Tag Archives: Kanye West

Grammy Nominations Announced


Many newbies have a lot to celebrate as the Grammy Award nominations were announced Wednesday on the CBS during the Grammy Nomination Concert Special. The special was hosted by LL Cool J and Taylor Swift with performances by Maroon 5, Fun., NeYo, Luke Bryan, Dierks Bentley and The Band Perry.

The National Academy of Arts and Sciences (NARAS) made sure to spread the love around. Six artists lead the pack with 6 nominations each. Kanye West, Mumford & Sons, Fun., Frank Ocean, Jay-Z, and Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. Miguel snagged a well deserved 5 nominations for his sophomore album Kaleidoscope Dream. Personally, I think his debut album was better but this one a very, very close second. The Black Keys also received 5 nominations. Other big nominees were Kelly Clarkson with 4, Taylor Swift with 3 and Carly Rae Jepsen with 2 nominations. The Grammys will take place Sunday, February 10, 2013 at 8/7c on CBS.

Album of the Year:
Black Keys, El Camino
Fun., Some Nights
Mumford & Sons, Babel
Frank Ocean, Channel Orange
Jack White, Blunderbuss

Song of the Year:
Ed Sheeran, “The A Team”
Carly Rae Jepsen, “Call Me Maybe”
Miguel, “Adorn”
Kelly Clarkson, “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)”
Fun. feat. Janelle Monae, “We Are Young”

Record of the Year:
Black Keys, “Lonely Boy”
Kelly Clarkson, “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)”
Fun. feat. Janelle Monae, “We Are Young”
Gotye feat. Kimbra, “Somebody That I Used to Know”
Frank Ocean, “Thinkin Bout You”
Taylor Swift, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”

Best New Artist:
Alabama Shakes
Fun.
Hunter Hayes
The Lumineers
Frank Ocean

Pop Vocal Album:
Kelly Clarkson, Stronger
Florence + the Machine, Ceremonials
Fun., Some Nights
Maroon 5, Overexposed
P!nk, The Truth About Love

Best Rock Album:
The Black Keys, El Camino
Coldplay, Mylo Xyloto
Muse, The 2nd Law
Bruce Springsteen, Wrecking Ball
Jack White, Blunderbuss

Best Alternative Music Album:
Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel…
Bjork, Biophilia
Gotye, Making Mirrors
M83, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
Tom Waits, Bad as Me

Best Rap Album:
Drake, Take Care
Lupe Fiasco, Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album, Pt. 1
Nas, Life Is Good
The Roots, Undun
Rick Ross, God Forgives, I Don’t
2 Chainz, Based on a T.R.U. Story

Best Country Album:
Zac Brown Band, Uncaged
Hunter Hayes, Hunter Hayes
Jamey Johnson, Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran
Miranda Lambert, For the Record
The Time Jumpers, The Time Jumpers

Best Dance/Electronica Album:
Steve Aoki, Wonderland
The Chemical Brothers, Don’t Think
Deadmau5, > Album Title Goes Here <
Kaskade, Fire & Ice
Skrillex, Bangarang

Country Solo Performance:
Dierks Bentley, “Home”
Eric Church, “Springsteen”
Hunter Hayes, “Wanted”
Ronnie Dunn, “Cost of Livin’”
Blake Shelton, “Over”
Carrie Underwood, “Blown Away”

For the full list of nominees click here.

MTV Video Music Awards Promo


MTV has named funny man Kevin Hart as the host of next month’s Video Music Awards. Kevin Hart’s star has definitely been on the rise this year(Think Like A Man, Laugh At My Pain, Five Year Engagement) and he is no stranger to the awards show, so it only makes sense for MTV to make him this year’s host. They released the first promo of the show yesterday and it features the new “it” couple, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian (Keeping Up With The Kardashians). It’s a pretty good promo. Kim is not the best actress and she is acting as herself lol. This makes me think of when Fantasia Barrino (American Idol Season 3 winner) was playing herself in her Lifetime movie bio-pic, Life Is Not A Fairy Tale, and was doing a bad job playing herself.

The Video Music Awards air Thursday, September 6 @ 8/7c on MTV.

Entertainment News


Some entertainment headlines from the past week.

Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler both announced this week that they will be leaving the American Idol judging panel. There has been speculation for weeks about Lopez’s exit but Tyler’s came a little as a surprise. But not that surprising as there were rumors of major shake ups on Idol coming (Budget cuts, lots of firings). There are even some talks about Randy Jackson moving towards being a mentor towards contestants and not being a judge. Now that these two have left, who is going to take their place? Some of the names being tossed around as replacements are Adam Lambert (season 8 Idol runner-up), Celine Dion, Charlie Sheen, Mary J. Blige and Mariah Carey. I love Mariah and I think she would be great. It still wouldn’t get me to watch the show though. I don’t think anything could.  All these big names they want are expensive though and I don’t see any of them except Lambert taking less than $15 million for the gig. Just to put it into perspective Lopez made $20 million per year as a judge. That isn’t going to save them any money at all. I’m sure that in the coming weeks there will be more speculation and a ton more names thrown out there as replacements. It’s always funny watching the process unfold.

Get ready ladies. Another round of Magic Mike is on the way. Channing Tatum said “Yes, yes and yes!” during a Twitter interview with Glamour U.K when asked about a sequel to the his hit movie. “We’re working on the concept now. We want to flip the script and make it bigger.” Hmmm I don’t know about a sequel to this movie. Granted I liked it and all but there is no need for a sequel. The movie was resolved. If there were to do a sequel Tatum’s character wouldn’t be in it because at the end of the first one **SPOILER** he quits stripping. I mean there is plenty of eye candy there to continue I guess but story-wise it just needs to end.

R&B singer and songwriter, Frank Ocean’s new album, Channel Orange was released a week early this past Monday on Itunes. And while that might not seem like a problem for most people, apparently Target took offense and has decided not to stock the physical album that will be released this coming Tuesday, July 17th. Ocean’s manager, Christian Clancy was not happy about this and tweeted, “Target has refused to carry Frank’s album because of iTunes exclusive. Interesting since they also donate to non-equal rights organizations.” This in reference to Target having made donations to anti-gay political organizations. Ocean essentially came out revealed the week before on his tumblr page and that seems to be the reason Clancy is bringing that up. Target has come out and said their reasoning for not carrying the album is because Ocean’s management team released the album online first and not for any other reason. I would believe Target except Jay-Z and Kanye West did the same thing when they released their joint album, Watch The Throne, last August and Target still carried their album. It doesn’t matter to me though.  I was always going to get the album and it was always going to come from Best Buy who will surely reap all the benefits from carrying the album. Channel Orange is now available on iTunes and in stores this Tuesday. Check out his performance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

There is a new Walking Dead trailer for season 3 that came from Comic Con this week. It shows the survivors working together to clear the undead from that ominous prison glimpsed at the end of the last season. The footage also shows a katana-wielding new character Michonne (Danai Gurira) slicing through zombies and teaming up with Andrea (Laurie Holden). The trailer ends with a shot of Michael Rooker’s scumbag character Merle, who escaped from a pair of handcuffs by slicing off his appendage back in the first season. In the third season footage, Merle sports a knife for a right arm.   This looks crazy as hell. Can’t wait for it to start. The Walking Dead season 3 premieres October 14 on AMC.

Yay more Hunger Games news. Lionsgate has announced that they are going to be splitting up the third installment of the series, Mockingjay into 2 parts. They will start with Catching Fire hitting theaters on November 22, 2013, Mockingjay, Part 1on November 21, 2014, and Mockingjay, Part 2 on Nov. 20, 2015. This way, like the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises, every Thanksgiving families can head out to the theaters and see kids kill each other. Entertainment Weekly has a nice article on the possible places where they could split it up. There are many spoilers so if you haven’t read the book don’t even click on the link.

BET Awards 2012


The BET Awards aired their annual show last night and they should have just called the show “The Carters and Kimye” because that is all the camera cut to for most of the show. The show ran 3 1/2 hours and that is minus the pre-show. Lets’s start with the pre-show. It ran for 2 hours and was just a hot bed of ignorance and

Machine Gun Kelly performing. He’s …. enthusiastic and sadly he’s was one of the better performances on the pre-show.

Rocsi and Terrence. Ughh Why? She looks like a bedazzled hot mess. They said they are leaving 106 & Park. I need that show to end now. Terrence quitting I understand, Rocsi no. Just because you upgraded to Eddie Murphy as a boyfriend doesn’t mean you need to quit your day job because lets be real you really have no job prospects. It seems like the male former hosts of 106 &Park always end up doing bigger and better things than the show but the women always falter. I mean who has seen Julissa or Free in anything since they left the show.

Continue reading BET Awards 2012

“That Shh Crazy, Ain’t It Jay?” Watch The Throne Tour With Jay-Z and Kanye West


I know this is not the norm that I usually post on but I mean technically this is something I watched. It just wasn’t on television, in a theater, or online. The Jay-Z and Kanye West Watch The Throne tour made its way to Houston,TX as part of their 24 city tour and delivered one hell of a show. Maybe one of the best shows I’ve seen.

Doors for the show opened at 6pm. I got there at 7:30 and the lines to get in went on for some blocks.  Our seats were in the nosebleed section but this didn’t matter because no matter where you were in the arena it was a good seat. The show kicked off at about 9:15pm when they came out and did H.A.M. and Who Goin’ Stop Me Now. They started on opposite sides of the arena with Jay-Z on the main stage and Kanye West on a stage set in the middle of the floor.  The stages both ascended high into the air above the crowd and the screens on the stage flickered with images of dogs and sharks. The crowd was sooo hyped up and on their feet and never really sat down the entire time.

They then went into the Otis Redding sampled song, Otis, and then on to other Throne favorites Welcome To The Jungle, Gotta Have It and Where I’m From. With each song there were flames and lasers and lots of booming but those things didn’t distract from the main focus, the wonderful tag team on stage.

Jay-Z and Kanye performing "Otis"

Jay-Z then did his hit Jigga what, Jigga Who from his Vol. 2…Hard Knock Life album. After this song he gave the stage over to Kanye who then commanded the stage with his hits Can’t Tell Me Nothing, Flashing Lights, Jesus Walks, All Falls Down and Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix). Kanye’s outfit of choice for the night was a black over-sized t-shirt emblazoned with a picture of his face on it,  gladiator skirt, black leather leggings/tights and black high tops. Jay came back out for Diamonds as he is featured on that record. They then went back and forth on the stage and did more of their solo hits. It was in this segment when Ye’ was doing his song All of The Lights that I thought we were gonna get a full on meltdown. The lights weren’t all on and Kanye started the song up 3 times before the lighting people got it right put them up at full blast.  Meltdown avoided. Still not sure if that was real or something he does every night for that song.

They hit the last 30 minutes of the show when they got back together to do Jay’s 99 Problems. They then went into their final songs from the Throne album, No Church in The Wild (one of my favorite songs on the album), Lift Off (another favorite of mine), and N****s In Paris. I was hoping that maybe the 8 month pregnant wife of Jay-Z, Beyonce would come out and give a vocal on the song Lift Off that she is featured on since they were in her hometown but sadly no Beyonce.

The guys then went out on their latest single, N****s In Paris. I hated that song when I first heard it but I love it now. The crowd was exceptionally hype for this song as we knew it was going to be the end. They did the song and stopped at the line “and they going gorillas, huh!” then they started it again finished the song out and walked off stage. The arena started clapping for an encore and they came out again to……… N****s In Paris. At first I thought are we not going to get a different song, but then I thought what other song could they go out to. So I just Kanyeshrugged and danced my butt off the 4 more times they did the song. At maybe the 4th time they did the song, Jay-Z tells everyone to come up to the stage. Security tried to stop people but Jay-Z told them to leave the people alone and we all continued to rock. The crowd was so hyped that some girl threw her gold pump on the stage (it got handed back to her by Ye’) and someone else threw a joint on the stage. Oh Houston.

Epic show. It was well worth the wait and the price and Jay and ‘Ye didn’t disappoint at all. They did a total of 38 songs and that doesn’t include the 4 times they did N****s In Paris and were on stage for a little over 2 and a half hours. They were done at midnight with the crowd only wanting more. I was so pumped for the rest of the night and was up until about 2am. I had barely had any sleep for work the next day but it was sooooo worth it.