Aussielicious

I heard this song for the first time a few weeks ago when they performed it live on Ellen. It’s not my usual style of music but I really like the song and the lyrics are very important. Given that the song is championing the rights of LGBT people and for equality for all, it was a very pleasant surprise to hear that it has gone to number 1 on the charts here in Australia.

We are viewed as a liberally minded country here but as I’ve said many times, our Prime Minister and the leader of the Opposition Party are both staunchly anti marriage equality and it drives me crazy. So while I know there are pockets of Australia that are very gay friendly and accepting I didn’t think a political song about equality would resonate so well with a lot of the country. Well done Australia. I love being pleasantly surprised.

This is the coolest thing Madonna has done in a while.

Kylie has just release the Abbey Road Sessions album here in Australia, the UK has to wait a couple more days. Oh My Lord. I love it. Stripped back, acoustic and orchestral versions of 16 of her hits. Sublime stuff for a fan like me. There was a video that I saw yesterday that was a behind the scenes video but it seems to have been taken down. This video is a rehearsal of Come Into My World for the Proms in the Park concert. New Kylie material always gets me a bit excited.

This is going to be a bit of a fan rave style of post. I love P!NK. She’s just so bloody cool. No matter what you think of her music you have to give her credit for playing the music and fame game according to her own rules rather than having her image and every detail micro managed by publicists. Then there is her awesome music and the fact that she sings live and writes a lot of her stuff herself. Add to that the fact that she performs it while dangling from the roof and being thrown around by her trapeze partner and other circus folks.

Now package all that up in a beautiful new video for her song “Try” which is about the pain of breakup and being in an unhealthy relationship. This video is beautiful. Pink looks amazing, the guy in it is her training partner and he looks astonishingly hot and it’s a very stylish and acrobatic, passionate video. 5 stars from me!

25 years ago, a diminutive (I think it’s a rule you have to call her diminutive because she’s TINY!) actress in an Australian soap opera performed a cover version of an old song called Locomotion at an event, not thinking it would go anywhere. The next year it was released as an official single. For years afterwards, despite many hit songs, Kylie was still dogged by the tag of the Singing Budgie and everyone thought her music career would fizzle out. Apparently not.

Hard work, perfectionism, creativity and adapting along the way and Kylie is still here. This video is this month’s K25 release and it edits together her various interpretations of Locomotion in the 25 years since she started. Yes, there is quite a gap in the middle. Once she was being taken seriously and had earned her credibility, Kylie tried to leave those early years behind, but now she embraces them and appreciates them for all they’ve given her. The last part of this video is from her Abbey Road sessions which, given she’s been filming them and has hair and makeup etc, I’m PRAYING (she’s the closest thing to organised religion I have) that not only will there be an Abbey Road album but DVD as well.

Hip Hop music doesn’t have the following here in Australia that it does in the U.S. It’s partly just a cultural difference and partly because of the much smaller population here. So when I read on Towleroad and a couple of other blogs, rumours that a Hip Hop star was going to be coming out I acknowledged that it was a massively brave thing to do in such a notoriously homophobic culture but that was as far as my thoughts went. I’d never heard of Frank Ocean once he actually came out, only to read that he’s worked with some huge names in the music industry including writing for Beyonce.

Frank’s coming out, in the same week as Anderson Cooper stands to have a much broader impact on tolerance and acceptance than Cooper’s. Anderson is on tv broadcasting to middle America. He’s from an upper class background and white and probably fits the more cliched view of a gay man. Frank Ocean is a Hip Hop artist and he’s black. Now before you all shout me down for being racist, I’m not, hear me out. It was the black community that created the “down low” sub culture and is probably the least represented in gay characters on television and is a minority in gay porn. Also, unfortunately with social media being what it is, an easy outlet for bigots and the ignorant to quickly voice their hatred and intolerance, there have been a huge number of tweets calling Frank a faggot and other abusive tweets Most of the tweets I read at Hate Tweets to Frank Ocean seem to be from what would normally be called his peers. They are mostly young black men who probably listen to Hip Hop and probably admired him until they found out he loves men. Thankfully, the site gives people an opportunity to respond, hopefully in a positive way to the abusive tweeters.

I guess only time will tell whether people like Frank Ocean challenging perceptions in homophobic cultures will help things along or not. I’m hoping that it will. Especially when people like Jay-Z publicly applaud his decision to come out. Ironically despite the abusive tweets, Ocean’s new album is selling very well, possibly better than it would have otherwise.

In what has to be one of Kylie’s best marketing strategies, Time Bomb has just been launched. At 4pm Australian time which is some ungodly hour of the morning in the UK, the twittering started. At that time, the hashtag #kylietimebomb was to be tweeted and when it got to 25,00o tweets the video was going to be launched. Well that happened in 43 minutes. If you were on the kylie.com page the twitter feed was moving way too fast for anyone to read and it was quite something to see.

Well I was just walking in to the Surgeon’s office when it happened and I couldn’t watch it on my phone but I’ve just walked in the apartment and after a slight panic because Kylie’s youtube page hasn’t allowed it to be viewed in Australia (wtf?) I got to watch it on the Warner Bros Music youtube page. I love the song and the video is very London and Kylie cool. I love it. Kylie seems to be rocking tiny denim shorts for K25 and looking good doing it.

One of the freelancers here at work, a young guy from Britain, told me to search for a singer he thought I might like on youtube. Wow, was he right. When you first see Maverick Sabre, he looks pretty much what he is, a young guy from Ireland. He’s white, he looks a bit “chav” which is an english expression. As soon as he opens his mouth you think he really should be a black guy in the south of the U.S. Just listen, and enjoy.

My ex posted this video on facebook the other day and I eventually got around to looking at it. Dan’s description of this guy as being like a “cool version of Justin Timberlake” is pretty spot on to me. This guy samples his own voice as he sings and loops it to build a really rich full sound as he keeps belting out the song. Love it.

I’m off this afternoon for my traditional easter family trip so there will be a few days break in blogging. Have a great long weekend everyone!

It’s no secret that I’ve questioned Madonna’s relevance in the past few years. In the good old days she’d create the bandwagon and then abandon it when the try-hards tried to jump on it. In recent times though she’s seemed to be chasing it down the street, in danger of losing credibility faster than Tom Cruise jumping on a couch.

I think the Super Bowl performance and the hype that is building around her new album have reinstated her as a force to be reckoned with and someone never to be written off. Sure there are people suggesting she’s pinched some influences for her show from Kylie’s Aphrodite show but those things go around and around and they are all influence by history whether recent or ancient.

Madonna has just announced the dates for most of her World Tour happening in 2013. This time she’s even coming to Australia for the first time in 20 years. Bout bloody time Madge! I’ll start mortgaging my internal organs now to afford the ridiculous price but I’ll be there.

I have just read a great article on her cultural influence and the feminist view of her Super Bowl performance. I hadn’t even given it any thought but I have to say, if it was intended it was a fantastic “fuck you” to machismo and homophobia.

I generally just feel like this is a huge triumph for feminine and queer energy in the universe.  The Super Bowl is such an ugly symbol for everything that is brutish and stupid about American/Western masculinism, and this was like an INTERVENTION.  Not only did this woman make millions of football fans watch VOGUE — not only her GAYEST song, but a song that is LITERALLY ABOUT BEING GAY, AND IS BASED ON AN APPROPRIATION OF GAY STREET CULTURE — but she made it even gayer by projecting images of VOGUE MAGAZINE ON THE FUCKING FOOTBALL FIELD.  “FUCK YOU, FOOTBALL.  FUCK YOU, AMERICAN MALENESS.”  “BETTE DAVIS, WE LOVE YOU” – that sentence was said AT THE SUPER BOWL.  The major theme of that performance was that FEMININE GAYNESS IS AWESOME, and WAY MORE INTERESTING THAN CONVENTIONAL AMERICAN MASCULINITY.  As soon as it was over, I tweeted, “It got better.”

A long while ago I posted the video for Matt Alber’s single “The end of the world” which was a beautiful song with an equally gorgeous video where Matt made no secret of his sexuality, dancing with the object of his desire.

Matt recently released a new album “Constant Crows” and on that album is Matt’s cover of Madonna’s “Take a bow” which I think is more raw and honest than the original. Matt’s voice is beautiful!

Today I saw a video online and we weren’t very busy at work so I settled in to watch it. What is it? Absolutely beautiful. Take buskers from around the world, playing different instruments or just singing, fly around the world recording them all singing the same classic song, mash the recordings up. What do you have? One of the most amazing feel good videos I’ve watched in a long time.

Stand by me!

Last night Australia saw the latest winner of XFactor, the young, very likable Reece Mastin, who, once awarded, proceeded to belt out his debut “winners” single “Good Night”. It’s a really catchy and fun song, perfectly suited to a 16 year old aspiring rock start with a pop edge. The only trouble? While the lyrics are all new, the music is practically identical to P!nk’s “Raise your Glass”, right down to the drum beats before the chorus. You can almost hear P!nk singing at the same time it’s that obvious.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens about it. Twitter is full of people commenting on the similarity so it hasn’t gone unnoticed. Check out the two songs for yourself below.

This was filmed backstage during Kylie’s Aphrodite Les Folies world tour and it’s a beautiful simple acoustic version of her hit “Breathe”. The song was off her “Impossible Princess” album from 1997 which didn’t do well commercially at the time even though critics loved it. It’s since become a bit of a cult Kylie album.

A few people on the Kylie Facebook page are hollering for Kylie to do an acoustic greatest hits album. God knows I’d buy it. Kylie herself has floated the idea of doing a tour of smaller venues doing acoustic and different versions of her hits. I say YES PLEASE!