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Still not 30 — she’s 28 — Miley feels like she’s lived several lifetimes. But even at this young age, her record sales are in terrible decline. She needs to be reinvented.
Her last two RCA albums, “Plastic Hearts” and “Younger Now,” were disasters. Her only real hit album was 2013’s “Bangerz.” That was eight years ago.
So Miley has left RCA and joined Sony corporate cousin label, Columbia Records. Ron Perry, who’s had a lot of success getting Columbia in order, signed her. It’s unclear what plan he has, but pointing Miley to country music with a pop edge seems like the only plan that might work. Metal, punk, and so on are offensive to her core audience. Perry will have to reason with her if she wants to make more records.
The fact is, Miley has an outstanding voice. She’s wasting it on a lot of junk. How about a Rick Rubin-produced Miley Cyrus album? How about a remake of “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”? It’s time to turn her into a vocalist supreme. No more Joan Jett (and I love Joan Jett but that’s not for Miley Cyrus).
And no more Dead Petz. Only living ones, preferably puppies!
Back in March 2015, we broke the story that Jay Z had bought a Swedish streaming service and was bringing in heavy hitters like Beyonce, Madonna and Kanye West as partners.
Jay Z called the service Tidal, and the rest is misery. Tidal has never competed with Spotify or Apple Music. And now Jay Z is cashing out. He’s sold the service to Twitter star Jack Dorsey’s Square for $297 million. Jay Z gets a seat on the board of Square, which is Dorsey’s main company, a cash app.
Dorsey said on Twitter, “Square is acquiring a majority ownership stake in TIDAL through a new joint venture, with the original artists becoming the second largest group of shareholders, and JAY-Z joining the Square board. Why would a music streaming company and a financial services company join forces?! It comes down to a simple idea: finding new ways for artists to support their work. New ideas are found at the intersections, and we believe there’s a compelling one between music and the economy. Making the economy work for artists is similar to what Square has done for sellers.”
There’s more but you get the gist of it.
According to reports, Jay Z and his musical partners will still hold forth within Square as some kind of separate entity.
Will this help Tidal in its competition with other streaming services? Probably not. But Dorsey likes being part of the celebrity music world. He’s partnered with Rihanna (who’s also in the Tidal group) in charities. A year ago he toured Clive Davis’s star studded pre-Grammy dinner with WarnerMedia inside investor Vivi Nevo. And now he can have all the hi-res music he wants on his iPhone!
Dr. Seuss, the late children’s book author currently under fire, has gone crazy in book sales.
Nine of the top 10 books on the Amazon bestseller list right now are all by Dr. Seuss starting with “The Cat in the Hat.” Nine.
Seuss also holds about 15 spots right now between number 11 and number 50 on amazon. And none of those are the six that are going out of print after controversies concerning racist features in those volumes.
In fact, “If I Ran the Zoo,” a book I loved as a child, is number 98. “And to Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street” is number 168.
Seuss’s masterpiece, “The Sneetches,” is number 10. Read that one first. A brilliant piece of satire, that will tell Theodore Geisel was not a racist.
The overreaction to possible Seuss book burnings, to his being “canceled” by the current thought police, to Fox News losing its mind on this subject, is something no one could have anticipated.
The Lorax, the Grinch, Sam I Am, they’re all fine. The books with images now considered racist will be removed. Maybe they’ll modified and reintroduced. The culture is going through a watershed moment, sorting out episodes from the past that are now unacceptable. (They were unacceptable then, only no one owned up to it.)
We will adjust, the culture will adjust and we’ll move forward enlightened and chastened. In the meantime, someone is buying up every copy of every Dr. Seuss book as if they’ll be removed from publication. Except for the six withdrawn by Seuss’s family, the others will remain. And now go back to print. Cash registers are ringing.
Jenny Cooney is one of the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press that the others fight with all the time. She’s blocked me on Twitter because I’ve told the truth about her and her cabal within the HFPA for the last two decades.
Now Cooney has gone on Australian TV and defended the group against allegations of racism and not having any Black people among their 87 cronies.
Cooney had the audacity to say “the fact that there was not a Black member was not really anything we focused on because we were accepting and welcoming everybody from around the world that was based in L.A. that wrote for foreign publications, that was just our criteria.”
LOL. Please. This is too much. She continued: “The fact that there were no Black members we didn’t really consider a problem. Now of course we realize that we should have been much more proactive about really going out of our way to recruit and work with the media, the journalists, the foreign press, everywhere.
“We’ve always considered ourselves such a culturally diverse group,” Cooney said of the HFPA. “I think 35% of our members are non-European, from everywhere from North Africa, Philippines, Bangladesh, Japan.” She added, “I always thought diversity was more about not skin color but about nationalities and where people came from.”
Cooney also essentially lies about how the HFPA picks new members and that must be approved or vetted by the MPAA.
“The MPA did not have a Black member in their international directory at all, not to throw them under the bus, but, that was the pool we were choosing from,” she said, claiming that HFPA members have to be “vetted” by the MPA before joining. “And we’ve now realized we can’t rely on the studios, we can’t rely on anybody else.”
Well. she tried to throw them under the bus– and it’s just not true. There are plenty of Black members, for one thing, in the MPAA directory of journalists. But it doesn’t matter– the MPAA has NOTHING to do with HFPA or selecting members. And to wit, the Globes have just been involved in a lawsuit with a female journalist who wasn’t approved by them for no decent reason.
The HFPA is in serious trouble. The old guard– which Cooney and a few others represent — must be removed in order for them to move forward. Look at her in this video. She must go, along with her cronies.
It’s all coming apart, thanks mostly to very good reporting in the LA Times.
I told you months ago that the real life brothers of “Joel Maisel” were trying to do something very bad in Greenwich Village.
Madison Capital, owned by Josh and Mark Zegen, is trying to destroy two landmark buildings on lower Fifth Avenue and replace them with an unwanted 241 foot high apartment tower for the very wealthy.
The Zegens are the brothers of Michael Zegen, who plays Midge Maisel’s shlubby husband on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Imagine what Midge and Joel would say if they heard this story back in 1960.
Next Tuesday there’s an important meeting of the Landmarks Preservation Committee. Since I do not trust these people to do the right thing, read the message below from the Greenwich Village Historical Preservation Society and get into that Zoom meeting. Let the Maisels, uh, the Zegens, build their tower somewhere in New Jersey or Long Island, and not in historic Greenwich Village.
Here’s the message:
The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s public hearing on the application to demolish 14-16 Fifth Avenue in the Greenwich Village Historic District and replace it with a 241 foot tall tower will be held next Tuesday. The approximate time of the virtual hearing is still TBD, but it will be during the day. When the time becomes available (likely Friday), we will post it here, and inform all who signed up for notifications. We need a BIG turnout to show broad opposition to this dangerous plan.
Madison Realty Capital is seeking to demolish a pair of 170+ year old former townhouses between 8th and 9th Streets which are among the most historically significant of their kind in New York. Though highly altered from their original form, they are connected to some of the most important figures in New York history throughout their lifetimes, and approval of their demolition would be a devastating blow to historic preservation in New York City.
It should also be noted that this is a joint application for demolition of the existing structure and the proposed new 241 ft. tall replacement. This means we MUST comment on both elements of the application NOW, should the LPC rule that demolition is allowed. So even if you strongly oppose demolition as we do, we strongly urge also telling the LPC that the proposed new building, 75% taller than all other buildings on Fifth Avenue in the Greenwich Village Historic District and four times the height of the average building on its block, is also unacceptably tall.
I didn’t see it, don’t ask me to figure out what happened.
But “The Bachelor” fell to its lowest rating of this season and second lowest of all time on Monday night with “The Women Tell All.”
This is the 12th year of “The Bachelor” and the 25th “season.” It’s also been an utter disaster on the part of the show with a racism scandal that has sunk the whole enterprise.
Matt James is the first Black Bachelor, and there’s nothing wrong with him. But his apathetic approach to the contestants was followed by his choosing of a white woman who turned out to have a racist past.
Then host Chris Harrison was interviewed by former Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay, and the results were explosive. Harrison has been replaced for the final show, which is live, by a former NFL player who is Black. Then Lindsay suffered some blowback for saying all the right things and announced she was disassociating herself with the franchise. Could things have gone any more wrong?
Monday night’s episode scored just 4.69 million viewers and dropped in the key demo, too. The show lost about 800,000 viewers from the previous week. That’s steep! ABC and the production should be concerned they’ve really wrecked their little business. I doubt Chris Harrison will come back from this.
Bob Wells may live in a van and keep to himself, but when he met Frances McDormand he knew eexactly who she was.How do I know? I asked him today. So I was surprised when I just read in USA Today that McDormand, two time Oscar winner, thought he didn’t know when they made “Nomadland.”
Wells told me on Zoom Tuesday afternoon, “Of course I knew her. She’d just won the Oscar for Three Billboards.”
Well and his two other members of the Nomadland cast have been carrying the weight of “Nomadland” publicity because McDormand has been mostly AWOL. She didn’t even bother opening the lid of a laptop to participate in the Golden Globes Sunday night. I thought maybe she was ill. But a source close to her confirmed it’s just her famous prickly attitude toward awards and Hollywood.
“She’d be just as happy seeing someone from the new generation [win awards],” they said. And so it’s quite possible “Nomadland” will win Best Picture at the Oscars, but McDormand will not pick up a third gold statue. She doesn’t care. This will clear the way for Viola Davis or Andra Day or Carey Mulligan.
“Nomadland” is Chloe Zhao’s extraordinary film about life among not homeless but mobile homeful independent spirits thriving off the grid and away from conventional society. Wells, as well as all the others whom Zhao enlisted from real life for her take on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 non fiction book, including Linda May and Swankie, was a delight to meet today. He called McDormand — who was not on the call “regular people”–but he’s the regular people.
Wells says he’s starting to get inundated with emails and fan mail from people who’ve seen the people. He has a website called CheapRVLiving where he interacts with fellow travelers. Right now he’s staying in Oregon with family, where he’s needed. Otherwise he’d be back in the desert, he said. “It’s too cold to be up north.”
Aren’t all his other Nomadic pals missing him while he’s in Oregon, I asked? Just as he’s depicted in the movie, he’s kind of their leader. But Wells is a modest man. “I’m pretty much of a loner,” he said, unwilling to be labeled a Nomad celebrity. But what a lovely guy, who is immortalized now in this instant classic of a film.
First, read this: “Supercell is an epic disaster moviethat tells the tale of William, a good-hearted teenager, who always lived in hope of following in his father’s footsteps, the legendary storm chaser Bill Brody, killed by a massive super tornado. His father’s legacy has now been turned into a storm-chasing tourist business, managed by the greedy and reckless Zane Rogers (Alec Baldwin), who is now using William as the main attraction to lead a group of unsuspecting adventurers deep into the eye of the most dangerous supercell ever seen.”
Yeah. That’s Alec Baldwin’s next project, directed by Martin Scorsese? Quentin Tarantino? No, directed by Herbert James Winterstern (NBC’s “Siberia”) from a script by Winterstern & Anna Elizabeth James (Deadly Illusions).
Who are these people? What is Alec doing? With now six kids to feed (a new one was added this week), Alec — who used to take quality fare for the most part — is off to do impressions of himself in shlock movies for a good payday.
I’m sad about this. He’s also got some kind of B action movie with Frank Grillo in pre-production. And let’s not forget something called “Chick Fight,” which ‘released’ quote-unquote last November when he still had just 5 kids. And then he’s playing Enzo Ferrari in a “Lamborghini” biopic produced by Monika Bacardi. Need I say more?
All straight to video or streaming. Very much the Bruce Willis-Mel Gibson route. Alas, remember “Working Girl” and “Married to the Mob”? Jack Donaghy?
Yes, we are still talking about the 2020 Tony Awards. For the 2019-2020 season that ended abruptly a year ago.
Yes, the Tony Awards that announced nominations last fall, six months late, and didn’t include any of the shows that were in previews on March 12, 2020.
Those Tony Awards. Now the Tony voters can start voting for the shows and performances they actually saw, which isn’t all of them.
The only thing anyone knows is that Aaron Tveit has won Best Actor in a Musical, for “Moulin Rouge.” He was the only nominee. If he loses, he will be very disappointed.
And when are the Tony Awards going to be given? Winners announced? No one knows. “Sometime in the future.”
If the fans had anything to say about it, Jay Z would not be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
After 3 weeks of voting, Jay Z is dead last in the public poll with just 56,651 votes.
The top vote getter, shockingly, is Fela Kuti. He has 211,123 votes. The pioneering Nigerian musician is the exact opposite of Jay Z musically: he’s talented. He’s also Black, so you can’t say the lack of interest in Jay Z is racist.
Indeed, the number 2 public vote winner is Tina Turner, as it should be. It’s disgraceful that Tina isn’t in the RRHOF as a solo act.
Number 3 is Foo Fighters, who are eligible for the first time and will definitely be voted in by the Rock Hall membership.
My guess is that Jay Z will get in whether the fans like it or not. The nominating committee will overrule the fans and even the membership in the end. It’s political.
Numbers 4 and 5 are headscratchers: Iron Maiden (yeeesh), and The Go Gos. Neither belongs in the Hall.
Carole King is number 6. Where are her fans? On the 50th anniversary of “Tapestry,” Carole should be inducted.
Still missing from the Rock Hall: Chubby Checker, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Carly Simon, Sting as a solo artist, and many, many more.
This year’s induction ceremony will be held at the Rock Hall in Cleveland on October 30th.
