Mary J. Blige and Andrea Bocelli (ahn-DRAY'-uh boh-CHEL'-ee) will perform Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" during a fundraising segment for Haiti relief at this year's Grammy Awards.
The Recording Academy said Wednesday the duet will be available for download at iTunes.com/Target following the show, with all proceeds going to the American Red Cross to benefit earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.
The 52nd annual Grammy Awards will air live Sunday on CBS from the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
Music's biggest night will also include performances by album of the year nominees Beyonce, the Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, the Dave Matthews Band and Taylor Swift.Yahoo
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Kelly Rowland was looking for a fresh start when she parted ways with longtime manager and Beyoncé's father Mathew Knowles. After success with When Loves Takes Over, a reality show and other opportunities in 2009, Rowland is said to be on track for an even better 2010 thanks to a new record deal.
While it has not been confirmed, sources say the former Destiny's Child darling met with record executive Sylvia Rhone last week with the intent of signing a deal with Universal/Motown.
If said deal goes through, Rowland will join a roster of talent that includes Ryan Leslie, Erykah Badu, Melanie Fiona, Hal Linton and Kid Cudi.
As previously reported Rowland has been busy working on a follow up to her "Like This"-led album Ms. Kelly.David Guetta, who worked with Rowland on the hit single "When Love Takes Over," confirmed that he has infact contributed to her as-yet-untitled third solo studio effort.
"I'm actually already working with her on her next album. We've just done a few songs at the moment and it's all fairly top secret," said Guetta. "We've become really close friends over time. I think she's an amazing singer."
Vibe.com
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A copyright infringement lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court by Plaintiffs Ebony Latrice Batts, a/k/a Phoenix Phenom, and Manfred Mohr, against Will.I.Am (William Adams Jr.), Fergie (Stacy Ann Ferguson), Apl.De.Ap (Alan Pineada Lindo), and Taboo (Jaime Gomez), all individually and collectively as the music group the Black Eyed Peas.
Also named in the lawsuit were the Universal Music Group, Inc.; Interscope Records; EMI April Music, Inc.; Headphone Junkie Publishing, LLC; and Will.I.Am Music, Inc.
The Complaint alleges that sometime between January and March of 2009, the Black Eyed Peas intentionally and willfully copied “Boom Dynamite” when they co-wrote and recorded “Boom Boom Pow.”
As a result, “Boom Boom Pow, “as a whole, is substantially similar to “Boom Dynamite,” and the “hook” portions of both songs are strikingly similar. The Complaint also alleges that approximately one year after the plaintiffs submitted “Boom Dynamite” to Interscope and one year after “Boom Dynamite” was released, the Black Eyed Peas released the song “Boom Boom Pow” as the first single off the group's fifth studio album, entitled The E.N.D.
“Boom Boom Pow” became the first US number single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for Black Eyed Peas and is currently nominated for a Grammy for Best Dance Recording. The Complaint also refers to other claims of copyright infringement made against the Black Eyed Peas, and seeks unspecified damages, disgorgement of profits, and punitive damages.
Ira Gould, the attorney for Batts and Mohr, released a statement concerning the case:
“My clients submitted their copyrighted song “Boom Dynamite” to Interscope Records after Interscope had shown interest in some of their music, and the Black Eyed Peas later copied the song when they wrote “Boom Boom Pow.”
A simple listening of the two songs will tell you that the songs are substantially similar, and that the hooks of the two songs are virtually identical in rhythm and lyrics.”
Compare the two versions below and decide for yourself.
Phoenix Phenom "Boom Dynamite"Black Eyed Peas "Boom Boom Pow"HipHopWired
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Audio After The JumpOn Monday, we brought you info from the great Bun B and his journey to tear a hole in every beat he raps on this year. Uncle Bun wants his name next to dozens and dozens of songs this year, whether it's original material, freestyles or guest spots. Another MC known for knocking the lining out of a beat is Philly's Cassidy. Cass has been jumping on a slew of instrumentals, from Jay-Z's "On to the Next One" to Jay Electronica's "Exhibit C."Read more…
WASHINGTON – Bob Dylan and Natalie Cole are among the performers President Barack Obama will welcome to the White House next month for a concert celebrating music of the civil rights movement.The White House on Tuesday said Jennifer Hudson, John Legend and John Mellencamp will perform Feb. 10 in a concert to be broadcast the next evening. Smokey Robinson, Seal and the Blind Boys of Alabama also are on the program, which will be hosted by Morgan Freeman and Queen Latifah.
The evening will include the Obamas and readings from civil rights speeches.
Earlier in the day, Mrs. Obama plans to have 120 high school students meet with the performers to talk about music's influence on the civil rights movement.
Yahoo
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Audio Inside
Slip-N-Slide recording artist Deuce Poppi is back with another hot joint to follow up his smash hit "My White Friends". This time he mixes some old school Chuck Berry with some new school rhymes for "Go Poppi Go"
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Christina Milian's 81-year-old neighbor claims he was mauled by one of her dogs back in 2008 -- and now the man wants Christina to pay for the canine's alleged brutality.
Leo Skolion filed a lawsuit against Christina and family earlier this month in L.A. County Superior Court, claiming the family's negligence lead to the attack that left him with "severe personal injuries."
Leo tells TMZ it all started in October of '08, when Christina's home had "flooding problems" which caused a gate between their properties to become damaged.
Leo says he went over to speak to the family about repairing the gate when one of their dogs escaped ... then attacked him from behind and bit "a huge chunk" out of the back of his arm.
The 81-year-old claims it took 19 stitches and 9 months of rehabilitation to get back to normal -- and that he still has to receive psychiatric help for fear and depression.
Leo is suing Christina -- real name Christine Flores -- her mother Carmen and her sister Danielle for an undetermined amount.
Calls to Christina's camp have not been returned.
TMZ
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Video After The JumpForming like Voltron, the Four Horsemen are making a much needed return according to Tha Dogg Pound's Kurupt Young Gotti.
Consisting of Kurupt, Killah Priest, Ras Kass and Canibus. The Four Horsemen bring together the East and West Coast on some smash the mic sh*t.
These dudes were slaughtering mc's before Slaughterhouse. I'm looking forward to hearing what they have to offer
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The National Football League is planning to make its RedZone Channel available to cellphone users next season, a move that has its broadcast partners questioning whether they will still get the same bang for their buck on their multibillion-dollar television deals.
The move, which would free fans from their living rooms on Sunday afternoons, is a significant shift in media strategy for the country's most popular sports league, whose focus has long been to protect the value of its lucrative television deals.
The RedZone cable-TV channel provides coverage of games all day on Sundays, cutting to the action any time a team is within 20 yards of a touchdown. It acts as a viewer's "remote control," switching between scoreing plays, key ball turnovers and other plays of interest.
If the RedZone Channel becomes available on mobile devices, viewers would see the same stream of important plays as people watching at home as the coverage bounces from game to game.
"This is tailor-made to be able to watch during your kids' soccer games," said Brian Rolapp, the NFL's vice president for media strategy. "We want to put it on the Internet and wireless phones for next season, so we're thinking about how we do that."
For News Corp.'s Fox and CBS Corp., an expansion of the RedZone Channel has the potential to erode the audience for some of its most reliable—and expensive—programming. The two companies pay the NFL about $1.4 billion each season to air live games on Sunday afternoons.
"RedZone hasn't hurt us yet, but we watch it very closely," said Sean McManus, president of news and sports for CBS. "Anything that would adversely affect our ratings on a Sunday afternoon would be a major concern to us."
David Hill, Chairman and CEO of Fox Sports, declined to comment.
The NFL has enjoyed a record season of television ratings. The league announced Monday that for the third time in three weeks a larger audience had watched each playoff game this year than for comparable games last year, a stunning achievement at a time when every other sports league is struggling to hang on to viewers. For the regular season, NFL games attracted an average audience of 16.6 million viewers, an increase of two million viewers, or 14%, over last year and the highest average audience since 1990.
The growth has come even as the NFL has pursued a media strategy substantially different than other leagues. In an age when every other sports league has tried to win the digital age by making their games and highlights available everywhere at all times, the NFL has used scarcity to its advantage, limiting both the number and distribution of its games and highlights.
NFL highlights currently are available on the Internet only via NFL.com. For the most part games are available only during Sunday night broadcasts or for people who pay for DirecTV Group Inc.'s Sunday Ticket package and live in an area that can't accommodate a satellite dish.
The NFL has limited its wireless ambitions to two deals, with modest reach. It had a wireless deal with Sprint Nextel Corp. this season, but only for eight, non-Sunday games in the second half of the season.
It also has a deal for Sunday afternoon games with DirecTV, but subscribers have to pay $280 for the Sunday Ticket and then another $100 for the mobile feed, available on gadgets such as the iPhone, Palm Pre and select Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Android devices.
Prices haven't been set yet for the mobile RedZone.
This year, Sprint's NFL Mobile package was included as part of the company's Everything plans starting at $69.99, including Simply Everything, which combines unlimited voice, messaging and extensive data services– such as NFL Mobile Live—for $99.99 per month. Other Sprint customers paid $15 a month for the added service.
"We want to be on the best available screen, whatever that is," said Bob Dupuy, president of Major League Baseball, which offers fans the ability to watch games wirelessly and over the Internet through MLB.com.
While the growth of the RedZone channel may ultimately erode the broadcast audience, so far the additional coverage appears to have sparked more interest.
"There seems to be an insatiable appetite for NFL games," said Lee Berke, a leading sports media consultant. For the other major sports leagues, the size of the audience for a team's local broadcasts depends largely on team performance, while audience size for the playoffs depends on whether the teams participating represent major media markets.
"Right now the sentiment among broadcasters is that this kind of wireless and digital product is only building fans' attachments to the broadcasts," said Neal Pilson, the former president of CBS sports. "So far, if you can avoid it, you're not going to choose your two-by-two-inch cell phone over your 52-inch, hi-def television."
Wall Street Journal
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BERLIN – Esther Bejarano says music helped keep her alive as a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz and in the years that followed.
Now, 65 years after the liberation of the Nazi death camp, the 85-year-old has teamed up with the hip-hop band Microphone Mafia to spread her anti-racism message to German youth.
"It's a clash of everything: age, culture, style," Bejarano, a petite lady with an amiable chuckle, told The Associated Press ahead of Auschwitz Liberation Day on Wednesday. "But we all love music and share a common goal: we're fighting against racism and discrimination."
In Shalom, the first track of the CD Bejarano and the Microphone Mafia released last year titled Per La Vita, the bands sing about longing for world peace.
"My head is bowed, too many tears held back," the song goes. "Worried I look around and see what happens, I'm not their leitmotif, which is the base of their lives: Violence, hatred and death, because too many people remained silent."
The daughter of a Jewish cantor from Saarbruecken in western Germany, Bejarano grew up in a musical home studying piano until the Nazis came to power and tore her family apart. Bejarano was deported to Auschwitz, where she became a member of the girls' orchestra, playing the accordion every time trains full of Jews from across Europe arrived at the death camp.
"We played with tears in our eyes," Bejarano remembered. "The new arrivals came in waving and applauding us, but we knew they would be taken directly to the gas chambers."
Bejarano survived, but her parents and sister Ruth were killed by the Nazis.
For the past 20 years Bejarano has played music mostly from the past — Yiddish melodies, tunes from the ghetto and Jewish resistance songs — with her children Edna and Yoram in a Hamburg-based band called Coincidence.
About two years ago, Kutlu Yurtseven, a Turkish immigrant rapper from the Cologne-based Microphone Mafia, got in touch with the band to see if they'd team up with them.
"Our band wanted to do something against the growing racism and anti-Semitism in Germany," Yurtseven, 36, said in a phone interview Tuesday.
"Yoram told me that first of all he had to ask his mother Esther what she thought about a crossover project with a bunch of young rappers."
Esther Bejarano, it turned out, thought hip-hop music "was really a bit too loud," but also said she saw it as a good way to reach out to Germany's youth.
"We want to keep the memories of the Holocaust alive, but at the same time look into the future and encourage young people to take a stand against new Nazis," said Bejarano. "I know what racism can lead to and the members of Microphone Mafia are immigrants and have experienced their share of discrimination as well."
Yurtseven, a Muslim, also sees a message of religious harmony.
"All religions ask to love and respect others and that's what we do as well," Yurtseven said.
The crossover of modern hip-hop and traditional Jewish folklore turned out to be quite a hit. The rappers have mixed Jewish songs with stomping hip-hop beats and also created new lyrics for some of the songs that are more accessible for a younger audience.
Last summer, the two bands released Per La Vita and a documentary about the band that was initially scheduled for the Auschwitz liberation anniversary is now supposed to be ready later this year to be shown at high schools across Germany.
The CD was released on a small, independent label and it was not clear how many copies were sold.
Currently, the troupe is touring through Germany. Their audiences range from teenage immigrants at metropolitan youth centers to a more established, older crowd that usually favors Bejarano's classic approach to music.
"They all love it," said Bejarano. "Even some of the older guests sometimes climb on the chairs and dance."
Bejarano said it can be exhausting at her age to perform on stage with a bunch of youngsters but that she has found ways to adjust the shows to her needs.
"I've educated the boys," Bejarano said with her trademark chuckle. "We've lowered the volume and I told them to stop jumping around on stage all the time."
For Yurtseven and his fellow band members, the fact that they are performing with an Auschwitz survivor has been a unique experience as well.
"I once asked Esther how she can still make music after Auschwitz," he remembered. "And she said that if they had also taken away the music from her, she would have died."
Yahoo
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NEWPORT BEACH -- A 79 year old international jewelry thief, whose story is the subject of an upcoming movie starring Halle Berry, is under arrest in Orange County.
Doris Payne was arrested Friday afternoon on suspicion of grand theft after security guards at Saks Fifth Avenue in South Coast Plaza say she stole a Burberry trench coat worth $1,300, according to Costa Mesa Police Lt. Mark Manley.
Payne is being held without bail on a parole violation.
Payne's life as an international jewel thief is the subject of an upcoming movie, "Who Is Doris Payne," starring Halle Berry.
In 1999, she was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison after stealing a 5-carat diamond ring from a Neiman Marcus in Denver.
Interviewed by reporters in 2005, Payne said she had no idea how many jewels she had stolen but that her career as a thief had spanned the globe from New York and Las Vegas to London, Paris, Monte Carlo and Tokyo.
Detectives said she would use distraction techniques to confuse jewelry store clerks. She would engage the clerk in an interesting story, or ask to see other rings and confuse them, and easily slip away with the jewels. Eventually, Payne was caught as technology and security systems improved.
Denver police detective Gail Riddell described Payne in 2005 as a female Cary Grant, "smooth and confident."
"She is very good at what she does," said Riddell. "She has the style."
She was sentenced to two to five years for pawning a stolen Palo Alto ring in Las Vegas, as well as stealing a ring in Nevada.
In the spring of 2008, Payne completed her prison sentence in Colorado and returned to California, where she was released on parole until her arrest.
KTLA
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Talk show hosts may have more influence than they realize. According to ABC News, Nancy Grace of HLN (formerly CNN Headline News) interviewed 21 year-old Florida mother Melinda Duckett back in 2006, after Melinda’s 2 year-old son Trenton had disappeared. Nancy grilled the woman, accusing her of hiding something. Tragically, Melinda shot and killed herself the day the taped interview was scheduled to air.
Melinda’s family is suing Nancy for wrongful death, claiming that she inflicted emotional distress on the woman. Nancy doesn’t want cameras present at the deposition on Thursday, or the prohibition of the release of the video if it is indeed taped. Her attorneys say it’s necessary to protect Nancy from embarrassment.
Earlier this month, CNN and Nancy fought back against the Ducketts, asking a judge to force the mental health facility Lifestream Behavioral Center to turn over records from when Melinda stayed there.
What do you think? Is this whole lawsuit bogus, or could Nancy really be to blame? Should hosts be more sensitive to their guests, especially when those guests are in fragile emotional states? And should cameras be allowed into the court, or should Nancy be granted some privacy?
What makes this story even more sad is that Melinda’s son Trenton has never been found. He would be four years old.
Source: Twirlit
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Audio After The JumpDon't Sleep: Necessary NotablesHeadliner: Bun BCo-Starring: The hot hip-hop blogs
Songs We Can't Stop Playing: "Big Di-- Chaney," "2 Dope Boyz Freestyle" and "I Am"
Essential Info: Freeze, somebody bring him back the title please. Usually in this section, we shout out a particular mixtape. But as the great Bun B will tell you himself, there's a mixtape worth of new material from the Underground King floating around the Net, and he hasn't stopped rapping long enough to collect them all and put them out as one compilation.Read more…
Year after year passes and still no 'Detox' album from legendary producer Dr Dre.
With his place in music history already cemented I think the time has come to seriously ask the question. Will there ever be a 'Detox' album?
I'm not being cynical or critical of Andre Young at all when I pose this question. After all he is in my opinion the best producer in hip hop history.
But as more time passes and the date of his final studio album's release keeps getting pushed further into the horizon it's starting to look like the album will never see the light of day.
We all know he has enough quality music stashed in the vaults to release 10 albums at this point so why isn't there a firm release date?
In a recent interview with British newspaper The Guardian he gave this answer as to when we will see 'Detox'
"I'm working hard on it. I'm stopping to work on other artists in-between, but the minute it's done and I feel it right here," he says patting his heart, "that's when it will come out"
He further added "I have to go out to clubs now, You need to understand what people are listening to."
I think that sums it all up right there. When you have accomplished as much as Dr Dre has there isn't a need to go clubbing to see what garbage is being played. You don't follow trends, you set them yourself.
When Dre dropped 'The Chronic' and 'Chronic 2001' they were albums that set the standard for every other artist. With the kind of beats you could ride and smoke to.
We need that again from Dre. But the question remains, will he ever give it to us?
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Clifford Joseph Harris, better known as the rapper T.I., is being sued for copyright infringement by Nathan Filby, known as rapper Motoe Blizzid.
Filby- who is being represented by One LLP, an entertainment and intellectual property litigation firm known for handling high-profile copyright infringement suits- is taking issue with the rapper’s 2006 Grammy-award winning song What You Know. Filby says the song uses substantial portions of his 2004 track entitled Reverence.
Filby has performed with Ice-T, Snoop Dogg, and Ludacris among others and says he distributed Reverence to industry insiders including an agent at Relentless Management who works with T.I.
He says the musical evidence is irrefutable from their “same rate of harmonic range” to their “virtually identical core harmonic progression of descending 4ths” and “nearly identical instrumental melodic lines in terms of pitch, shape, and rhythm.” Filby even added illustrations in the court documents showing the two songs’ similar melodic similarities.
Filby is requesting a jury tail and seeks any damages and disgorgement of all profits derived from the song. T.I. Is currently at a halfway house in Atlanta from a federal weapons charge.
Source: RadarOnline
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Video After The JumpThe inmates at Cebu Provincial Detention (CPDRC) in the Philippines sure do spend a lot of time dancing. This time they are back with a routine from Michael Jackson's 'This Is It'
Choreographed by Michael's long time dance instructor Travis Payne and dancers Daniel Celebre and Dres Reid. I wonder if they extra commissary for doing this?
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Video After The JumpDiddy claims to have invented the remix, but his son proved adept at putting his own twist on things over the weekend at M2 Ultra Lounge in New York, where he celebrated his sweet 16.
On Saturday, Justin Combs held court at a themed party titled "I Am Prince," a nod to his father's "I Am King" fragrance campaign.
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