The Star Online: Entertainment: Music

Posted: 05 Mar 2014 08:00 AM PST

The soul music hit makers ponder a grown-up romance.

TONI Braxton and Kenny Edmonds have history together as soul music hit makers, which in the record industry is usually reason enough to rejoin forces.

In the 1990s he wrote and produced large chunks of her first two albums, both blockbusters with combined sales of more than 16 million copies; the discs spawned five top 10 singles, including You're Makin' Me High and Breathe Again, and earned three Grammy Awards for female R&B vocal performance.

So although their careers later diverged – Braxton took up with other collaborators and began acting, while Edmonds (known as Babyface) made his own records and helped create huge songs for everyone from Eric Clapton to Beyonce – the pair "always thought about working together again," Edmonds said recently.

"But we needed an idea," he went on, "something more than, 'Ooh, if we get together and make an album, it'll be hot.'"

They found inspiration in real life. On Love, Marriage & Divorce, their strong new duo album, Braxton and Edmonds ponder the vagaries of grown-up romance in unflinching, sometimes brutal detail. Both divorced, the stars pulled from their own experiences for songs that dig beneath did-me-wrong drama and slick sex talk.

Yet as true to themselves as they sought to keep the music, the result also feels designed to serve an often-neglected audience: middle-aged R&B fans.

"Toni and Kenny are really singing their truth on this album," said Stephen Hill, an executive at BET (Black Entertainment Television).

"They understand where they are in their lives and what they've been through, and I think they're aiming this record toward people who've grown with them."

For Braxton, 46, the prospect of getting personal – and of teaming again with Edmonds – led her to reverse a decision she'd made last year to quit music after several coolly received albums in which, she said, she felt decreasingly involved.

"I wasn't using my voice – I was using the voice others told me to use," she said. Dressed in a black off-the-shoulder sweater, the singer was seated with Edmonds, 54, during a break from shooting Braxton Family Values, the We TV reality series she stars in with her four sisters and their mother. (Before she entered reality TV, Braxton appeared in films including Kingdom Come and played Belle on Broadway in Beauty And The Beast.)

"When you're making one album after the next, like she was, sometimes you get to the point where you're just trying to make a hit, as opposed to really saying anything," Edmonds said. "She didn't know how to get back to it."

"It was a dark period," said Braxton, who famously filed for bankruptcy in 1998 and again in 2010. "But Kenny was the person who snapped me out of it. He said: 'Toni, you're forgetting you're an artist. Stop being a business manager and tell people your story.'"

The album sets frank reflections against the soft-edged arrangements for which Edmonds is known. In The D Word he describes dropping divorce papers on his wife's doorstep, while Braxton curtly dismisses a well-to-do lover in the shimmering I'd Rather Be Broke. ("Than with you" are the next three words in the song's chorus.)

Some of the songs, Braxton said, were born from casual conversations.

"We'd go in the studio and he'd just let me vent," she recalled. "Then the next day he'd say, 'That thing you were taking about – let's write about that.'"

As an example she pointed to I Wish, a disarmingly pretty piano ballad with lyrics that Braxton said had been inspired by things she'd heard her mother tell her father during her parents' divorce.

"I hope she gives you a disease so that you will see," she sings, "Not enough to make you die/ But only make you cry like you did to me."

"I might've opened up Toni a little bit too much," Edmonds said with a laugh.

"He did!" Braxton said. "The monster's out now, baby." – Los Angeles Times/McClatchy-Tribune Information Services

J-pop group AKB48 wants older members

Posted: 05 Mar 2014 10:35 PM PST

The all-girl pop group is inviting more 'mature' applicants to join.

Japanese commercial music juggernaut AKB48 is looking to build on its wildly successful all-girl group by adding a more mature member to its teen-dominated line-up, an advert released on Wednesday said.

The collective, whose 90-plus singers and dancers are rotated in and out of the limelight according to their waxing and waning popularity, regularly pump out songs that sell more than a million copies.

But now the management group behind one of the most successful brands in showbiz is looking to branch out of the teen and early-20s demographic.

"AKB48 is inviting applicants for a project called 'Otona (adult) AKB48'," announced a full-page advertisement in the Yomiuri Shimbun, the world's biggest-selling newspaper, which shifts 10 million copies a day.

"The only condition for qualification is that the woman is over 30 years old, with no upper limit. Applicants can be entertainment professionals or amateurs, married or single, self-appointed or recommended – none of these matter." Applications are being accepted until March 28, and the winner will be selected on April 12.

The putative appointee – dubbed juku-doru ("Ripe Idol") by Japan's tabloid press – will have a limited run with the group and will be signed only until the summer.

AKB48, one of the most lucrative groups of all time, is part pop act, part talent show, where a member's time on the front line is determined by how much adoration they inspire from fans.

The most popular girls or young women remain a part of the core group that sings and dances their way through formulaic bubblegum tunes. Those who fall out of public favour are demoted to a sub-group in an organisation structured somewhat like a football league.

Much of the group's appeal lies in frequent opportunities for fans to meet them, chat with them or befriend them on social networking sites.

This strategy, combined with flesh-baring outfits, has also given them a huge following among Japanese businessmen.

The new member of the Otona AKB48 project will take part in hand-shaking events and live concerts as well as a television commercial for confectionary maker Glico, the advert said.

The pop collective has previously courted controversy in what commentators say is a brazen marketing strategy. In one commercial, several attractive girls were shown passing bite-sized candies seductively from mouth-to-mouth, sparking criticism from conservative quarters that they were "encouraging homosexuality".

The group is in constant demand for advertising and has been involved in promotions for products as diverse as canned coffee and government bonds, while fronting a campaign aimed at reducing teenage suicide.

An annual "general election" determines who becomes leader of the group, with ballot slips only available to those who buy their latest single. — AFP Relaxnews

Kredit: www.thestar.com.my

Jumaat, 7 Mac 2014

The Star Online: Entertainment: Music

The Star Online: Entertainment: Music

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