Empoprise-MU News
The news letter for Empoprise-MU - An Empoprises vertical information service for music news.
Welcome to Empoprise-MU News
It's certainly been an interesting week musically, between the new Pearl Jam song and everything else. You may have noticed, however, that this blog doesn't always feature the big musical events of the week. Music itself is so broad that I find myself writing about things that interest me, which may not be the things that interest Robert Hilburn or whoever. If my discerning audience wants to bring a musical artist or group to my attention, however, feel free to do so via the "empoprises" email address that the folks at Gmail were kind enough to provide to me.
Behind the Scenes
Last week I talked about the lastfmfeeds group on FriendFeed. But did you know that there's a FriendFeed group associated with this here Empoprise-MU blog? Well, there is - http://friendfeed.com/empoprise-mu. The group currently consists of some music-related feeds that auto-populate the group, plus some things that I find in Google Reader, FriendFeed, YouTube and elsewhere that I share within the group. If I had unlimited time I'd probably blog about everything that appears in the group's feed, but (luckily for you, I guess) some things are simply shared in the group without comment. By the way, feel free to contribute to the room yourself!
Special Features
As an example of something that I read and enjoyed but didn't have a chance to write about, I recently shared an item in the aforementioned Empoprise-MU group. This was an Alan McGee piece from the Guardian entitled "It's time we applauded the genius of George Michael." It describes how George, who was somewhat trapped in the teeny-bopper image that was created when he and Andrew Ridgeley performed as Wham!, was able to update his image with his solo album "Faith." I don't know that I'd necessarily compare "Faith" to "Pet Sounds" as McGee did, but I do agree that it (or at least the singles, which is all I've heard) is a very strong statement. However, McGee noted that "Faith" contained a trap of its own:
Ironically, the success of his new Faith persona locked him yet again into the pop-image ghetto (the same one he tried to escape from with Wham!). His follow-up, 1990's Listen Without Prejudice, made a point of obscuring his image and subsequently Michael was penalised by his record company with lack of promotion (Sony wanting a forced return to the Faith-era image). The result? Michael was prompted (like Neil Young and Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis) to sue his record company and win back his freedom.
Read the rest here. Perhaps I'll write about Wham! itself a little more at some point.
Upcoming
I've planned a post for this coming week that you may or may not like, but that means a lot to me. It concerns a song that I first heard during my freshman year of college, and that I hadn't heard for decades afterwards - not only because of music tastes, but also because of geopolitical reasons. It's fun when music, politics, and religion all intersect - in fact it's "oh ho ho ho ho" fun. You'll understand when the post appears.
