Tuesday, October 22

Tag: Pop music

ABBA fans mark 50 years since ‘Waterloo’ took the world by storm
6Apr By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

ABBA fans mark 50 years since ‘Waterloo’ took the world by storm

LONDON -- It’s 50 years since ABBA won a major battle with “Waterloo.”A half-century ago on Saturday, the Swedish quartet triumphed at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with the peppy love song, which opens: “My my, at Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender, and I have met my destiny in quite a similar way.”The song rang out again Saturday at London’s Waterloo railway station — also named after the 1815 battle that dealt defeat to the French leader — where a choir belted out a rendition for commuters.In the English coastal town of Brighton, where the 1974 competition was held, fans were staging a flashmob dance and silent ABBA disco to mark the anniversary.Eurovision victory turned ABBA into a pop juggernaut, by far the most successful band to win the pan-continental music contest, which will ho...
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Glass Animals return this summer with a new album, each song exploring a ‘different side of love’
5Apr By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

Glass Animals return this summer with a new album, each song exploring a ‘different side of love’

NEW YORK -- Glass Animals' latest album was born thanks to a massive storm, a house on a cliff and an existential crisis. What emerged from that? A 10-track collection exploring love.The indie-pop band's frontman, songwriter and producer Dave Bayley found himself in an Airbnb house high on stilts below Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, alone, sick with fever and wondering about Glass Animals' place in the universe.Then came a powerful storm: Trees tumbling down the hill, roads flooded and his rented house perched precariously. “My existential crisis went to the next level,” Bayley says, laughing.But in the dazed calm that followed, Bayley saw people emerge from the storm and embrace — families, couples, friends, neighbors. “I felt like I was sitting in space in this house, looking down on ...
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2023 (Taylor’s Version): The year in pop culture
7Dec By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

2023 (Taylor’s Version): The year in pop culture

In weather terminology, they call it “rapid intensification” — the process by which a storm strengthens dramatically in a short period.In pop culture terminology, they call it Taylor Swift.It’s not like Swift didn’t have big – huge! – years before this. But 2023? This was ridiculous. From the blockbuster “Eras” tour that conquered the United States before a planet-vanquishing international leg, to the re-release of more albums on the road to reclaiming her catalog, to the record-smashing concert film, to becoming a billionaire — and yeah, that thing with “the guy on the Chiefs” — it all made for a year you could reasonably call “2023 (Taylor’s Version).” There were, of course, non-Swiftian developments in pop culture. Beyoncé, ever the superstar, had a huge tour herself, and ruled the box...
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Billy Porter hits the dance floor on his fifth album with the goal of ‘trying to heal people’
15Nov By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

Billy Porter hits the dance floor on his fifth album with the goal of ‘trying to heal people’

NEW YORK -- NEW YORK (AP) — Billy Porter is strutting off in an entirely new sonic direction on his fifth album. The Broadway, runway and TV star has pivoted to dance music. “I’m a new artist. There’s a transformation that has happened,” the Tony-, Emmy- and Grammy-winner tells The Associated Press. “I've been offered a real second chance.”“Black Mona Lisa” sees Porter embrace club, house and old-school disco over 12 tracks, creating a warm, welcoming space that showcases his voice and redemption story. “It’s been fun. It’s been a healing. It’s been beyond anything that I could have dreamed,” he says. “I’m trying to bring some positivity into the world. I’m trying to heal people.”The songs veer from the dance anthem “Broke a Sweat,” to the soulful “Stranger Things,” the four-on-the-floor ...
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Music Review: Taemin is back with another sultry K-pop EP, his fourth mini album ‘Guilty’
30Oct By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

Music Review: Taemin is back with another sultry K-pop EP, his fourth mini album ‘Guilty’

The prince of sultry K-pop is back! The gothic, fall season is here and the prolific Taemin returns with some appropriately atmospheric music on a new EP titled “Guilty." It is his first release since completing his mandatory military enlistment in the South Korean army in April 2023.Taemin cut his teeth in the spotlight by starting out in boy band SHINee but has emerged as a strong solo artist in the last nine years, with four previously released full-length albums under his belt. “Guilty” marks his fourth mini album — and proves that it only takes Taemin six tracks to realize a robust comeback. Dramatic, mysterious, sometimes unsettling but always dreamy, “Guilty” is an offer one can’t refuse.It would be inaccurate to say he’s back and better than ever, because he was never not excellen...
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What to stream this week: Annette Bening, Jason Aldean, Awkwafina, NKOTB and ‘Blue Eye Samurai’
30Oct By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

What to stream this week: Annette Bening, Jason Aldean, Awkwafina, NKOTB and ‘Blue Eye Samurai’

Awkwafina starring as a game-show-obsessed woman in “Quiz Lady” and the animated historical drama “Blue Eye Samurai” about a mixed-race, revenge-seeking female samurai in Japan are some of the new television, movies, music and games headed to a device near youAlso among the offerings worth your time as selected by The Associated Press’ entertainment journalists are a studio album from Jason Aldean, a new Hulu series made from Charmaine Wilkerson’s novel “Black Cake” and Annette Bening portrays a real-life hero who swam the treacherous passage from Cuba to Key West in 2013.— It took Diana Nyad more than 30 years and five tries to swim from Cuba to the Florida Keys. “Free Solo” filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s “Nyad,” streaming Friday, Nov. 3 on Netflix, dramatizes her ...
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“The Woman in Me,” Reviewed: What Britney Spears’s Memoir Has to Say
29Oct By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

“The Woman in Me,” Reviewed: What Britney Spears’s Memoir Has to Say

Our era runs on biography. Stories—in film adaptations, novels, and pop songs alike—are received as the clarion calls of so many “voices.” The myth of an unencumbered, authentic voice persists. Even if it’s never quite found, we find value in the searching. It was foreseeable, then, that readers would make much of a new memoir from the pop star Britney Spears, whose prevailing story for much of her adult life has been one of silencing.We know the story by now. In 2008, after a series of messy public episodes, zealously documented by the tabloid press, Spears was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility and her father successfully petitioned a California court for a conservatorship, deeming Spears unfit to make personal and financial decisions on her own behalf. But Spears did not disappear ...
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From country to pop, 2014 nostalgia to 2023 reality — it’s time for Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’
27Oct By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

From country to pop, 2014 nostalgia to 2023 reality — it’s time for Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’

LOS ANGELES -- Taylor Swift’s reimagined “1989” is here, the album that ushered in the first Peak Swift era — revisited at the height of her massive pop culture dominance.Released in 2014 and named for her birth year, the original “1989” signified a sonic rebirth. Swift had shed the Nashville country roots of her first four studio albums and announced herself a full-fledged pop superstar.“1989 (Taylor’s Version),” out Friday, takes that version of Swift — then in her mid-20s, living in New York, prepared to take on the world with an arsenal of ’80s synth sounds and a new producer named Jack Antonoff — and includes five unreleased “vault” tracks that deliver more clues about the artist she was then.Previous “Taylor’s Version” releases have been more than conventional rerecordings, arriving...
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Music Review: Poppy grows up and goes dark pop-y with genre-blending album ‘Zig’
24Oct By adminNo Comments
Entertainment

Music Review: Poppy grows up and goes dark pop-y with genre-blending album ‘Zig’

Not quite dark pop, not quite techno, not quite any genre at all, Poppy's fifth studio album, “Zig," is rather a mix of several different styles and an example of how far she's come since her debut five years ago.“Zig” strays far from Poppy's old bubblegum pop sound for those who remember her 2017 debut, “Poppy.Computer," which followed her earliest introductions to the cute-but-strange, pseudo-AI Poppy character — first discovered via surreal performance art YouTube videos in 2015. The bleach-blonde android is nowhere to be seen in “Zig,” but that's not a surprise — she's been gone for some time now.Poppy's style and sound started to shift with her second album, 2018's “Am I a Girl?” which started to take a heavy metal turn, followed by the even darker “I Disagree” in 2020. She scaled it...
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