Billy Ray Cyrus

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Friday, July 31st, 2009

CHART ATTACK!: 8/1/92

by Jason Hare

null Welcome back, everyone, to another edition of CHART ATTACK! Before we get to this week’s Top 10, I’d like to remind you all that Jeff Giles, Michael Parr and I will all be at Mohegun Sun tonight for the Jack Wagner concert. In fact, I’m pretty sure Jeff might actually be there at this very moment, dreaming of Jack Wagner singing to him interviewing fans that will supposedly be waiting on line all day for tickets.

If you happen to be somewhere near Uncasville, CT tonight, and you have absolutely nothing better to do with your time, then you’re free to join us. Michael and I are bringing our wives, so if you spot two ladies in the casino weeping about the cruelty of marriage, you know we’re right around the corner. If you can’t make it (lucky you!), you can follow me on Twitter and read my up-to-the-minute recounts of what is sure to be the event of the century evening. I promise to tweet at the very second a tear falls down Jeff’s cheek.

Anyway, on to the chart! Two weeks ago, we covered a summer week in 1974, and I received some very nice comments from people reminiscing of their childhoods. So this is the week where I completely ruin all that nostalgia and hit a current year — well, current for this series, anyway. Here we go, attackin’ August 1, 1992!

10. Wishing On a Star — The Cover Girls Amazon iTunes
9. Giving Him Something He Can Feel — En Vogue Amazon iTunes
8. End of the Road — Boyz II Men Amazon iTunes
7. Life Is a Highway — Tom Cochrane Amazon iTunes
6. November Rain — Guns N’ Roses Amazon iTunes
5. Just Another Day — Jon Secada Amazon iTunes
4. Achy Breaky Heart — Billy Ray Cyrus Amazon iTunes
3. Baby-Baby-Baby — TLC Amazon iTunes
2. This Used To Be My Playground — Madonna Amazon iTunes
1. Baby Got Back — Sir Mix-A-Lot Amazon iTunes

10. Wishing On a Star — The Cover Girls

Here’s the first of three covers on this week’s chart. “Wishing On a Star” was originally recorded by Rose Royce in 1978, though it had very little success in the US — it was the Cover Girls version that has seen the most chart action, peaking at #9. Since then, it’s been covered by a number of artists, most notably BeyoncÃ©. And I don’t understand it at all, because I really find this song terribly boring. If you don’t remember it, don’t worry about it; you’re not missing anything. Besides, everybody knows the Cover Girls’ best song was “Show Me,” followed closely by “Because of You.” These two songs are still played on NY radio all the time. (By the way, that clip of “Show Me” looks like it’s from a local public-access cable channel. Worth watching at least 30 seconds just to see if Robin Byrd is going to show up.)

9. Giving Him Something He Can Feel — En Vogue (download)

I don’t miss most of the artists on this Top 10. I’ll be just fine if I never hear from the Cover Girls again, as well as…hang on, let me count…at least five of the other artists on this chart (unless Sir Mix-A-Lot comes up with something brilliant). But I genuinely miss En Vogue — specfically, I miss En Vogue hanging around on the charts. They’re still together, although you need some kind of graduate degree to figure out the complicated soap opera of who left, who stayed, who re-joined and who didn’t. I can’t think of a popular En Vogue song that I don’t like (though I could do without the “Who’s Loving You” opening to “Hold On,” but that’s a story for another chart). Each of the women had phenomenal voices and impeccable harmonies, and I’m assuming from the live clips I’ve seen that they did most of it without a lot of fancy studio tricks.

“Giving Him Something He Can Feel” is a cover of a Curtis Mayfield song from 1976, composed for the movie Sparkle. Here’s the original from the film, sung by Sister & the Sisters, with Lonette McKee on lead vocal, and Irene Cara and Dwan Smith on backing vocals.

On the soundtrack, however, the song was performed by Aretha Franklin, who took it to #28. En Vogue brought their beautiful version to #6, produced by the group’s creators, Thomas McElroy and Denzil Foster, who had previously been members of Club Nouveau and had produced for Timex Social Club and Tony! Toni! TonÃ©!, to name a few.

8. End of the Road — Boyz II Men

Boyz II Men: Great singers, extremely tight harmonies, great feel for R&B, can’t get arrested these days. I don’t know what happened, exactly, although it seems like Motown essentially buried them after conflicts between the label and the group. But back to better times: “End of the Road” was a massive, massive hit. It spent 13 weeks at #1, which broke a record held up until that point by Elvis Presley. Of course, Whitney Houston beat it by a week just two weeks later with “I Will Always Love You,” but Boyz II Men tied it with “I’ll Make Love to You” shortly after. So yeah. Massive hit. It was written by the powerhouse team of Babyface, L.A. Reid and Daryl Simmons, intended for a specific scene in Eddie Murphy’s Oscar-winning Boomerang. (Just wanted to see if you were paying attention.) Babyface considered keeping it for himself, but instead gave it to the guys, who recorded it in under four hours. Reid and Babyface also produced the song, but that doesn’t help me figure out who to blame for the two things that drive me nuts here: (more…)

Tags: Billy Ray Cyrus, Boyz II Men, Chart Attack!, Cover Girls, Curtis Mayfield, En Vogue, Gloria Estefan, Guns 'n' Roses, Jack Wagner, Jason Hare, Jeff Giles, Jon Secada, Madonna, Michael Parr, Mohegun Sun, Red Rider, Rose Royce, Sir-Mix-A-Lot, Sparkle, TLC, Tom Cochrane
Posted in Chart Attack!, Featured, Featured - Frontpage, Music | Comments

Friday, May 8th, 2009

How Bad Can It Be?: “Hannah Montana Volume 5: Keepin’ It Real”

by Jack Feerick

As I grow older, time seems to go faster. That’s an illusion, I suppose, stemming mainly from an ever-keener awareness of my own mortality—but it’s due, too, to increased ubiquity of mass media and the attendant global interconnectedness. If everything seems to be happening all at once, well, maybe it always was; what has changed, perhaps, is our ability to observed and process it on the fly, instead of absorbing the mediated version after the fact. Perhaps.

Or perhaps not. Because pop culture is a highly mediated phenomenon, with corporate interests acting as stakeholders and gatekeepers—and yet the accelerated boom-and-bust cycle is apparent in pop culture, too. Not so long ago, the Beatles had to play a couple of years at five sets a night in the sailor haunts of Liverpool and Hamburg to attract the notice of management; and although they eventually came to be marketed primarily as personalities, it was their musical skills that were their initial product, before their personal charm and humor could be monetized effectively.

These days, though, young stars arrive as pre-packaged omnimedia engines. It’s not enough to be one thing anymore; backed by deep-pocketed conglomerates like Disney and Viacom, these kids dÃ©but in a flurry of hyphens—singer-actress-comedienne-dancer-fashion designer, with a CD, a tour, a basic-cable sitcom, and a Vanity Fair spread all bursting on the scene at once. All the revenue streams are cross-branded and cross-marketed, regardless of the stars’ skills or shortcomings in any of those market sectors. There are ways to compensate, after all. Not such a great comic actress? That’s what laugh tracks are for. Autotune can sweeten the vocals, and a sufficient cadre of backing dancers makes even pedestrian choreography look impressive. Thus can sufficient budgeting make a megastar of a mediocrity—for a certain audience, anyway. A very young audience, in the main, with indiscriminate tastes, plenty of discretionary income, and indulgent parents.

The cost of this career fast-tracking is an accelerated burn rate. While there are occasional youth stars who survive off the reservation—recent examples include former Disney kid Shia LaBeouf, by this point a genuine movie star, and Nickelodeon stalwart Josh Peck, who’s been cobbling together an impressive indie-film rÃ©sumÃ© on the side—most fall away somewhere along the line. Sometimes their fall is public and tragic (e.g., Lindsay Lohan), sometimes it’s a slow fade to obscurity: What do you hear from Hilary Duff lately? How about the kid from Cory in the House? Shia’s old co-star, Christy Carlson Romano, has had a quiet couple of years. So has Amanda Bynes. Frankie Muniz was making 5 mil a picture, not long ago. These days? The occasional direct-to-DVD project, which leaves him plenty of time to drive race cars.

Here’s the thing: Not everybody has the savvy or the luck to go out on a high point. For most of these people, in most of these careers, there had to be a moment when it became apparent that the good times could not last. Maybe the certainty doesn’t come all at once, but it comes nonetheless. And what do you do then? What do you do when you know that it’s all but over? When your numbers are down but you’re still under contract for another ten episodes, another album, another tour—how do you keep on? Do you suck it up and hack it out? Do you rage against the dying of the light? Or is it business as usual? I find myself asking this because I’ve just watched the DVD Hannah Montana Volume 5: Keepin’ It Real—collecting episodes of the Disney Channel sitcom—and it seems like a product of that fading twilight, that hour of the wolf. (more…)

Tags: Billy Ray Cyrus, child stars, Disney, franchises, Hannah Montana, hour of the wolf, identity, Madonna, metafiction, Miley Cyrus, omnimedia engines, so cold, the horror â€¦ the horror, Troll dolls, Viacom
Posted in Featured, Featured - Frontpage, How Bad Can It Be?, TV on DVD, Television | Comments