billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 14, 2015

So here's an interesting hypothetical for all of you - presume you're an artist who has scheduled to release his album - and then out of nowhere, one of your competition drops a critically acclaimed mixtape/album that gains him a ton of buzz. You're angry, you're annoyed - without warning, he seems to have stolen your thunder - do you delay your record? It's an interesting question - but it appears by staying the course, Big Sean got an interesting results on the charts. Simply put, Drake was riding a wave of hype that managed to lodge ten songs off of his new album on the charts, and when they inevitably faded, something had to replace them. Now sure, Big Sean could have impacted the chart with his album anyway, but I'd argue he wouldn't have lodged as many tracks - and unlike Drake, the songs Big Sean got charting were his best ones. I might not like the guy, but I have to give him props here, even if some of it was pure luck.

video review: 'fuse' by keith urban

Hmm, this was definitely a pleasant surprise. Have to say, I was quite impressed by the new album from Keith Urban. Have to say, it's kind of funny how the videos where I actually like the material are so much easier to edit and put together than when I don't like it (although the lighting is still not consistent - goddamn it, the sooner I get a real camera the better). 

In any case, Janelle Monae is on the way... and then the real shitstorm will begin. Stay tuned!

album review: 'fuse' by keith urban

I think, over the past several years, I've been unfair to Keith Urban.

At first glance, the rise and success of Keith Urban and his type of handsome, inoffensive pop-country is the sort of direction for country music that gets my nerves, mostly because of a marked shift in instrumentation, production, and themes. The songwriting gets a little shallower in order to court mass-market appeal, the production is a little more bland to sand down the rough edges, the instrumentation is simplified, and it's all fronted by a succession of musicians who look distinctly too polished to be performing country music. What's worse is that many of these acts attempt to co-opt traditional country elements into their songwriting and it often sounds forced, inauthentic, and fake.

Now to his credit, Keith Urban has rarely, if ever, done this, and I think there's a few very simple reasons why. Firstly, he's actually Australian, and thus probably didn't grow up with the cultural attitudes that might push him to adopt styles that don't match his image. Secondly, despite the more polished style of music Keith Urban has written, produced, and performed throughout his career, it feels authentic with his image. He has always seemed distinctly comfortable in his stylistic choices, and the fact that, unlike some country singers (looking at you, Justin Moore) seems like a genuinely nice guy, means that he's not going to co-opt somebody else's style if it doesn't work for him. Thirdly and finally, Keith Urban is actually a pretty good songwriter on his own, so he never needed to run to the country song generating machine that Nashville has turned into for some artists.

That being said, the majority of many critic' issues with Keith Urban isn't that he's offensive or bad, but that he's kind of boring. It's sort of like the same issue I had with Jay Sean - not that the music is all that egregiously awful, but that it doesn't really inspire much emotion. If I wanted to be crass, I could call him a pretty face without a lot of substance (seriously, Keith Urban seems to have only gotten better looking with age, it's unnerving), but that's not entirely fair because he has indeed written some solid, catchy, occasionally emotionally evocative tunes, and I can't really hate the guy. To me, I've always slotted him in with Rascal Flatts, as a country act that's a little polished and a little too slick for me to really get enthused about, but nobody I can really take offensive with either. 

But as I said, I might have been a little unfair to the guy, because his new album Fuse reportedly was described as Keith Urban trying a new artistic direction, which was enough to catch my interest and give the new album a look. After all, Keith Urban has been around long enough in the scene of solo male country singers to practically be considered an elder statesman of the genre. So how does the new album Fuse turn out?