love It” or “Party in the USA,” but it’s enough to get people dancing. All that’s too bad, too, because a moderately-known group called The Chainsmokers already released the song of the summer. It’s called “Kanye” and features a guest vocal appearance from Siren. It is very catchy, has an easy-to-remember chorus (“I WANNA BE LIKE KANYE!!!”), and a preposterous post-chorus dance breakdown. It’s fun and stupid. It’s a perfect song for the summer.
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Post by Admin on Aug 31, 2014 5:23:52 GMT
Eight years after her breakthrough on Billboard’s Country charts, Swift storms onto the Hot 100 with “Shake It Off,” entering the big chart at No. 1—only the 22nd song in history to start in the penthouse. Billboard reports that, in its first week, the song racked up the highest digital sales total of the year (544,000 downloads), trouncing the best sales week for the year’s top song, Pharrell Williams’s “Happy,” (490,000). It also ranks as the fourth-highest digital debut, period. So powerful is Swift with radio programmers, meanwhile, that “Shake,” which is barely nine days old, has already racked up the ninth-largest U.S. radio airplay audience of any current song. This is the fastest that radio has adopted a song since Lady Gaga’s 2011 smash “Born This Way.” Finally, in terms of online streaming—the third ingredient in the Hot 100 formula—Swift arrives with 18.4 million U.S. streams, nearly all of them tallied by the song’s sprightly video (the song is not yet available on Spotify). Only Nicki Minaj’s ass-tastic video for “Anaconda,” which is also brand new, racked up more clicks over the last week. The simple answer to why Swift is No. 1 with this song is that, again, she’s music’s biggest star. Also the song is impossibly catchy—if you’re like me, last week you thought it was forgettable, and this week it’s fully colonized your frontal lobe. “Shake It Off” takes the up-with-people bounce of Williams’s “Happy,” adds horns—odd that Pharrell didn’t think of that—and layers in an infectious descending, cascading melody that some advertising agency is either trying to license or rip off as we speak. At this imperial point in Swift’s career, she probably could’ve released four minutes of impassioned alpine yodeling and topped the charts. The fact that she released perhaps her most irresistible pop melody yet is just not playing fair. Lyrics have always been essential to Swift’s songs, but these are probably her dopiest, certainly for one of her major hits. And it basically doesn’t matter: They are still knowing, self-referential and trash-talky in a post-hip-hop way (“I go on too many dates, but I can't make ’em stay/ At least that's what people say”). They also keep up the us-against-the-world theme so beloved by Swift’s younger fans, a la her prior hit “Mean.” Moreover, because the song is all hook, the lyrics themselves are arranged rhythmically to deliver maximum pleasure (“ ’Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play/ And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate/ Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake”). It’s as if Taylor caught this summer’s James Brown biopic Get on Up and took to heart the apocryphal scene where Brown teaches his Famous Flames that, in funk, “every instrument [is] a drum.” On “Shake,” she’s taken her most valued asset—the words—and made a beat out of it. Given its massive sales and airplay, “Shake It Off” probably could have hit the top without its satirical, Mark Romanek–directed video, which finds Taylor flailing through a series of modern dance tropes (and troupes). Like the lyric, it works very hard to maintain Swift’s carefully nurtured Cult of the Awkward White Girl, alive and well since 2009’s award-winning clip for “You Belong With Me.” As naturally charming as Swift is in the clip, I kind of wish “Shake” had scaled the chart without it, given the ill-conceived segment—widely, and deservedly, eviscerated in the media over the last week—that satirizes post-Miley twerking and in the process dehumanizes its black dancers, the only troupe in the clip who are literally faceless, much as Miley did. (Memo to Swift, Lily Allen, and anyone else who feels the need to “comment” on twerking in 2014: Don’t replay the exact same offense you’re attempting to skewer.) Taylor is no Garth: The kind of full crossover she is mounting, while not totally unprecedented, is unique in its overtness and scale. I doubt she’s thinking much about Newton-John, but she surely is drawing inspiration from two more recent crossover females. The first is ’90s star LeAnn Rimes. Swfit credits Rimes for introducing her to country music as a tween, before she moved to Nashville with her family and got signed. Rimes broke through with 1996’s “Blue,” a Patsy Cline soundalike, before pivoting to the pop album chart and recording one of the longest-lasting Hot 100 hits of all time, the ultra-diva ballad “How Do I Live” (No. 2, 1998, 69 weeks). But after that success, Rimes recorded one poorly received pop album before scurrying back to country. Swift probably regards that too-fast trajectory as a cautionary tale. The more interesting crossover figure of the last 20 years is Shania Twain, possessor of the second-biggest-selling album of the Nielsen SoundScan era, the 20-times-platinum Come on Over. (She even baked her crossover intentions into the title.) Thanks to the Canadian singer’s then-partnership, both professional and romantic, with hard-rock producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, Twain’s hits sounded less like the Opry and more like Wembley. She only released four studio albums before going on a long hiatus a decade ago, so we’ll never know how far she would have pushed her crossover after a millennial string of hybridized hits. Before she disappeared she dropped three different versions of her last studio album—2002’s Up!—in country, pop and even “International” flavors. Had there been an immediate follow-up, she might’ve dispensed with the country version entirely. Twelve years after Up!, it’s as if Swift is completing what Shania started.
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Post by Admin on Sept 1, 2014 5:41:17 GMT
Taylor Swift is officially gracing the “The Voice” as a guest advisor. With the news of her brand new album 1989 and the success of her new single “Shake It Off”—her second No. 1 to date—it’s safe to say that Swift is back, and this time she’s ready to dominate the pop world. And in 2014, appearing on “The Voice” is practically a requirement. The "Shake It Off" singer, 24, will be joining the upcoming seventh season of the NBC competition show as an advisor. A source tells Us that Swift will serve in the same capacity that Coldplay singer Chris Martin aided the show in its sixth season, advising contestants across all four teams. Swift will be working with veterans Adam Levine and Blake Shelton, as well as new coaches Gwen Stefani and Pharrell Williams, who were added to the lineup for the upcoming season. "Taylor was an absolute pleasure to work with," a source tells Us of Swift's contribution to The Voice. "She had great feedback for all the contestants. She made for an amazing mentor." Swift, who previously performed on the fourth season of The Voice, joins previously announced advisors Stevie Wonder (who is working with Levine), Gavin Rossdale (working with his wife Stefani), Little Big Town (working with Shelton), and Alicia Keys (working with Williams). The next season of The Voice kicks off on Sept. 22, one month before the scheduled release of Swift's upcoming fifth studio album 1989. Led by the hit single "Shake It Off," 1989 will hit stores on Oct. 27.
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