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Thursday, May 27, 2010

Brett Michaels Courageous Rocker or Con Artist?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 10 years or so, you’ve heard of and probably watched several episodes of American Idol.  However if you’re like me you don’t put too much stock in the show these days…  Needless to say our latest “American Idol” was crowned last night! *insert fan fare and confetti here*
It was an awesome ending to an otherwise boring season on American Idol and Lee Dewyze broke down even before he was announced the American Idol winner while Simon Cowell managed to tear up a little during his farewell speech. 
 
For those of you with a life, here are a few links to videos and synopsis  of the show:
 
Had to embed my favorite exploitation victims!
 
http://www.youtube.com/v/IsjOgAnpsZ4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1">

OK now that we have all of that BS out of the way let’s get to the meat of why we’re here…  This Brett Michaels character!
 
Wasn’t he in the hospital last week for some MAJOR shit?  But the doctors gave him the OK to perform and put on a tour? #cmonson 
 
Let’s break it down:
 
1. Let’s start from the beginning, Michaels has suffered from Juvenile Diabetes for most of his life (although I was thought when you were an adult they just called in diabetes…guess I learned something new *shrug*).  In a march interview with popeater.com Michaels had this to say "I'm a life-long juvenile diabetic, so taking four injections a day and, as I just did right before this, probably six to eight blood tests a day. I really have a strong cause and I'm in there fighting for it."
 
2. Early in April, Michaels was rushed to the hospital and underwent an emergency appendectomy. He was released several days later.
Following the scare, he wrote on his Web site, "They told me that if I had gone on stage like I wanted to, [my appendix] likely would have ruptured and I could have died," and joked that "getting your appendix out HURTS."
 
3. On April 21, Michaels made an emergency visit to the hospital after suffering a crippling headache that turned out to be a brain hemorrhage. He was in critical condition, but eventually recovered and was discharged from the Phoenix hospital on May 4.  
 
On May 20, Michaels appeared on Oprah saying, "I've never been shot, thank God, but I can tell you this: It sounded like a small handgun went off in the back of my head. They call it a thunderclap, and I've never instantaneously had a headache like that in my entire life. The word's not even a headache. It's like a migraine times 10."
 
4. May 21, (AKA Last Friday) Bret Michaels was back in the hospital after what doctors described as a "warning stroke."  A message was posted on Michaels' official website saying that he "was readmitted to the hospital this week after suffering numbness on the left side of his body, predominantly his face and hands, which doctors described as a transient ischemic attack, or warning stroke."  During testing the doctors discovered a whole in Brett’s heart that has apparently been there untreated since birth.
 
5. May 23, Mr. Michaels appears on the Celebrity Apprentice finale, and wins! (I can see doctors OK-ing this)
 
6. Then a mere month after a brain hemorrhage, and 5 days after a “warning stroke” Brett Michaels goes on the American Idol Finale, and performs! (really!?), and if that ain’t enough, he’s scheduled to return to the stage with a show on May 28 at the Hard Rock in Biloxi, Miss., followed by a tour with Lynyrd Skynyrd kicking off June 10 in West Palm Beach, Florida.
 
Let’s be real for two fuckin seconds! I’m not even gonna give you my opinion on this.  I’ve given you the facts, you form your own opinions, but if you ask me I think most of this is a publicity stunt.  Look at it, Brett Michaels the Poison front man is dead!  Everybody knows that, when celebrities do “Love” based reality shows on VH1 that’s the equivalent of a rapper signing to Koch records.  It’s the last stop before they’re put out to pasture.
 
Isn’t it just mildly suspicious that all this has come just months prior to the start of his upcoming tour?  You be the judge, this is just how I feel.  Only time will tell…
 
—Seven owt

Monday, May 10, 2010

Lena Horne dies at 92; dynamic singer and activist broke barriers in Hollywood (Washington Post)

By Adam Bernstein
Monday, May 10, 2010; 1:30 AM 





Lena Horne, 92, an electrifying performer who shattered racial boundaries by changing the way Hollywood presented black women and who enjoyed a six-decade singing career on stage, television and in films, died Sunday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Ms. Horne, considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, came to the attention of Hollywood in 1942. She was the first black woman to sign a meaningful long-term contract with a major studio, a contract that said she would never have to play a maid.

"What people tend not to fully comprehend today is what Lena Horne did to transform the image of the African American woman in Hollywood," said Donald Bogle, a film historian.

"Movies are a powerful medium and always depicted African American women before Lena Horne as hefty, mammy-like maids who were ditzy and giggling," Bogle said. "Lena Horne becomes the first one the studios begin to look at differently. . . . Really just by being there, being composed and onscreen with her dignity intact paved the way for a new day" for black actresses.

He said Ms. Horne's influence was apparent within a few years of her leaving Hollywood, starting with actress Dorothy Dandridge's movie work in the 1950s. Later, Halle Berry, who won the 2001 best actress Oscar for "Monster's Ball," called Ms. Horne an inspiration.

Ms. Horne's reputation in Hollywood rested on a handful of musical films. Among the best were two all-black musicals from 1943: "Cabin in the Sky," as a small-town temptress who pursues Eddie "Rochester" Anderson; and "Stormy Weather," in which she played a career-obsessed singer opposite Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

In other films, she shared billing with white entertainers such as Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Mickey Rooney and Red Skelton but was segregated onscreen so producers could clip out her singing when the movies ran in the South.

"Mississippi wanted its movies without me," she told the New York Times in 1957. "So no one bothered to put me in a movie where I talked to anybody, where some thread of the story might be broken if I were cut."

In Hollywood, she received previously unheard-of star treatment for a black actor. Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios featured Ms. Horne in movies and advertisements as glamorously as white beauties including Hedy Lamarr, Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable.

The media sometimes described Ms. Horne in terms that upset her.
"I hated those awful phrases they used to trot out to describe me!" she once said. "Who the hell wants to be a 'chocolate chanteuse' ?"

Ms. Horne was also frustrated by infrequent movie work and feeling limited in her development as an actress. She confronted studio officials about roles she thought demeaning, a decision that eventually hurt her.

James Gavin, a historian of cabaret acts who has written a biography of Ms. Horne, said: "Given the horrible restrictions of the time, MGM bent over backward to do everything they could. After MGM, she was an international star, and that made her later career possible, made her a superstar." 


Ms. Horne appeared on television and at major concerts halls in New York, London and Paris. She starred on Broadway twice, and her 1981 revue, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," set the standard for the one-person musical show, reviewers said. The performance also netted her a special Tony Award and two Grammy Awards.

Gavin said Ms. Horne cultivated a "ferocious" singing personality through her flashing eyes and teeth.
"Unlike Perry Como and Bing Crosby, who were warm, familiar presences, Lena Horne was a fierce black woman and not a warm and fuzzy presence," Gavin said. "She was formidable and the first black cabaret star for white society."

Ms. Horne said she felt a need to act aloof onstage to protect herself from unwanted advances early in her career, especially from white audiences.

"They were too busy seeing their own preconceived image of a Negro woman," she told the New York Daily News in 1997. "The image that I chose to give them was of a woman who they could not reach. . . . I am too proud to let them think they can have any personal contact with me. They get the singer, but they are not going to get the woman."

For her repertoire, she chose the sophisticated ballads of Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Billy Strayhorn. She loved the music but also said she liked surprising the white audience who expected black entertainers to sing hot jazz or blues and dance wildly.

In her singing, Ms. Horne showed great range and could convincingly shift between jazz, blues and cabaret ballads. New Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett praised her "sense of dynamics that allowed her to whisper and wheedle and shout." 

In the early 1960s, Ms. Horne said she felt her sophisticated act sounded increasingly obsolete as she saw a younger generation at sit-ins and marches protesting racial discrimination.

"I thought, 'How can I sing about a penthouse in the sky, when with the housing restrictions the way they are, I wouldn't be allowed to rent the place?' " she told the Times in 1981.

Ms. Horne struggled for years to find a public role on race matters. Her earliest mentors urged her to remain reserved and graceful in public, what she called "a good little symbol."

In the late 1940s and 1950s, she chose to focus on quietly defying segregation policies at upscale hotels in Miami Beach and Las Vegas where she performed. At the time, it was customary for black entertainers to stay in black neighborhoods, but Ms. Horne successfully insisted that she and her musicians be allowed to stay wherever she entertained. One Las Vegas establishment reportedly had its chambermaids burn Ms. Horne's sheets.

In 1963, Ms. Horne appeared at the civil rights March on Washington with Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory and was part of a group, which included authors James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, that met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to urge a more active approach to desegregation. Ms. Horne also used her celebrity to rally front-line civil rights activists in the South and was a fundraiser for civil right groups including the NAACP and the National Council of Negro Women. 


Looking back, she said her legacy on race was complicated by her ambition. She said she married the white conductor and bandleader Lennie Hayton in 1947 -- her second marriage -- to advance her career because "he could get me into places no black manager could."

"It was wrong of me, but as a black woman, I knew what I had against me," she told the Times in 1981. "He was a nice man who wasn't thinking all these things, and because he was a nice man and because he was in my corner, I began to love him.'"

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her father was a civil servant and gambler who largely abandoned the family, although Ms. Horne reconnected with him in the late 1930s. Her mother, an actress, was largely absent from Ms. Horne's early life because of work on the black theater circuit.

Shifted at first among friends and relatives, Ms. Horne was raised mostly by her maternal grandmother, a stern social worker and suffragette in Bedford-Stuyvesant, then a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood. Ms. Horne said she was influenced by her grandmother's "polite ferocity."


In 1933, when she was 16, Ms. Horne was reunited with her mother and new stepfather, a white Cuban. It was the peak of the Depression, and they lived on relief in Harlem. Ms. Horne was pushed into a job at the Cotton Club by her mother, who knew the Harlem nightclub's choreographer.
The segregated club attracted white clientele who liked to watch the top black entertainers of the day, such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, surrounded by what was promoted as a "tall, tan and terrific" chorus of girls.

"I could carry a tune, but I could hardly have been called a singer," Ms. Horne said. "I was tall and skinny and I had very little going me for except a pretty face and long, long hair that framed it rather nicely."

Ms. Horne began by wearing three large feathers and doing a fan dance, but she took singing lessons and gradually won better parts.

Ms. Horne made $25 a week for three shows nightly seven days a week. Her stepfather went to see the racketeering club owners to raise Ms. Horne's salary. In reply, they had his head shoved down a toilet, Ms. Horne said.

She was soon hired to sing with Noble Sissle's Society Orchestra, a leading black orchestra. Sissle emphasized decorum, even when the band members were not allowed to enter the hotel through the front door. In Indianapolis, the band slept on circus grounds when no hotel would put them up.
Exhausted by 19, she fled to her father's home in Pittsburgh and married a friend of his, Louis J. Jones, a minor Democratic Party operative. She and Jones had two children, Gail and Edwin, but the marriage disintegrated over money quarrels.

As she returned to singing and struggled to find work, one club owner told her she looked "too refined for a Negro." Her agent advised her to "pass as Spanish," but she refused. She appeared in a "race movie" intended for black audiences called "The Duke Is Tops" (1938) and in the Broadway musical "Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939."


White bandleader Charlie Barnet was said to have remarked when first seeing her, "Wow, who are you?" He then hired her in 1940 and provided Ms. Horne with some of her earliest recordings, including two hits, "You're My Thrill" and "Good for Nothing' Joe."

Helped by record producer John Hammond, she won a long engagement at Manhattan's Cafe Society Downtown, the first integrated nightclub in the United States. She had a stormy affair with married boxer Joe Louis, a regular at the nightspot, and befriended entertainer and social activist Paul Robeson. Her friendship with Robeson, a communist sympathizer, was a key factor that led to her brief blacklisting a decade later.

The work at Cafe Society Downtown prompted ecstatic reviews and was a major step in Ms. Horne's career. She was soon in Hollywood singing at the Little Troc club, and film studio composer-arranger Roger Edens urged her to make a screen test for MGM.

"I didn't know him, but he went to his bosses at MGM and told them about me," Ms. Horne once said. "I wasn't impressed because I didn't want to be in California, and I hadn't ever thought about the movies.

"My father flew in from Pittsburgh, and we sort of laughingly went to the studio. My father was, in fact, fighting against the idea of my going into the movies, because neither of us liked the roles that we African Americans were obliged to play at the time. So I thought nothing of it, but lo and behold, they took me! Friends like [director] Vincente Minnelli, [composer] Billy Strayhorn and [bandleader] Count Basie all convinced me that I should take the job."


Working closely with NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White, Ms. Horne said she wanted to "try to establish a different kind of image for Negro women." They successfully challenged the casting system that had long marginalized black performers onscreen by having them portray servants, minstrels or jungle natives.

To Ms. Horne's surprise, her efforts to overcome servile screen parts was resented by many black actors who viewed her as a threat more than a pioneer. She said she was perceived as a danger to the system of informal "captains" in the black acting community who worked as liaisons with film producers when they needed "natives" for the latest Tarzan picture.

"I was not trying to embarrass anyone or show up my colleagues," Ms. Horne told film critic Richard Schickel for his 1965 biography, "Lena." "I was only trying to see if I could avoid in my career some of the traps they had been forced into. It was no crusade, though of course I hoped that if I could set my own terms in the movies and also be successful, then others might be able to follow."


Bored from infrequent movie work, she began taking outside singing engagements and devoted more time to advocating fair employment and anti-lynching laws. She also filed a complaint with the NAACP when she sang for soldiers at Fort Reilly, Kan., on a studio-sponsored tour and saw German prisoners of war seated ahead of black soldiers. This complaint irritated the studio.

MGM producer Arthur Freed was also unhappy that Ms. Horne refused to act in a Broadway show he had backed, "St. Louis Woman." She said the black characters were clichéd and offensive. She said Freed took revenge by turning down her requests for plum movie assignments.

She returned to a lucrative singing career. At one point in the mid-1950s, she made $12,500 a week singing at Las Vegas casinos. Her 1957 best-selling album of jazz standards, "At the Waldorf Astoria," captured her at a peak moment -- at the tony New York hotel where she long performed, backed by an orchestra conducted by her husband, Hayton.

She and Harry Belafonte co-starred on Broadway in "Jamaica," a 1958 musical by Harold Arlen and E.Y. "Yip" Harburg. She received a Tony Award nomination playing a Jamaican dressmaker who dreams of a push-button life in America.

In 1969, she won a leading part in a dramatic movie, as a brothel madam and the lover of a white town sheriff played by Richard Widmark in "Death of a Gunfighter." She later called the film "too little, too late."

Ms. Horne continued her active singing schedule, appearing with Belafonte and Tony Bennett. She also appeared on "Sesame Street" singing to Kermit the Frog and played Glinda the Good in "The Wiz," a 1978 musical based on "The Wizard of Oz" and directed by Sidney Lumet, who was then her son-in-law.

After the triumph of her 1981 Broadway show, she led an increasingly isolated life in her Manhattan apartment. Her 1993 appearance honoring composer Billy Strayhorn at the JVC Jazz Festival led to her first album in a decade, "We'll Be Together Again." Her 1995 release, "An Evening With Lena Horne," won the Grammy Award for best jazz vocal performance.

Hayton, from whom she had long been separated, died in 1971; her son died around the same time from a kidney ailment. Survivors include her daughter, the writer Gail Buckley; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Ms. Horne spoke of her one-woman show as the most liberating moment of her life, saying her identity was clear to her because "I no longer have to be a 'credit,' I don't have to be a 'symbol' to anybody. I don't have to be a 'first' to anybody. I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become. I'm me, and I'm like nobody else."

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Houston Rapper Trae Tha Truth Suing Radio One (OZONE MAGAZINE)

Ozone Magazine Article:



Houston rapper Trae Tha Truth (nee Frasier Thompson) will be holding a press conference at 11:00 AM on Wednesday, May 5, 2010 at the Harris County Civil Courthouse to announce the filing of a lawsuit in the 189th District Court of Harris County Texas, 201 Caroline, 12th Floor, Houston, Texas, against Radio One, which owns and operates Houston radio Station 97.9 KBXX, The Box.

[Previously, OZONE featured an open letter to Radio One's KBXX The Box for banning Trae's music from the airwaves, from Texas Hip Hop advocate and former OZONE editor Matt Sonzala.]

The civil case alleges a consistent pattern of business disparagement, conspiracy and tortious interference. Defendants include Radio One, the radio station’s general manager Doug Abernathy, program manager Terri Thomas and morning show radio personality Nnete Inyangumia. Trae decided to file the lawsuit after the radio station officially banned his music from receiving airplay, and then began to interfere in his relationships with other music industry professionals. Radio One is the seventh largest radio broadcasting company in the country, and is the largest one targeting African American audiences in the U.S. The Box is the only hip hop radio station in Houston.

The suit, which will be filed by Houston attorney Warren Fitzgerald Jr., alleges that Trae was the subject of a radio ban after Nnete falsely accused Trae during an on-air interview of causing the violence which occurred at public festival which he sponsored. Ironically, Trae has arguably been the most active Houston rap artist when it comes to serving the local community. In 2008, Trae was honored by Houston Mayor Bill White and Council Member Peter Brown with his own “Trae Day” in honor of his outstanding community service.

After Nnete had made the disparaging remark about Trae on the radio, he later released a “mix tape” that had a humorous lyric about Nnette’s weight.

Trae notes, “I would not have filed a lawsuit, but when other people started being hurt by this ban, I knew I had to stand up.” The suit also alleges that a radio station staff member was suspended for a week and a half without pay for making a mixtape outside of work that had Trae’s music in it. The employee, in fear of losing his job, and the ability to feed his family, had to end his relationship with Trae. Another alleged incident occurred when rapper 6tre Gangsta, an artist signed to Battery/Sony Records, asked Trae to be on his new single. However when KBXX found out about the song, they notified 6tre that the song would be banned. This resulted in the record community scrapping both the song and the music video that had been slated for BET.

Even Haitian earthquake victims lost out, due to the station refusing to advertise Trae’s appearance at a benefit fundraiser. Other alleged incidents are listed in the lawsuit, the most recent being the firing of the “Kracker Nuttz,” an on air DJ tandem, for their accidentally playing a song on the air by Chamillionaire, which they did not realize had Trae on one of its verses. Ironically, the “Kracker Nuttz”, who were 12-year veterans of the station, had the Number One rated radio show there.

Rap-A-Lot Records CEO, James Prince states, “I had been excited about being involved with the next Trae album, but with this ban taking place, not only in his home town, but likely also in the second best place for airplay, which is Dallas, it would be impossible to promote the album. This ban is sabotaging his career, because those cities are the foundation for breaking his records.” Prince adds, “Having run a record label for over twenty years, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Says Trae, “I just could not let any more people suffer and be punished by the radio station over this ridiculous vendetta.”

Trae’s attorney Warren Fitzgerald Jr. comments, “We believe that the defendants have gone beyond the parameters of legally sanctioned activity in first banning Trae’s music, then going so far as to intentionally interfere with his business relationships and thus destroy his career. I find this behavior repulsive, especially for a radio station that daily champions itself as music artists “best friend.”

Trae is suing for general damages to his reputation, character, standing in the community, mental suffering, loss of professional opportunities, performance revenue, record royalties and other damages.

Judge Randy Williams issued a restraining order prohibiting the radio station from destroying any evidence, including memorandum or emails surrounding the ban on Trae’s music.

A preliminary hearing is set for May 14, 2010 at 1:30 pm.