Why Do People Hate Rap and Opera? (from NPR Music)

From ABC News: Whitney Houston’s Star-Spangled Secret Whitney Houston sings the national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl. (George Rose/Getty Images) By Chris Cuomo and Andrew Paparella It was what turned a star into a superstar: Whitney Houston’s mesmerizing rendition of the national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl. Houston’s powerful “Star Spangled Banner” performance came at a poignant, patriotic time — the U.S. had just entered the 1991 Gulf War . But here’s what you didn’t know: What the Super Bowl audience and hundreds of millions of TV viewers heard was lip-synched. “The music was pre-recorded, and so was the vocal,” confirmed Rickey Minor, who was Houston’s musical director at the time. Minor, now the band leader on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, said that in a crowd that large and loud, it was impossible for Houston to hear herself. Though she did sing, it was her pre-recorded voice that the audience heard. Here’s another surprise: Minor and Houston changed the national anthem to ensure a better performance. “The original version is in 3/4 time, which is more like a waltz,” Minor explained. “What we tried to do was to put it in 4/4 meter… We wanted to give her a chance to phrase it in such a way that she would be able to take her time and really express the meaning.” Minor was nervous that the altered anthem wouldn’t be well received, but that story, at least, has a happy ending: Houston’s performance electrified the stadium and soon after, popular demand prompted Houston’s record label to release a single that hit the top 20 on the Billboard charts. “I think it might well be the best Super Bowl performance of all time, ” said Billboard Magazine editor Danyel Smith. “It may well be, with the exception of her version of Dolly Parton’s, ‘I Will Always Love You,’ the most remembered thing about her. I think our grandkids will look at the video for ‘I Will Always Love You’ and they will look at the video of Whitney Houston singing at Super Bowl twenty-five.” Watch the full story on “One Moment in Time: The Life of Whitney Houston,” a two-hour “20/20″ special Friday at 9 p.m. ET.

Hey look, it's a Mom tossing knives at her children.

Thanks for the info. I bought my copy shortly after In Through the Out Door came out so it definitely wasn't second hand. As for the sound issues, I probably wouldn't have even noticed as I'm not exactly an audiophile. Still cool to know though.

Cool but Jakob Dylan won't be appearing at that show, the reference to him is a list of Audley Freed's credentials. I'll be seeing Kevn next week in Chapel Hill. Looking forward to it as it'll be the first time I've seen Audley perform since at least the early 90s when Cry of Love and Dag played at the Attic in Greenville, NC. I've seen the Crowes a number of times over the years but never when Audley was a member of the band. I'm with you on the Dave Matthews Band and Crud, I mean er... Creed. I don't own anything by the Wallflowers or Jakob Dylan but I like most of what I've heard from him. Also his Woman + Country album (which included Neko Case and Kelly Hogan) got lots of rave reviews from friends when it came out a couple of years ago. As for Counting Crows, August and Everything After is one of my favorite debut albums ever. I also really liked Recovering the Satellites and their live album Across A Wire: Live In New York City from several years back that combined their appearances on MTV's Live at the 10 Spot and VH1's Storytellers. Aside from that, they pretty much lost me (especially when they ruined Joni's ("Big Yellow Taxi") but I never rule out a comeback. Apparently their next album is an all covers project. In regards to Dave Matthews, I admire the musicianship but musically he rarely seems to tread any new ground and begins to sound all the same after the while. As for Creed, all one needs to do is watch that Behind the Music they did for VH1 several years ago to realize just how pitiful that band (and Scott Stapp) are. That, or just listen to their music.

Thanks, I don't think I've seen him in any of the movies you mentioned. I'll have to check those out.

Nice. I still need to do some catching up on the Cure. All I have is Wish and the Sideshow EP.

Nicholas Cage = Can't act his way out of a paper bag. That said, I did enjoy his performance in Raising Arizona. Can't say much of anything else favorable about him beyond that.

Thanks, this is what is said about the "Strawberry" inscription at the same link (which someone else just sent to me as well):

I'm not sure but I long ago checked my copy of Led Zeppelin III to see if it was a first pressing. Lo and behold, it is. That's really strange because I'm sure I didn't purchase it when that album was new.

For hardcore collectors I'm sure this is nothing new but today when I was perusing old vinyl at a local antiques shop I noticed a copy of In Through the Out Door for sale that made note on the cover of the word "Strawberry" being etched into the run off groove. Just from my little bit of research I've discovered that means it's a first pressing. They were only asking $10 for it so it's not like it's a rarity or anything but when I got home I had to check my copy as well and it also has "Strawberry" etched into the dead wax. Again, not a huge surprise but still cool to know. Believe it or not, when In Through the Out Door first came out I bought it on cassette first. Since I have a first pressing I'm guessing it wasn't all that much longer that I got around to purchasing it on vinyl.

I wasn't really a fan of Whitney Houston's but I was definitely aware of her when she first started making waves on the music scene. By the same token, I was also well aware of her all too public decline. Lots has been said about her recent untimely passing and I'm sure lots more will be written. In the time being, I think Mark Kemp's thoughts on the matter are well worth sharing. Whitney Houston: A (Very) Personal Tribute BY MARK KEMP CREATIVE LOAFING (CHARLOTTE) | FEBRUARY 15, 2012 I've been a music journalist for nearly three decades, and yet my reasons for mourning Whitney Houston are much more personal than pop-cultural. Whitney's life and career have overlapped with mine many times and on multiple levels in the past 28 years. I was never a big fan of Whitney Houston's music, although I respected and admired that hurricane of a voice. Still, her death Saturday at the way-too-young age of 48 affected me more profoundly than I ever would have imagined, as it did her millions of fans. I didn't know what I was going to write about her, but I knew I needed to write something. I've been a music journalist for nearly three decades, and yet my reasons for mourning Whitney Houston are much more personal than pop-cultural. You see, Whitney's life and career have overlapped with mine many times and on multiple levels in the past 28 years. I began as a newspaper reporter in the early '80s but was writing almost exclusively about music by 1985, the year Whitney's first album arrived. She was pop-R&B; I wrote mostly about emerging post-punk, indie-rock and hip-hop. To my ears, Whitney Houston represented everything that was wrong about '80s music. As big as her voice was, it got sapped of its soul by sterile production techniques that were so common in '80s pop. R&B had come a long way since the organic southern soul and funk of early-'70s Aretha Franklin records, or even the pristine pop of Motown. Prince and Michael Jackson were doing creative things with '80s production, but the cheesy synthesizers and other ham-fisted sonic tricks were suffocating the voices of most mainstream pop and R&B stars, Whitney included. The 21-year-old daughter of gospel-soul singer Cissy Houston certainly cut a powerful, statuesque figure — all big puffy hair and hoop earrings, huge, gorgeous smile and sleek leather jacket — when she appeared in an early MTV video belting out "they can't take away my dignity" in her first blockbuster ballad, "The Greatest Love of All." It was a little schlocky, but you couldn't deny that voice. Fast-forward 15 years: Whitney Houston had been at the top of her game for an entire generation and was by then a legend, her vocal gymnastics having influenced a cattle call of younger singers, from Mariah Carey to Christina Aguilera to Beyoncé's early group Destiny's Child. It was a style that Time magazine, writing about Carey, once described as "Nutrasweet soul." But Whitney — with Arista Records executive Clive Davis by her side, helping to sculpt that sound and image — was the godmother of this new breed of divas. By the late '90s, Whitney's "children" regularly passed through the green room at MTV, where I was then working as vice president of music editorial on the daily show TRL. Like Whitney, I was at the top of my game, too, having risen from a freelance writer covering alternative rock and hip-hop to editing the music pages of Rolling Stone. I'd sat in on recording sessions of classic albums by Public Enemy and Stetsasonic, and written cover stories on artists ranging from Lou Reed and Yoko Ono to Morrissey, Michael Stipe and Beck. Whitney and I were doing well. Or, so it seemed. It didn't start out that way. Whitney's first solo gig was far from the powerhouse pop she became famous for. It was a song called "Memories," which the 19-year-old singer performed on an album by the downtown New York experimental funk-rock collective Material. Behind her soulful voice was a sweet, smoky saxophone solo by the legendary jazz man Archie Shepp. That song remains, for me at least, the only recording that truly shows the nuances of Whitney Houston's talent. Soon after, Davis scooped her up and turned her into a pop princess that even Whitney didn't recognize. She became America's sweetheart, hopping about video shoots in big hair, wearing tops with shoulder pads amid sets splattered with new wave art, singing "How Do I Know" and "I Wanna Dance with Somebody." What Davis had was a new Donna Summer-like disco queen for Madonna fans. What Whitney had was stardom. Whitney was the biggest pop-R&B diva in the world throughout the '90s, scoring hit after hit and singing a stirring version of "The Star Spangled Banner" at the 1991 Super Bowl. She landed a spot in the Kevin Costner movie The Bodyguard and turned Dolly Parton's modest ballad "I Will Always Love You" into a multi-platinum showcase of vocal dexterity that had young wannabe pop singers from Charlotte to Seattle grasping hairbrushes in their suburban bathrooms, lip-synching the words and dreaming of the glamorous life that Whitney surely lived. It was around that time that she married fellow pop star Bobby Brown, and the couple, like their counterparts in rock, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, became the gossip of the music world. The most common question was: How could America's R&B-pop sweetheart marry a bad-boy R&B rapper? Whitney countered, saying that no one really knew who she was. She continued gaining accolades, landing movie roles and looking regal next to her bad-boy husband. And the gossip columnists continued gossiping about this unlikely musical power couple that seemed to be living the glamorous life. Cracks began to appear in the façade, though, and by 2000 it was abundantly clear that Whitney Houston's life was anything but glamorous. That year, news broke that Whitney and Bobby were using drugs and things were looking dire. She began acting strangely during interviews and missing important appearances. She was no longer the bright-eyed singer — the good girl, America's sweetheart — that she'd projected only a few years earlier. Her Colgate smile was now an icy glare. She looked hard, disheveled, unhealthy, defiantly anti-glamorous. The statuesque beauty with that hurricane of a voice was deteriorating right before our eyes into a common, everyday drug addict. I was on a similar path. The MTV executive who had everything he'd ever dreamed of had taken a detour and was on a crash course and about to collide head-on into one Whitney Houston. (No, not literally, but the impact was just as real.) I walked into work one day, unhealthy, unhappy, unfulfilled. My writing staff at VH1 was waiting in a conference room, as they always did, to brief me on the top music stories of the day. On this day, they were huddled around an image of Whitney Houston, and cracking jokes about her appearance. Enraged, I launched into a diatribe: Those images, I told them, weren't funny. They were images of sickness, sadness, disease. I was being defensive and overly sanctimonious, and I had no ground to stand on. By then, Whitney and I were in about the same place. I felt her pain. I knew she must be hurting and that she definitely was killing herself, because I was, too. Whitney got through that period of her illness, and over the years she would get better, then get worse, and then get better again. So would I. But the one thing she never seemed to do was fully accept that she had a problem. I've heard people in the past few days blame Bobby Brown, and that's typical of those who don't understand addiction. Bobby Brown was not Whitney Houston's problem; Whitney's problems were her own. He may have been a symptom, but it's pretty well established in the addiction field that no one can make someone else an addict any more than someone can make another person diabetic. I can't say whether or not Whitney was an addict; only she could have said that. But I do recall seeing her tell Oprah Winfrey in a 2009 interview that she was OK now; she still drank alcohol occasionally, but she was OK. And Whitney may have been OK, but for those who suffer from addiction, it's really kind of not OK to drink alcohol. At least, that's the case for me. We don't yet know exactly what killed Whitney Houston, although we can guess. And it would be disingenuous for us to say that we aren't already doing just that. After all, she was only 48. I can only imagine how terribly her family and close friends are hurting right now. I know that my own family and close friends can imagine that quite easily. Today, I'm happy with my lot in life. I love my work and wouldn't want to be doing anything other than what I do. I would no sooner trade what I have in Charlotte today to be back at MTV, or in the middle of the music industry, with all that money, than I would trade a warm massage for a heart attack. I love my community, trust my close friends today and feel blessed. But when I heard Whitney Houston had died Saturday, it shook me to my core. I wished I could have been there with her, but what could I or anyone else have done? All I could tell myself was, "There but for grace go I." Rest peacefully, Whitney. No matter what anyone says, they can never take away your dignity.

A definite "yes" to the latter. Just look at Robert DeNiro in those Fockers movies. Then there's instances like Kevin Costner and Dances With Wolves where it was obvious that it was a project he was very passionate about having made.

I haven't heard it but I agree about Stephen. I like some of what I've heard by Ziggy but a lot of it (especially his early material) is little more than "bubblegum" reggae. A few years back he did that album produced by Dave Matthews which was pretty much devoid of any reggae influence. Some people may have liked it but I didn't care for it at all. Stephen is definitely the real deal.

I think too much hype can ruin a movie (or a record or book). A friend lent me a copy of The Big Lebowski but I wasn't in any hurry to watch it. When I finally did, I failed to see what all of the fuss was about as well. Perhaps I just didn't give it a fair chance because there was no way it was going to live up to all of the praise nearly everyone I knew had heaped upon it.

Why? As someone that grew up in that era I can tell you that you really didn't miss anything. Yeah, there was some good music but there's also tons of good music in 2012.

Is that fellow Roger Waters? I guess it could be someone from ELO but it sure seems to favor Waters.

From Imgur.

Perhaps but it looks more like someone just stuck a skateboard up there. Not really all that far fetched. Thanks for the heads up, I've added it to my Amazon Wishlist.

http://youtu.be/Pei6VrZvl3Q I first heard about this movie years ago but never got around to watching it until recently when a friend tipped me off that it was playing on Hulu (which it still is). It was filmed in 1996 and came out in 1997 and is set in and around Raleigh, NC. As rock n' roll movies go, most seem to get more wrong than they do right. Bandwagon is a very notable exception to that. It's definitely low budget but it still gets it's point across. As a resident of Raleigh and a local music fan, I've always wanted to see this. Jac Cain (soundman at the Pour House) makes a cameo as a doorman at the Brewery (which was torn down last year). Back when this movie was filmed, Jac was the soundman there. Also of note is Doug MacMillian of the Connells in a starring role as a zen-like tour manager. You don't have to be a fan of Triangle area music scene to enjoy this movie but if you are, it's fun to try to spot the various locales. Otherwise, as rock n' roll movies go, the filmmakers did a pretty damn good job of capturing the trials and tribulations of a struggling, new band that's hoping to get signed to a label. There's also this review from The New York Times in case you're interested in learning more about the film.

Say again?