music Page 16 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Machers And Rockers: Jews And The Blues
From Rich Cohen's winning book, The Record Men, here's an excerpt about Leonard Chess and Muddy Waters:...

Oh No, Some NBA Players Are Collaborating On A Rap Album
This here is a teaser trailer for the forthcoming rap album, Full Court Press Vol. 1, that is set to be released this fall. This isn't just any rap album, though. It's a rap album featuring the hottest bars from Shawn Marion, Big Baby Davis, Stephen Jackson, Carlos Boozer, and Juwan Howard(!)...

Some FSU Football Players Made A Very Good Parody Of A Terrible Song
Before you watch the video above, which features Florida State football players Derrick Nnadi, Jacob Pugh, Lorenzo Featherson, and Demarcus Christmas singing and rapping very, very poorly, you need to acquaint yourself with Ice JJ Fish....

25 Years Ago Today...
...couple of classic Hip Hop Records were released. ...

The Latest From Steinski
Yeah, that Steinski. Here are two of his latest mixes for WFMU....

"Weird Al" Yankovic's <em>Mandatory Fun</em> Is Not The End (We Hope)
Does anyone actually hate "Weird Al" Yankovic? You'll usually find two reactions to him: adoration or indifference, with the indifference mostly confined to wayward millennials. Considering that he's been churning out parodies (and originals!) for nearly 35 years, that in itself is impressive. He'...

Why I Love <em>So You Think You Can Dance</em>, Dopey (Or Dead) Dads And All
Less than 10 minutes into the first episode of the 11th season of Fox's So You Think You Can Dance, a contestant's dad was onstage dancing to "Blurred Lines." To begin, he set a water bottle on the floor before him, and then, as though initiating an ancient mating ritual, he approached and hovered a...

Paramore's "Ain't It Fun" Is The Summer Jam Twitter Desperately Needs
It's a pleasantly sweaty June night at the bucolic, Live Nation-owned Xfinity Center in Mansfield, Mass., and Hayley Williams looks like she's ready for a fight. The lead singer of Paramore is sporting the kind of high-waisted shorts, knee braces, and white high-tops you might associate with a sparr...

Nasty Dread: Beware The Ersatz Island Schmaltz Of Magic!
It's the rare band that makes Smash Mouth seem edgy by comparison. It's the rare band that makes Sublime seem arty, that makes 311 seem novel, that makes Jack Johnson seem… tolerable. But here we are, and here we go: Magic. Oops, make that Magic!—the exclamation point being one of many red flags ind...

The Freewheelin' Riff Raff: Embracing The Cagey, Loopy Joys Of <em>Neon Icon</em>
My favorite Bob Dylan interview is the infamously painful sit-down with Time magazine in D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Dont Look Back, wherein Dylan gets miffed at a prying line of questioning and slams the writer, the publication, and the publication's readership alike for subscribing to a wor...

Ex-NFLer Suffering Memory Loss Writes A Song For His Daughters
Former Colts and Bengals TE Ben Utecht retired in 2009 after suffering a concussion, his fifth officially diagnosed one in six seasons. At age 33, he says he's already suffering from memory loss. So he wrote a his daughters a song now, before it's too late....

How Michael McDonald, The Affable Captain Of Yacht Rock, Lost His Voice
Even 28 years after his last hit, Michael McDonald can still trigger laughter and tears. Though he's still a fixture on the R&B/soft rock nostalgia circuit (catch him with Toto and Kenny Loggins this summer), that sui generis voice has been touring without him, so to speak, for decades. Recently, th...

Lil B's Hoop Dreams: Why The Based God Is Our Lebron (And Our Tupac)
Every Lil B mixtape is an event: a multi-stage, multimedia extravaganza that in all its quirkiness, interactivity, and downright craziness exemplifies why the Based God is the most fascinating artist currently doing it....

In Defense Of Pitbull
Spectacle begets spectacle, and the 2014 World Cup kicked off with a doozy, via a live performance of the song we'll hear thousands of times before it's all through: "We Are One (Ole Ola)," Pitbull's official FIFA anthem, costarring Jennifer Lopez and Brazilian pop star Claudia Leitté....

The Incestuous World Of Rock-Star Collaborations, On One Huge Chart
Pop Chart Lab has put together a new print titled "The Charted Connections of Rock," which shows how over 700 artists have collaborated on over 500 projects as an enormous web diagram. It's pretty dense, but useful for "six degrees of separation" games for the musically inclined....

Get Ready To Hate The Caxirola
Brazil's answer to the vuvuzela? Not quite. The "official musical instrument of the 2014 World Cup" is softer—it produces a rattle, not a blare. Another thing in favor of your viewing experience: it's been formally banned from Brazilian stadiums. But that hasn't stopped fans from bringing them in so...

Lethally Blonde: Miranda Lambert's Cheerful Country-Radio Revolution
You approach a Miranda Lambert song called "Automatic" with certain expectations—by not approaching it at all, really, instead crouching behind a desk, or a wall, or a Camaro, or something, braced for a cleansing, delightful hail of epithets and flames and bullets. She's a Texan country superstar wh...

Prince At The French Open With A Scepter
Prince was at the French Open yesterday, and he brought a scepter. So here are a bunch of pictures of Prince, who was at the French Open with a scepter....

“Wheels On The Bus” On YouTube: A Distressed Father’s Guide
So my firstborn son is obsessed with "Wheels on the Bus," and will sing it at the slightest provocation, or with no provocation at all, really. He's three ("a young three," as noted by now multiple polite but clearly frazzled instructors at toddler-activity sessions he's disrupted by, for example, f...