Blige, Mary J

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg to Share Super Bowl Halftime

      by

      The N.F.L. announced the three Southern California natives will share billing with Mary J. Blige and Eminem at Super Bowl LVI in Los Angeles.The N.F.L. announced Thursday that five performers would share headlining duties at the Super Bowl, with a distinct nod to West Coast hip-hop given the game’s location at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. Three Southern California natives and rap titans — Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar — will take the stage alongside Mary J. Blige and Eminem during the halftime show scheduled for Feb. 13, 2022. The game will air on NBC.“The opportunity to perform at the Super Bowl Halftime show, and to do it in my own backyard, will be one of the biggest thrills of my career,” Dr. Dre said in a statement.The halftime show for Super Bowl 56 will be the third produced by Roc Nation, the entertainment and sports company started by the music impresario Jay-Z, as the N.F.L. pushes to modernize the show and appeal to a more diverse audience. Jennifer Lopez and Shakira were dual headliners of the 2020 performance in Miami Gardens, Fla. The Canadian pop superstar the Weeknd performed at halftime of February’s Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., before a crowd limited by coronavirus pandemic restrictions. He reportedly spent $7 million of his own money on the production, in part to ensure that the spectacle would wow TV audiences.Organizers said the expected return of the Super Bowl’s usual capacity crowd at SoFi Stadium, the $5 billion venue near Los Angeles International Airport that opened in 2020, would restore energy to the festivities.“This year we are blowing the roof off the concept of collaboration,” said Adam Harter, the senior vice president of media, sports and entertainment at PepsiCo, which sponsors the show. “Along with the N.F.L. and Roc Nation, we continue to try and push the limits on what fans can expect during the most exciting 12 minutes in music.”The Super Bowl is typically the most watched broadcast of the year, despite ratings declining in five of the past six years, notably among the advertiser-coveted demographic of people aged between 18 and 49. In February, 96 million people watched the Super Bowl between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs, the game’s smallest audience in 15 years, despite the N.F.L.’s biggest star, quarterback Tom Brady, leading Tampa to victory. That decrease was in line with overall drops in viewership for sporting events held amid the pandemic.If advertiser interest is any indication, though, this season’s Super Bowl could mark a resurgence. NBC said earlier this month that it had nearly sold out of Super Bowl advertising spots, which cost a record $6.5 million for 30 seconds.Kevin Draper contributed reporting. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Chucky Thompson, Hitmaking Producer, Is Dead at 53

      by

      He brought a range of musical influences to bear on the tracks he helped create for Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G. and many others.“My mind is always on ‘Record,’” the producer Chucky Thompson once told an interviewer, explaining how he was able to bring such a wide range of musical influences to the hits he helped create for Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G., Nas and other stars.For any particular track, he might draw on the soul records his parents used to play, or his time as a conga player in Chuck Brown’s go-go band, or some other style in his mental archive, as he sought to realize the vision the performer was after, or perhaps take him or her in a whole different direction.Mr. Thompson helped forge the hip-hop and R&B sound of the 1990s while in his mid-20s. He showed his versatility with his work on Ms. Blige’s second album, “My Life,” and the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut, “Ready to Die,” both released in 1994. The next year he was a producer on almost all the tracks on Faith Evans’s debut, “Faith,” another hit.In this period he was working for Bad Boy Entertainment, the influential label Sean “Diddy” Combs founded in 1993, as part of the producing team known as the Hitmen. But he continued to produce for a range of artists after the Hitmen dissolved later in the 1990s. If he — unlike some other producers in those years — defied categorization, that was deliberate.“In my brain, as a producer, I never wanted a sound,” he said in a 2013 video interview with Rahaman Kilpatrick. “That’s why you hear me on so many different records.”Mr. Thompson died on Aug. 9 in a hospital in the Los Angeles area. He was 53.His publicist, Tamar Juda, said the cause was Covid-19.Mr. Thompson was different from many of his contemporaries in that he was a multi-instrumentalist, often contributing guitar, piano, trombone or other flourishes to the tracks he produced. To get a particular effect for the 2002 Nas track “One Mic,” he flipped a guitar over and banged on the back of it.“He’s a true musician and doesn’t like to program heavily — just like me,” Mr. Combs told Billboard in 1995, when that publication included Mr. Thompson in an article on “the next crop of hotshot producers.” “Chucky has so many melodies in his head and produces from the heart.”Carl Edward Thompson Jr. was born on July 12, 1968, in Washington to Carl and Charlotte Thompson. In the 2013 interview, he said that his mother recognized his innate musical ability early.“She used to sit me in the kitchen and — you know how kids would just be banging and making noise? I was actually on beat with it,” he said. “She knew from there that something was different.”At 16 he was touring with Mr. Brown and his band, the Soul Searchers, playing the funk variant known as go-go, which was popular in and around Washington. It was a time when traditional live performances by bands were losing ground to D.J.s, who could keep the music constant rather than breaking between songs and thus keep people on the dance floor. Mr. Brown had his young conga player try to compensate.“He decided, ‘I’ll put a percussion break in between songs,’” Mr. Thompson told Rolling Stone in June. “So we would finish a song, then I’d do a percussion break, and I’d do a call and response — ask the crowd, ‘Y’all tired yet?’”The year 1994 was a big one for Mr. Thompson. Among the albums he worked on that year was the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut, “Ready to Die.”Bad Boy AristaThat same year, he co-produced much of Mary J. Blige’s “My Life,” the Grammy-nominated follow-up to her successful debut, “What’s the 4-1-1?,” with Ms. Blige and Sean Combs.Uptown RecordsBy the early 1990s he was in New York trying to market himself as a producer, and Mr. Combs and Ms. Blige were looking for material for the follow-up to her successful first album, “What’s the 4-1-1?” (1992).“She picked my song out of a ton of tracks from new and previous producers,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview with the website StupidDope.com in June. “I was truly honored. That track was ‘Be With You,’ and at that time it was very different for her and her sound. I felt at that moment we were onto something that would be special.”He ended up co-producing much of the album with Ms. Blige and Mr. Combs. Ms. Blige had a tough hip-hop image that defied female-singer stereotypes, and some people didn’t care for it. Mr. Thompson took that reaction into account as he helped her create the songs for her second album.“I didn’t like people throwing stones at something they didn’t understand,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I was like, on this record, people are gonna know you’re a singer. You’re the real deal.”“My Life,” full of confessional songs exploring Ms. Blige’s personal struggles, received a Grammy nomination for best R&B album and helped establish her as a star. In June, Amazon Prime unveiled a documentary about her career and the record, “Mary J. Blige’s My Life.”Over the years Mr. Thompson also produced for Usher, Raheem DeVaughn, Total and many others. He produced some of the final tracks for his early mentor, Mr. Brown, who died in 2012 at 75.Mr. Thompson’s survivors include five children, Ashley, Emille, Myles, Quincey and Trey Thompson. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Jay-Z, Foo Fighters and Mary J. Blige Among Rock Hall Nominees

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJay-Z, Foo Fighters and Mary J. Blige Among Rock Hall NomineesSeven of this year’s 16 nominees are women, including the Go-Go’s, Dionne Warwick, Kate Bush, Carole King, Chaka Khan and Tina Turner.Jay-Z in concert. He’s on the list of nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame released Wednesday.Credit…Brian Ach/Getty Images North America, via (Credit Too Long, See Caption)Feb. 10, 2021Foo Fighters, Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige, Iron Maiden and the Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti are all first-time nominees for the 36th annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, the hall announced on Wednesday.They lead a group of 16 nominees, including several who have received nods at least twice before: Devo, LL Cool J, New York Dolls, Rage Against the Machine and Todd Rundgren.After many complaints that the hall’s hundreds of inductees over the years have been overwhelmingly white and male, this year’s ballot is its most diverse yet. Seven of the 16 nominees are female acts, and nine feature artists of color.Women on the ballot include the Go-Go’s and Dionne Warwick — both receiving their first nods — along with Kate Bush, Carole King, Chaka Khan and Tina Turner.This year’s induction ceremony is planned for the fall in Cleveland, home of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.To some extent, the latest crop of nominees extends a pattern that has taken hold over the last half-decade or so, with a handful of alt-rock heroes and rap gods as all-but-guaranteed sure things; Foo Fighters and Jay-Z have just crossed the hall’s eligibility threshold of 25 years since the release of their first commercial recordings. Dave Grohl, the leader of Foo Fighters, is already in the pantheon as a member of Nirvana, class of 2014.From left, Chris Shiflett, Rami Jaffee, Taylor Hawkins, Dave Grohl, Nate Mendel, and Pat Smear of Foo Fighters. The band only recently became eligible for induction.Credit…Kevin Winter/Getty Images for IheartmediaA few recycled names from previous years’ ballots give a sense of the advocacy projects among the Hall of Fame’s secretive nominating committee. Rundgren, the eclectic singer-songwriter and producer whose solo career goes back to the early 1970s, has been nominated in each of the last three years; Rage Against the Machine, the agitprop rap-metal band whose planned reunion tour last year was disrupted by the pandemic, has been nominated three times over the last four cycles. LL Cool J has now gotten a total of six nods.Iron Maiden, whose lightning guitar riffs and demonic imagery helped shape heavy metal in the 1980s, has been eligible since 2005.But this year’s nominations also include some surprises. Kuti, the Nigerian bandleader and activist who melded James Brown’s funk with African sounds to create the genre of Afrobeat — and was introduced to many Americans through the 2009 Broadway musical “Fela!” — would be the first West African honoree. (Trevor Rabin, a member of Yes, which was inducted in 2017, is from South Africa.)And the hall’s nominating committee — a group of journalists, broadcasters and industry insiders — has clearly made an effort to highlight some of pop music’s many deserving women. The pressure to do so has been mounting for years. In 2019, the critic and academic Evelyn McDonnell tallied the 888 people who had been inducted up to that point and found that just 7.7 percent were women.Mary J. Blige performing in New Orleans. She’s on the list of hall of fame nominees for the first time. Inductees will be announced in May.Credit…Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressWhen Janet Jackson and Stevie Nicks gave acceptance speeches that year, they called on the institution to diversify its ranks. “What I am doing is opening up the door for other women to go, like, ‘Hey man, I can do it,’” Nicks said.If chosen, King and Turner would join Nicks as the only female artists to be inducted twice; King was admitted in 1990 with her songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, and Ike and Tina Turner joined in 1991.The nominations will be voted on by more than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals. The hall will once again enter a single “fan ballot” based on votes collected from members of the public on the hall’s website, rockhall.com. Inductees are to be announced in May.In December, the Hall of Fame and Museum announced plans for a $100 million expansion, which would increase the footprint of its museum by a third.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More