As mentioned in our previous installment, 2011 was a particularly active year in the music industry. In this post, we will get address some of the past year’s biggest developments – the good, the bad, the ludicrous, and the hilarious.
2011 In Music News (Let’s Not Do That Again)
- Undulating heap of gristle and noted hydrangea enthusiast, Madonna, left her Latin plaything with his nanny and directed a film about a nice Nazi sympathizer.
- Katy Perry highlighted everything wrong with our culture when her album, Teenage Dream, produced five Billboard Hot 100 #1 singles, making it the second album in history to achieve that feat. (For those of you keeping score, the other album was Michael Jackson’s Bad.)
- Jennifer Lopez divorced a Puerto Rican cadaver and began shilling for a car no Americans will ever buy.
- Speaking of J. Lo, she and Aerosmith scat-singing rag doll, Steven Tyler, became judges on American Idol. Lopez pretended that she was a nice person and Tyler assumed Paula Abdul’s former role as pill-addled spewer of gobbledegook.
- There was another music competition on television this year – NBC’s The Voice. Evidently, NBC executives decided that success lay in mimicking FOX’s karaoke juggernaut (you do not get to be the fourth place network without some effort!), so they assembled a rag-tag group of pop gurglers to mentor contestants. Improbable sex symbol and singer of your dental assistant’s favorite band, Adam Levine, was joined by Cee Lo Green, Dee Snider and some other guy in the set’s comically over-sized chairs. Bolstered by by his sudden popularity, Green then decided to squander it by performing at the Grammys with a corn husk doll and some puppets.
- R. Kelly released the cover art to the greatest autobiography of all time.
- Jay-Z and Beyonce got fake pregnant.
- Venereal disease-addled rockers, Kings of Leon, began to slowly implode. In January, their drummer began a Twitter war (ugh) with Glee creator Ryan Murphy after Murphy complained that the band would not grant him permission to use their music. A barely-coherent homophobic and misogynistic fracas ensued and Dave Grohl leapt to the band’s defense (double ugh). Seven months later, the band’s lead singer drunkenly walked off a Dallas stage after belching out a few songs. Following the scandal, the band announced that they would be taking a hiatus. America responded by pulling the cotton out of its collective ears and high-fiving some pigeons.
- Lauryn Hill laughed smugly when we realized that she had been right about Wyclef Jean all along.
- Arcade Fire won a Grammy and Rosie O’Donnell reminded us that she’s our nation’s foremost arbiter of taste.
- Pearl Jam celebrated 20 years of angst-y anti-commercialism by releasing a movie about themselves and charging $89 for tickets to their anniversary concert. Our fingers are still crossed for a Collective Soul anniversary show and film.
- Bono explained to us what the worst part of AIDS is for him.*
- People accused Lady Gaga of ripping off other pop acts and we all yawned and did not bother to pretend to care.
- A make believe hoodrat called Kreayshawn existed.
- Kanye continued to be Kanye.
- Justin Bieber became a man.
- Martin Scorsese released a documentary about George Harrison that everyone should see.
- To pay homage to the 20th anniversary of the Year Punk Broke, the recording industry decided to poke at Kurt Cobain’s corpse until more Nirvana nuggets fell out.
Coming Up in Part Three: Indie Darlings, Lost Luminaries, Reissues & The Worst of the Worst.
* Take it away, Irish Jesus! http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/opinion/a-decade-of-progress-on-aids.html
