The Star Online: Entertainment: Music
The Star Online: Entertainment: Music |
- Afrojack of all trades
- MJ civil trial: Dr Conrad Murray was in financial and legal troubles
- Michael Buble's 'To Be Loved' tops album chart
| Posted: 02 May 2013 02:31 AM PDT For this award-winning DJ, writing dance ditties is a piece of cake. IT DOES not take much to write a sure-fire hit dance song - so says Grammy-winning Dutch DJ and producer Afrojack. "I can easily do a couple of tricks that can make me a No 1 DJ in the world, but that's not what it's about," he said in an interview at The St Regis Singapore last week. "But I don't want to be the world's No. 1 DJ. I just want to be the No. 1 DJ to my fans, the people who respect my music and listen to my music, to keep making them happy." Born Nick Van De Wall, the 25-year-old is one of a recent spate of electronic dance DJs who have crossed over to the mainstream music charts with pop hits. While his 2010 single, Take Over Control, was his first to breach the charts in not just the Netherlands but also in countries such as the United States, Britain and Australia, it was his collaboration with popular American rapper Pitbull the following year that thrust him into the limelight. The catchy dance-pop tune, Give Me Everything, which also featured R&B singer Ne-Yo, became a worldwide smash, hitting No. 1 in 11 countries including the US and several countries in Europe. With 8.2 million legal downloads, the song was also one of the best-selling digital singles of 2011. With mainstream success came brickbats. Electronic dance purists started lumping him with other superstar DJs such as David Guetta, accusing them of selling out to cash in on the increasing popularity of dance music among mainstream listeners. The soft-spoken man, who is single but was famously in a relationship with socialite Paris Hilton last year, takes it all in his stride. "I don't make dance music because it's cool. I make it because I like it. And the more people I can share it with, the better," said the DJ, whose stage name is an amalgamation of his former hairstyle (an afro) with the phrasal verb of jacking something in or up. "Everyone who says that I am selling out because I include vocals, that I'm selling out because I'm not keeping it exclusive anymore, those people are into dance music for the wrong reasons. "You shouldn't be into it because it's cool, you should be into it because you enjoy the music." He is now among the world's top-ranked DJs, and the readers of electronic dance music bible DJ Mag voted him No. 9 on their list of favourite DJs. In 2011, he also won a Grammy in the Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical category for his work with Guetta on Madonna's song Revolver. Indeed, he is now in the position to cherry-pick whom he wants to feature in his songs. Take for example his newest single, As Your Friend, which features the notorious R&B singer Chris Brown. "I made the song and a friend said Chris Brown would be dope on it. So we called Chris, he jumped on it, he said, 'Let me work on it' and one week later, it was finished." But the DJ, who runs his own record label Wall Recordings, is most excited about his latest collaboration - with veteran pop-rocker Sting. He does not want to reveal too much about their song together, saying only that the track will be one of the key songs on his first full-length album, which he is expecting to release in September. "We did one song in a studio in Hollywood, an instrumental, and we said it would be so cool if Sting was on it. Through some connections, the song got to Sting and he said 'let's do it', and sang on it." And while he will have more guest stars singing on the album, the DJ is quick to emphasise that he is still the driving force behind the tunes. "I want to put the focus on it being an Afrojack album. The guest singers and musicians will be an extension of the Afrojack sound." – The Straits Times, Singapore/Asia News Network |
| MJ civil trial: Dr Conrad Murray was in financial and legal troubles Posted: 02 May 2013 12:33 AM PDT LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Michael Jackson's personal doctor was in financial and legal troubles at the time of the singer's death, a Los Angeles detective testified on Wednesday in the wrongful death lawsuit brought by Jackson's family against concert promoters AEG Live. Conrad Murray was "in desperate financial straits," and under legal pressure with liens against his property in Nevada, Los Angeles police detective Orlando Martinez told a jury in the civil trial. Martinez, who investigated Jackson's 2009 death, said Murray had unpaid student loans, was behind on credit card bills and owed rent for his business. Murray, who had asked for US$5 million to care for the singer, was convicted in 2011 for Jackson's involuntary manslaughter of Jackson through an overdose of powerful anesthetic propofol weeks before a planned series of 50 concerts. Jackson's immediate family accuses AEG Live, who were promoting the London concerts, of negligence in hiring Murray, failing to conduct proper background checks and going to extreme lengths to get the singer ready for the shows. Murray is not being sued. AEG Live maintains that Jackson kept his dependency on propofol secret from outsiders, that a proposed contract with Murray was never fully executed and they could not have foreseen that Murray posed a danger to Jackson. Martinez was the second witness called by attorneys for Jackson's family. A paramedic who tended to Jackson after the overdose, testified on Tuesday that Murray had appeared "frantic," "pale" and "sweating" but never mentioned that Jackson had taken propofol, which is typically used in surgical settings. Jackson, 50, was pronounced dead in a Los Angeles hospital on June 25, 2009, a day after a rehearsal and three weeks before the first concert on his This Is It tour. Jackson's 82-year-old mother Katherine and the singer's two oldest children Prince and Paris, are also on the witness list later in the civil trial along with singers Diana Ross and Prince, and The Incredible Hulk actor Lou Ferrigno. Attorneys for AEG Live warned jurors on Monday that the trial, expected to last three months, would expose "some ugly stuff" about the King of Pop. |
| Michael Buble's 'To Be Loved' tops album chart Posted: 02 May 2013 12:13 AM PDT LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Canadian singer Michael Buble (pic) went straight to the top of the weekly Billboard 200 album chart, scoring his fourth No. 1 album. To Be Loved - a mix of standards and original songs - sold 195,000 copies in its first week, beating out its nearest competitor by more than 100,000 according to figures on Wednesday from Nielsen SoundScan. The 37-year-old singer's follow-up to his 2011 Christmas album had already topped the charts in the U.K. following its April 15 release there. R&B singer Fantasia, a former winner of the American Idol singing competition, grabbed the second spot on the chart with her fourth album, Side Effects Of You, which sold some 91,000 units in its first week. Justin Timberlake's album, The 20/20 Experience, held onto the third spot on the chart for the third consecutive week, selling 74,000 copies. French rock group Phoenix's fifth album, Bankrupt!, entered the chart at No. 4 with a career-best sales week of 50,000 units sold. Last week's top-selling album, Save Rock And Roll by U.S. rockers Fall Out Boy, placed fifth. Hip-hop duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' song Can't Hold Us was the top song on the digital song chart with 259,000 downloads last week. The pair knocked pop singer Pink and her song Just Give Me A Reason from the top spot and into second place. Year-to-date U.S. album sales of 95.6 million units are down 5 percent compared to 2012, while digital song downloads of 458.3 million are off 2 percent from last year. |
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