Momma Shannon
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Well, here we are again and the buzz over Thriller is like reliving history :yes:
[SIZE=+1]Michael Jackson's "Thriller" Re-Release Left Off Charts, Experts Explain Why[/SIZE]
Contributed by: Janelle Griffith
Source: sohh.com
Posted on: February 21, 2008 09:53 PST
Filed under: Hip-Hop/Rap, R&B, Pop
Win a copy of American Gangster on DVD!
Michael Jackson's Thriller album is technically number two on this week's Billboard charts but it won't be credited as such due to a technicality.
According to New York's Daily News, even though Jackson's 25th anniversary album sold 166,000 copies this week, according to Nielsen's SoundScan, Billboard categorized the album as a catalogue- or oldies album, making it uneligible for inclusion in the Billboard 200.
Jackson's label, Sony, argues that this should not be the case because in addition to classic hits like "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," the album also contains six new songs.
One label source explains, "Michael went into the studio and recorded with Kanye West, Fergie, Akon, Will.i.Am - and there's a brand-new song from Michael, and videos. It beat Grammy winners Amy Winehouse and Herbie Hancock, with 167,000 crossing the counter. Yet for reasons unfathomable to folks in the music industry, Billboard has decided to relegate it to the catalogue chart. Catalogue makes it look like the same ol' same ol', but with a "new cover."
According to Billboard chart expert, Geoff Mayfield, "We were approached by Sony and Sony BMG to consider 'Thriller 25' as a current album. But we had to be consistent with hundreds, if not thousands, of reissues that have come to the market. There have actually been new issues of classic albums that include even more new material. We didn't just make the decision on our own. We contacted major retailers [like Wal-Mart and Best Buy], and that was the consensus."
Still Mayfield adds that Jackson should find comfort in knowing, "It's the largest sum for an album on the catalogue chart to be sold in 10 years."
http://www.hiphop-elements.com/article/read/4/15883/1/
Jackson can still thrill
By Alex Barnett Contributing Writer | February 21st, 2008
Many are familiar with Michael Jackson’s ground breaking 1982 album “Thriller,” but “Thriller 25” has a handful of extra tracks featuring contemporary artists that takes the old classic to new heights. “Beat It” is turned into a warring duet with Fergie’s tough girl vocals morphing in and out of Jackson’s. Kanye West takes on “Billie Jean” with predictable results, and Will.i.am adds some vocal hooks to “The Girl is Mine.”
Some songs are complete re-imaginings, while others might as well be Jackson himself. “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” featuring Will.i.am is virtually indistinguishable from the original. Akon adds completely new verses to “Wanna be Startin’ Somethin,’” infusing sexuality and negligee into a previously tame song.
The disc closes with the previously unreleased “For All Time,” which was recorded for the original album but did not make the cut. With the infusion of modern day dance sensibilities into old tracks, listeners might be on the verge of discovering a new guilty pleasure.
"Thriller 25" by Michael Jackson recieved three out of four stars.
http://theithacan.org/am/publish/cdreview/200802_Jackson_can_still_thrill.shtml
(did I post that one already
h34r
Really long but cute Mention lol
Puttin’ on Razzle-Dazzle, One Bead at a Time
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: February 21, 2008
CRANFORD, N.J. — Glitz doesn’t just happen.
Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image
Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York Times
Bessie Nelson has been beading Broadway costumes for 68 years. More Photos »
Multimedia
Slide Show One Bead at a Time
Enlarge This Image
Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York Times
Bessie Nelson at her home in Cranford, N.J., beading costumes for “A Chorus Line.” More Photos >
A Broadway designer has to come up with the look, the gold glow of the dancers in “A Chorus Line,” say, or the gluttonous kitsch of the showgirls in “The Producers.” But even then, you can’t wear an idea. Somebody actually has to make it.
And quite often that somebody — on Broadway at least — lives and works in a small upstairs bedroom in a modest brick house on an unremarkable residential street here.
She is Bessie Nelson, and she is the go-to beader of Broadway. Meaning Ms. Nelson, 77, spends hours upon hours sticking a needle through fabric stretched taut across two pieces of wood, attaching one No. 4 bugle or No. 6 three-cut copper bead at a time to costumes that will eventually be wildly elaborate works made up of thousands and thousands of beads.
She has done the beadwork on Liberace’s capes, Neil Diamond’s jackets, Michael Jackson’s glove and Cher’s famously revealing, uh, thingies. (“It was only covered in spots that had to be covered, you know,” Ms. Nelson recalled in a Jersey accent you could pour on pancakes.) She did beading for the Broadway productions of “Dreamgirls,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Miss Saigon,” “Wicked” and “The Boy From Oz”; she did inaugural-ball gowns for Nancy Reagan ( for the second inauguration) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (the first). She’s currently working on 31 costumes for the national tour of “A Chorus Line.”
“I mean I boggle my own mind when I think about it,” Ms. Nelson said in an interview last week.
In the 68 years she’s being doing this, what she actually does hasn’t changed all that much. “They haven’t found a way yet for a machine to do it,” Ms. Nelson said. Beading still has to be done by hand, bead by bead.
Many of the costume shops used to have staffs of “beading ladies” who would sit around their frames in large rooms, quilting-bee style, gossiping and arguing. Ms. Nelson — who has lived at her sister’s house since the late ’80s, soon after her second husband died — is something of an anomaly, preferring to work behind closed doors, in the company only of her beading frame and the television set.
“There were many more beaders when I first started in the ’70s,” said Suzy Benzinger, a costume designer for “Movin’ Out,” “Miss Saigon” and other Broadway shows. There was Miss Norma and Madame Berthe (as they were known) and all the ladies who worked for Barbara Matera’s legendary costume shop. They’re almost all gone now, and they’re not being replaced. “Kids coming up don’t want to do that,” Ms. Benzinger said. “It takes too much concentration, and it’s too labor intensive.”
Ms. Nelson has four beaders scattered around the country who work for her; there is an excellent beading shop in California, and some top beaders in Paris. There is the woman who lives in the suburbs of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Otherwise a great deal of the beadwork is done these days in China or India. If you have the right connections in Asia, the beadwork there is good for high-end fashion, said the costume designer William Ivey Long, who estimates he has worked with Ms. Nelson on at least 30 shows. But the demands of Broadway are different.
Costumes often have to be put together fast, at the last minute; Ms. Nelson had to do the work on Mr. Long’s wildly complicated Chrysler Building gown, the one Gary Beach wore in “The Producers,” in two weeks. You need someone who has the aesthetic sense to make artistic decisions without having to be told exactly what to do.
With Ms. Nelson, Mr. Long said, “I have put down watercolor and thrown some glitter on it, and said to her, ‘I want it to be somewhat like this.’ ”
Broadway outfits also have to be able to take a licking. What may look beautiful on an haute couture gown might end up leaking beads all over the stage after a week on Broadway. Beadwork done in China and India tends to have this problem. Ms. Nelson’s work, which is not cheap but not out-of-line expensive either ($5,000 to $8,000 for the work on bead-intensive outfits), is famous for being durable.
Ms. Nelson grew up as Bessie Noto, the fourth of six children in an apartment building in Jersey City that was owned by her grandmother and occupied almost exclusively by family. Bessie’s father was a milkman, and her mom was a homemaker, but Aunt Jenny was a beader.
Bessie came down with rheumatic fever when she was 9 and had to spend most of that year at home, being tutored and being bored. She would go over to Aunt Jenny’s apartment and lie under the beading frame while Aunt Jenny worked, watching the patterns slowly emerge. After a few months of looking and learning, Bessie went to work for 25 cents an hour at a local beading shop called Roman Art. She was by far the youngest in the roomful of women doing beadwork for the clothing shops along Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.
Twenty-five years later she left Jersey City for California, but she had barely gotten started. After a few years of working at a bead shop attached to Nolan Miller’s design studio in Beverly Hills, Ms. Nelson and another beader broke off to open their own shop on Sunset Boulevard.
“All of a sudden we got into that little one-room shop, and Jean Louis came and Bill Whitten came, and Bob Mackie came,” Ms. Nelson said, rattling off the names of a few designers.
They brought their clients with them: Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, Cher, the Jackson Five, “The Carol Burnett Show,” everyone on “Dynasty.” (Ms. Nelson has done most of her Broadway work after moving back East in 1988.)
At one point in the interview she reached into a drawer and pulled out a tattered box meant to hold checkbooks; a piece of masking tape ran across the top of the box, upon which was written “Michael Jackson’s Glove.” The glove is red and black and the beading is unfinished. Mr. Jackson did not like the colored gloves, and anyway, this one didn’t fit. He threw it in the garbage, Ms. Nelson said, but she recovered it as a keepsake.
On March 28 at the Hudson Theater on Broadway Ms. Nelson will receive an Irene Sharaff Award from the Theater Development Fund, the so-called artisan award. Artisans usually don’t get awards. Everybody, or at least people whose names are known always say that what’s special about artisans is that they just do great work and don’t need recognition. Well, yes, that’s so special. Tell it to the artisans.
Ms. Nelson said the lack of recognition in her career didn’t bother her, but it clearly does, a little. No mention of her on the plaque next to Mrs. Clinton’s inaugural ball gown in the Smithsonian. She’s been the subject of a few articles in The Cranford Chronicle, and her name shows up in the coffee-table book for “The Producers,” and in a couple of Playbills. But now she’s got this award.
And, of course she’s also got a bunch of “Chorus Line” costumes to finish. Her sister chimed in, It’s going to be a late night.
Today is Thursday, February 21, 2008
[SIZE=+2]
Today in
Michael Jackson History[/SIZE]
1970 - The Jackson Five performed "I Want You Back" and "ABC" on "American Bandstand." It was the group's TV debut.
1983 - Michael Jackson's album "Thriller" reached #1 for the first of 37 weeks.
1987 - Janet Jackson's single "Let's Wait Awhile" hit #2 in the U.S. making her the first artist to have five Top 10 hits from one album, all in different positions in the top five.
1990 - Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation 1814" won Best Music Video, Long Form at the 32nd Annual Grammy Awards.
1990 - Michael Jackson's "Leave Me Alone" won Best Music Video, Short Form at the 32nd Annual Grammy Awards.
2003 - Jack Gordon, LaToya Jackson's former husband, appeared on Connie Chung's show to talk about his new book.
[SIZE=+2]Michael Jackson Quote[/SIZE]
Get me out
Into the night-time
Four walls won't hold me tonight
If this town
Is just an apple
Then let me take a bite
- Michael Jackson, Human Nature
[SIZE=+1]Michael Jackson's "Thriller" Re-Release Left Off Charts, Experts Explain Why[/SIZE]
Contributed by: Janelle Griffith
Source: sohh.com
Posted on: February 21, 2008 09:53 PST
Filed under: Hip-Hop/Rap, R&B, Pop
Michael Jackson's Thriller album is technically number two on this week's Billboard charts but it won't be credited as such due to a technicality.
According to New York's Daily News, even though Jackson's 25th anniversary album sold 166,000 copies this week, according to Nielsen's SoundScan, Billboard categorized the album as a catalogue- or oldies album, making it uneligible for inclusion in the Billboard 200.
Jackson's label, Sony, argues that this should not be the case because in addition to classic hits like "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," the album also contains six new songs.
One label source explains, "Michael went into the studio and recorded with Kanye West, Fergie, Akon, Will.i.Am - and there's a brand-new song from Michael, and videos. It beat Grammy winners Amy Winehouse and Herbie Hancock, with 167,000 crossing the counter. Yet for reasons unfathomable to folks in the music industry, Billboard has decided to relegate it to the catalogue chart. Catalogue makes it look like the same ol' same ol', but with a "new cover."
According to Billboard chart expert, Geoff Mayfield, "We were approached by Sony and Sony BMG to consider 'Thriller 25' as a current album. But we had to be consistent with hundreds, if not thousands, of reissues that have come to the market. There have actually been new issues of classic albums that include even more new material. We didn't just make the decision on our own. We contacted major retailers [like Wal-Mart and Best Buy], and that was the consensus."
Still Mayfield adds that Jackson should find comfort in knowing, "It's the largest sum for an album on the catalogue chart to be sold in 10 years."
http://www.hiphop-elements.com/article/read/4/15883/1/
Jackson can still thrill
By Alex Barnett Contributing Writer | February 21st, 2008
Many are familiar with Michael Jackson’s ground breaking 1982 album “Thriller,” but “Thriller 25” has a handful of extra tracks featuring contemporary artists that takes the old classic to new heights. “Beat It” is turned into a warring duet with Fergie’s tough girl vocals morphing in and out of Jackson’s. Kanye West takes on “Billie Jean” with predictable results, and Will.i.am adds some vocal hooks to “The Girl is Mine.”
Some songs are complete re-imaginings, while others might as well be Jackson himself. “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” featuring Will.i.am is virtually indistinguishable from the original. Akon adds completely new verses to “Wanna be Startin’ Somethin,’” infusing sexuality and negligee into a previously tame song.
The disc closes with the previously unreleased “For All Time,” which was recorded for the original album but did not make the cut. With the infusion of modern day dance sensibilities into old tracks, listeners might be on the verge of discovering a new guilty pleasure.
"Thriller 25" by Michael Jackson recieved three out of four stars.
http://theithacan.org/am/publish/cdreview/200802_Jackson_can_still_thrill.shtml
(did I post that one already
h34rReally long but cute Mention lol
Puttin’ on Razzle-Dazzle, One Bead at a Time
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: February 21, 2008
CRANFORD, N.J. — Glitz doesn’t just happen.
Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image
Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York TimesBessie Nelson has been beading Broadway costumes for 68 years. More Photos »
Multimedia
Slide Show One Bead at a Time Enlarge This Image
Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York TimesBessie Nelson at her home in Cranford, N.J., beading costumes for “A Chorus Line.” More Photos >
A Broadway designer has to come up with the look, the gold glow of the dancers in “A Chorus Line,” say, or the gluttonous kitsch of the showgirls in “The Producers.” But even then, you can’t wear an idea. Somebody actually has to make it.
And quite often that somebody — on Broadway at least — lives and works in a small upstairs bedroom in a modest brick house on an unremarkable residential street here.
She is Bessie Nelson, and she is the go-to beader of Broadway. Meaning Ms. Nelson, 77, spends hours upon hours sticking a needle through fabric stretched taut across two pieces of wood, attaching one No. 4 bugle or No. 6 three-cut copper bead at a time to costumes that will eventually be wildly elaborate works made up of thousands and thousands of beads.
She has done the beadwork on Liberace’s capes, Neil Diamond’s jackets, Michael Jackson’s glove and Cher’s famously revealing, uh, thingies. (“It was only covered in spots that had to be covered, you know,” Ms. Nelson recalled in a Jersey accent you could pour on pancakes.) She did beading for the Broadway productions of “Dreamgirls,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Miss Saigon,” “Wicked” and “The Boy From Oz”; she did inaugural-ball gowns for Nancy Reagan ( for the second inauguration) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (the first). She’s currently working on 31 costumes for the national tour of “A Chorus Line.”
“I mean I boggle my own mind when I think about it,” Ms. Nelson said in an interview last week.
In the 68 years she’s being doing this, what she actually does hasn’t changed all that much. “They haven’t found a way yet for a machine to do it,” Ms. Nelson said. Beading still has to be done by hand, bead by bead.
Many of the costume shops used to have staffs of “beading ladies” who would sit around their frames in large rooms, quilting-bee style, gossiping and arguing. Ms. Nelson — who has lived at her sister’s house since the late ’80s, soon after her second husband died — is something of an anomaly, preferring to work behind closed doors, in the company only of her beading frame and the television set.
“There were many more beaders when I first started in the ’70s,” said Suzy Benzinger, a costume designer for “Movin’ Out,” “Miss Saigon” and other Broadway shows. There was Miss Norma and Madame Berthe (as they were known) and all the ladies who worked for Barbara Matera’s legendary costume shop. They’re almost all gone now, and they’re not being replaced. “Kids coming up don’t want to do that,” Ms. Benzinger said. “It takes too much concentration, and it’s too labor intensive.”
Ms. Nelson has four beaders scattered around the country who work for her; there is an excellent beading shop in California, and some top beaders in Paris. There is the woman who lives in the suburbs of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Otherwise a great deal of the beadwork is done these days in China or India. If you have the right connections in Asia, the beadwork there is good for high-end fashion, said the costume designer William Ivey Long, who estimates he has worked with Ms. Nelson on at least 30 shows. But the demands of Broadway are different.
Costumes often have to be put together fast, at the last minute; Ms. Nelson had to do the work on Mr. Long’s wildly complicated Chrysler Building gown, the one Gary Beach wore in “The Producers,” in two weeks. You need someone who has the aesthetic sense to make artistic decisions without having to be told exactly what to do.
With Ms. Nelson, Mr. Long said, “I have put down watercolor and thrown some glitter on it, and said to her, ‘I want it to be somewhat like this.’ ”
Broadway outfits also have to be able to take a licking. What may look beautiful on an haute couture gown might end up leaking beads all over the stage after a week on Broadway. Beadwork done in China and India tends to have this problem. Ms. Nelson’s work, which is not cheap but not out-of-line expensive either ($5,000 to $8,000 for the work on bead-intensive outfits), is famous for being durable.
Ms. Nelson grew up as Bessie Noto, the fourth of six children in an apartment building in Jersey City that was owned by her grandmother and occupied almost exclusively by family. Bessie’s father was a milkman, and her mom was a homemaker, but Aunt Jenny was a beader.
Bessie came down with rheumatic fever when she was 9 and had to spend most of that year at home, being tutored and being bored. She would go over to Aunt Jenny’s apartment and lie under the beading frame while Aunt Jenny worked, watching the patterns slowly emerge. After a few months of looking and learning, Bessie went to work for 25 cents an hour at a local beading shop called Roman Art. She was by far the youngest in the roomful of women doing beadwork for the clothing shops along Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.
Twenty-five years later she left Jersey City for California, but she had barely gotten started. After a few years of working at a bead shop attached to Nolan Miller’s design studio in Beverly Hills, Ms. Nelson and another beader broke off to open their own shop on Sunset Boulevard.
“All of a sudden we got into that little one-room shop, and Jean Louis came and Bill Whitten came, and Bob Mackie came,” Ms. Nelson said, rattling off the names of a few designers.
They brought their clients with them: Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, Cher, the Jackson Five, “The Carol Burnett Show,” everyone on “Dynasty.” (Ms. Nelson has done most of her Broadway work after moving back East in 1988.)
At one point in the interview she reached into a drawer and pulled out a tattered box meant to hold checkbooks; a piece of masking tape ran across the top of the box, upon which was written “Michael Jackson’s Glove.” The glove is red and black and the beading is unfinished. Mr. Jackson did not like the colored gloves, and anyway, this one didn’t fit. He threw it in the garbage, Ms. Nelson said, but she recovered it as a keepsake.
On March 28 at the Hudson Theater on Broadway Ms. Nelson will receive an Irene Sharaff Award from the Theater Development Fund, the so-called artisan award. Artisans usually don’t get awards. Everybody, or at least people whose names are known always say that what’s special about artisans is that they just do great work and don’t need recognition. Well, yes, that’s so special. Tell it to the artisans.
Ms. Nelson said the lack of recognition in her career didn’t bother her, but it clearly does, a little. No mention of her on the plaque next to Mrs. Clinton’s inaugural ball gown in the Smithsonian. She’s been the subject of a few articles in The Cranford Chronicle, and her name shows up in the coffee-table book for “The Producers,” and in a couple of Playbills. But now she’s got this award.
And, of course she’s also got a bunch of “Chorus Line” costumes to finish. Her sister chimed in, It’s going to be a late night.
Today is Thursday, February 21, 2008
[SIZE=+2]
Today in
Michael Jackson History[/SIZE]
1970 - The Jackson Five performed "I Want You Back" and "ABC" on "American Bandstand." It was the group's TV debut.
1983 - Michael Jackson's album "Thriller" reached #1 for the first of 37 weeks.
1987 - Janet Jackson's single "Let's Wait Awhile" hit #2 in the U.S. making her the first artist to have five Top 10 hits from one album, all in different positions in the top five.
1990 - Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation 1814" won Best Music Video, Long Form at the 32nd Annual Grammy Awards.
1990 - Michael Jackson's "Leave Me Alone" won Best Music Video, Short Form at the 32nd Annual Grammy Awards.
2003 - Jack Gordon, LaToya Jackson's former husband, appeared on Connie Chung's show to talk about his new book.
[SIZE=+2]Michael Jackson Quote[/SIZE]
Get me out
Into the night-time
Four walls won't hold me tonight
If this town
Is just an apple
Then let me take a bite
- Michael Jackson, Human Nature
