The music industry eXposed

Sony BMG's Burgundy Records Signs Legendary Singer Songwriter Donna Summer

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sony-bmgs-burgundy-records-signs-legendary-singer-songwriter-donna-summer-55984627.html

See a pattern, here?


A F SONY BMG BURGUNDY RECORDS LOGO SONY BMG BURGUNDY RECORDS LOGO Burgundy Records (SONY BMG) logo. (PRNewsFoto/SONY BMG)[AL] NEW YORK, NY UNITED STATES 06/08/2007

NEW YORK, Aug. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- BURGUNDY RECORDS, SONY BMG's new
record label, announced today the signing of legendary singer songwriter
DONNA SUMMER.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20060502/NYTU191LOGO-b )
"Donna Summer is a perfect fit for Burgundy and we couldn't be happier
to be working with her. She is an absolute legend -- a classic and timeless
vocalist who still has a great deal of demand and viability within the
marketplace," says Joe DiMuro, EVP/General Manager of Burgundy Records.
"I'm excited and very eager to get started. Let the games begin. It's
great to have Burgundy Records as my new musical family, "says Donna
Summer.
Donna is scheduled to go into the studio this Fall to record her new
album, which is currently in its initial planning stages.
About Donna Summer:
As one of the most important female artists of the 21st century, Donna
Summer has an extensive list of accomplishments including setting multiple
'firsts' within the music industry.
* Donna has won 5 Grammys and 6 American Music Awards
* Donna was the first female singer to have a #1 album and #1 single on
the Billboard charts simultaneously -- a feat she accomplished again
just a few months later, breaking her own record.
* Donna was the first artist to have three #1 double albums on the
Billboard charts consecutively (she still remains the only female artist

and solo act with this accomplishment).
* Donna was the first female solo artist with three #1 hits in a one year
period, topping the charts with the singles 'MacArthur Park,' 'Hot
Stuff,' and 'Bad Girls.'
* Her single 'No More Tears' (Enough Is Enough) was the first 12 inch
single to achieve gold status.
* For years, Donna held the record for having the most #1 "Dance (or
Disco) Songs of The Year" on the Billboard Year-End Charts only to be
tied by Madonna in 2002.
* Donna set another 'first' when NARAS recognized her ability in the rock
genre, awarding her the first Grammy ever given for the category of Best

Rock Female Vocal Performance for her platinum single 'Hot Stuff.'
* Donna has earned 14 Top 10 Singles on the Billboard Hot 100, four
reaching #1 as well as 12 Gold singles.
* Donna has earned the following RIAA certifications: , 2 double platinum
albums, 1 platinum album and 8 Gold albums
* 8 of Donna's songs have reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, R&B, and
Dance charts
Donna Summer is in good company on Burgundy Records, joining legendary
artists Aaron Neville, America and Chaka Khan, all of whom have new records
on the way.
About Burgundy Records:
Burgundy Records, an imprint under SONY BMG's Strategic Marketing
Group, signs legendary multi-platinum artists and releases new titles in
conjunction with innovative marketing campaigns that promote their artists
through traditional and non-traditional channels. Their roster includes
Aaron Neville, America, Chaka Khan, Donna Summer and The New Orleans Social
Club.
Sony BMG Music Entertainment is a global recorded music joint venture
with a roster of current artists that includes a broad array of local
artists and international superstars, as well as a vast catalog that
comprises some of the most important recordings in history. Sony BMG Music
Entertainment is 50% owned by Bertelsmann A.G. and 50% owned by Sony
Corporation of America.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sony-bmgs-burgundy-records-signs-legendary-singer-songwriter-donna-summer-55984627.html

KELLY ROWLAND -

Others working on the album included American record producer, Jim Jonsin who described the Rowland's new sound as Donna Summer-esque,[74]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Rowland

TONI BRAXTON

February 15, 2007 20:18

Toni Braxton settles lawsuit against manager

R&B star is now a free agent

http://www.nme.com/news/toni-braxton/26483

TLC

TLC’s T-Boz files for bankruptcy protection again

5:05 pm November 28, 2011, by Rodney Ho


http://blogs.ajc.com/the-buzz/2011/11/28/tlcs-t-boz-files-for-bankruptcy-protection/

MARTHA WASH

Last week's Throwback Thursday got me thinking of something. This is actually a topic people have asked me about in the past, because clearly if any brain is going to contain this info, it's mine.

It involves the lip synching scandal of the early 90s. No not that one. There was another one, which people vaguely recall, so when they want all the facts, it's "Hey Jason, you know this... wasn't there another lip synching scandal?" Yes. Yes there was. It involved two groups, actually, C+C Music Factory and Black Box. Both featured the vocal stylings of one Martha Wash.

Solo career

Later, when the Weather Girls disbanded, Wash continued to lend her vocals to various dance and house music tracks. Several of them became massive pop, R&B and dance hits. She sang lead vocals on all three of Black Box's U.S. top-forty hits, including the top-ten smashes "Everybody Everybody" and "Strike It Up," as well as "I Don't Know Anybody Else," which charted at #23 in the United States. All three of these hit singles continued to receive regular club-play and mainstream radio airplay as of late April 2010. In addition, Wash sang lead vocals on the lesser-known Black Box tracks, "Fantasy," which charted at #5 in Great Britain, "Open Your Eyes," and "Hold On." All six of these songs appear on the Black Box album Dreamland. Also, she performed uncredited lead vocals on Seduction's "You're My One and Only (True Love)," and lead vocals on C+C Music Factory's "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)," which hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1991.

Her post-Milli Vanilli litigation

But with the Milli Vanilli scandal still fresh in the minds of the music industry, Wash was also perturbed by the fact that her image had been labeled "unmarketable" because of her size. She was, in fact, so perturbed that she successfully sued to receive proper credit, and appropriate royalties, as the vocalist on all of these songs. Wash's courtroom efforts spurred legislation making vocal credits mandatory on Compact Discs and music videos. It also awarded her a recording contract with RCA Records, which led to her eponymous debut solo album in 1993. The album scored three top ten club/dance hits including "Carry On", "Give It to You" and "Runaround". The first two reached number one and featured a song written by Kenneth H. Williams, Sami McKinny and Denise Rich, "God Bless The Road", a stirring uplifting ballad noted in Billboard Magazine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Wash

Jim Corr




www.jimcorr.com

http://forum.davidicke.com/showthread.php?t=177013

It is reasonable to assume that most people reading this will, at some point, have gazed at a website like the one your correspondent has open before him as he types. It's one of those sites that seeks to inform that Things Are Not What They Seem or, at least, Not What They Would Have You Believe.

These websites adopt such uniformity of style and content that it's almost as if they're all being operated according to the diktats of some shadowy, but all-powerful steering committee, of the kind the sites are actually trying to warn you about. The sites flaunt gaudily apocalyptic graphics, bristle with audaciously punctuated headlines, and urge you towards reams of densely argued revelation, often published in eye-wateringly light text on a dark background. They are usually, for these reasons and more, utterly unreadable, but it doesn't really matter, because you know what they're going to say – 9/11 was an inside job, the world is secretly controlled by the Bilderberg group, global corporate dictatorship is imminent, and so on.

The website open before me now conforms to all of these tropes, but differs from all its seething peers in one key respect. It is not the work of some lonely, tinfoil-hatted denizen of his parents' basement, but of a multimillionaire rock star. It is jimcorr.com, the online presence of Jim Corr, guitarist with the Irish soft-rock band the Corrs. His Twitter feed – @jimcorrsays – keeps about 2,700 agog followers updated with such bulletins as "Newscaster alludes to Satanic government", "Severe child abuse goes to the top of the establishment", and "32 signs entire world being transformed into a futuristic big brother prison grid". If imagined as song titles, these certainly whet the appetite for a Jim Corr solo album.

Tragically, Corr declined to respond to requests for an interview, perhaps suspecting this newspaper to be an agent of the furtive, sinister elite that manipulates the lives of ordinary people to further its nefarious ends. A brisk YouTube trawl confirms, however, that Corr has not been shy about expanding on his views about Irish chatshows. Corr, to risk glibly reducing his panoramic thesis, is a "truther": that is, a person whose worldview is largely rooted in the belief that the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 were a stunt contrived by the US government to excuse the subsequent Middle East wars.

Though the effort Corr invests in researching and propagating conspiracist dogma is unusual in the rock world, his possession of such views is not unique. Rock has always been fertile ground for the sowing and growing of such myths, and little wonder: the field is disproportionately populated by people who are overendowed with spare time, money, hallucinogenic drugs and delusions of grandeur, and/or correspondingly underequipped with common sense. Conspiracy theories flourish at all levels of the music industry, from the journeyman plodder whimpering that his decades of obscurity are due not to his manifest uselessness but to some backroom industry stitch-up, to the aggrieved music press reader accusing rock journalists of building a band up just to knock them down, to the successful, but dimwitted pseudo-sage megastar earnestly pronouncing on the vast range of subjects about which he knows nothing.

Corr has, or perhaps had, at least one ally in the "truther" cause, in the form of Matt Bellamy of Muse, who has used the phrase "inside job" in reference to 9/11 (a view he has since recanted, perhaps weary of being tittered at). Bellamy has also discussed various other conspiracy theories in a tone wilfully closer to that of the card-carrying adherent than the interested observer – up to and including David Icke's belief that many of our rulers are members of a breed of shape-shifting reptiles from a parallel dimension. (In fairness to Bellamy, he appears to have a sense of humour rare among subscribers to these ideas, once playing along gamely with a New Zealand television news show that, brilliantly, showed him portraits of various luminaries, and asked him to pick out the lizards.)

MIA last year outlined to the Observer her earnest beliefs that Facebook and Google were creations of the CIA, and that during her adolescence, the London borough of Tower Hamlets had been flooded with heroin on the instructions of its local MP, with a view to pacifying the local Bengali population. This is a common conspirazoid trope: the powers that claim to protect us are actually seeking to destroy us. Chuck D of Public Enemy has claimed both in song (Race Against Time) and on stage (more than once) that the World Health Organisation is, in fact, engaged in the propagation of racially targeted biological warfare. This was, granted, a while ago now, and Chuck's sporadic blog on Public Enemy's website is generally more sensible, but just as excitable conspiracy-mongers in days of yore used to send journalists interminable letters in green ink, so Chuck's website adheres to the equivalent contemporary trope of publishing in white writing on a black background for maximum eye-strain.

Possibly as a consequence of Public Enemy's incalculable influence, hip-hop has appeared all but determined to corner the market in conspiracy theorising. One Public Enemy old boy is especially prolific in this regard. Professor Griff, who departed the band under something of a cloud a couple of decades back, after making disobliging remarks about Jews – "Is it a coincidence that Jews run the jewellery business, and it's named jewellery?" he said to the Washington Times – can still be found on YouTube reading from William Cooper's absurd conspiracist tract Behold a Pale Horse, and claiming that Jay-Z and his business partner Damon Dash are agents of the Illuminati (Jay-Z has disputed this, not unreasonably, archly observing: "I can't even get into a golf club in Palm Springs.")

Wu-Tang Clan have been proponents of Griff's teachings on the New World Order, the unified field theory of conspiracies, which posits that the world is controlled by a clique of omnipotent puppetmasters who amuse themselves by planting obtuse clues to their doings on American currency. The Grammy-winning rapper Prodigy, of Mobb Deep, recently released from prison, is another sworn enemy of the Illuminati, and another who believes Jay-Z is among their number. Canibus once upped the ante still further, setting out his stall on his 1998 debut Can-I-Bus with the track Channel Zero, which appeared to suggest that almost all the conspiracies along the wilder shores of popular culture – alien abductions, Freemasonry, cattle mutilations, DNA testing, Bible codes – are themselves united in some sort of overarching superconspiracy.

There are few beliefs so daft that a musician won't espouse them, even the people old enough to know better. Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant, according to Andrew Smith's book Moondust, is a Moon landings sceptic ("I never really believed they went, to be honest with you"). Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac has expressed approval of the witterings of David Icke ("I find that sort of stuff really interesting," he told Word magazine in 2004, before speculating perplexingly on the number of US presidents who may have been Freemasons). Megadeth's Dave Mustaine told conspirazoid American radio host Alex Jones in 2009 of his apprehension vis-a-vis the imminent one world government, and his plans to escape it by moving to Canada.

All of which is a necessarily incomplete survey, and all of which also neglects the rich heritage of conspiracy theories that flourish about rock, pop and hip-hop, as opposed to within it. Many of these are as much staples of conspiracy thought as the assassination of John F Kennedy – the notions that Elvis Presley faked his death, that Kurt Cobain was murdered, that John Lennon was whacked by the FBI/CIA/Freemasons, that Paul McCartney was disposed of and replaced with an impostor by the rest of the Beatles, who then – for unexplored reasons – embedded their album covers with clues to their crime, that the iconography flaunted by Kiss contained hints of allegiance to Satan and/or Adolf Hitler (the latter accusation, especially, must have bemused Kiss's substantially Jewish lineup). Hip-hop has also contributed in this regard: various baroque theories circulate the deaths of Tupac Shakur, Eazy-E and Biggie Smalls.

Above and beyond even these state of rarefied paranoia, there are those who have insisted that pretty much all modern popular culture is itself a conspiracy theory, intended to (depending on your predisposition) subvert public morality. The urtext of this viewpoint is Rhythm, Riots and Revolution, the 1966 philippic by American evangelist David A Noebel, which held that rock'n'roll was a Soviet psy-ops weapon – or, as he put it, "an elaborate, calculated, scientific technique aimed at rendering a generation of American youth neurotic through nerve-jamming, mental deterioration and retardation".

Of course, given that Jim Corr and all the abovementioned have been raised in the rock'n'roll-dominated period since the publication of Noebel's tract, perhaps he was on to something.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jul/21/popandrock-hip-hop