WABASH & MICHIGAN
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@kanyewest Air Yeezy 2 drops June 9th for $250. Anyone buying? (Taken with instagram)
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NEW MUSIC: CHRIS BROWN - ‘COUNTDOWN’
Check out this brand new track from Chris Brown, which is set to appear on his upcoming album, ‘Fortune’ that drops in July. I really like this! This is album is going to be ridiculous!
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MUSIC NEWS: CIARA ANNOUNCES ALBUM & SINGLE TITLE BUT WHY?
I don’t want to waste too much time writing about this because I personally feel like Ciara’s career is dead. However, she doesn’t think so, because she confirmed that her next album will be called, ‘One Woman Army’ and the first single will be called, ‘Sweat,’ dropping later this summer. Honestly, she is going to need every armed forces member to help sell this album…
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SPIN MAGAZINE: “BEYONCE IS THE GREATEST PERFORMER OF HER GENERATION”
If this past weekend has taught us anything, it’s that Beyonce is respected by her peers and fans alike. Many celebrities flocked to the Revel Resorts in Atlantic City over Memorial Day weekend to witness Beyonce’s first set of concerts after taking nearly a 10 month hiatus from performing, physically promoting her album, ‘4’ which dropped last June and giving birth to daughter, Blue Ivy Carter. The reviews of her 4 show stint in Atlantic City have been nothing but stellar, so it doesn’t surprise me that SPIN magazine calls Beyonce, the greatest performer of her generation.
When you think about it, she is, you cannot name one current artist who can match Beyonce’s talent, stage presence and ability to sell out shows in seconds. She is in a league of her own and her concerts this weekend confirmed that there is no rush for a follow up album because her previous work is enough for fans, peers and critics to reconginze that Beyonce is simply, the baddest chick in the game.
Check out SPIN magazine’s full write up below:
In 2011, Beyoncé put out a No. 1 album, shot and released a live DVD, and nearly broke the Internet by announcing her pregnancy, so performing four Memorial Weekend concerts can’t even jokingly be considered a comeback. Only three months passed between the birth of her daughter with Jay-Z, Blue Ivy Carter, and Beyoncé‘s announcement that she’d be returning to the stage at the opening of Atlantic City’s lux Revel resort and casino — three years separated her debut solo album Dangerously in Love and its follow-up B’Day. But stakes are so high in diva-dom these days, nobody can afford to take a breather. B dropped last year’s 4 in the height of Lady Gaga domination; now the music biz is tethered to Adele‘s ruptured vocal cord, Britney‘s serving as a judge rather than facing one, Madonna is starting a world tour, Katy Perry is a divorcee, and Rihanna won’t stop patting her crotch on TV.
But the difference between Beyoncé and all those other (legally, for now!) single ladies is black and white, which is exactly the color palate she chose to employ at her Revel shows. Beyoncé is the greatest performer of her generation and she knows it well. Her Revel concerts were more Liza With a Z than MTV — predicated on nothing but the tour de force of its creator. Saturday night’s two-hour show featured no gimmicks, no backing tracks, no hard-to-follow narratives, no whipped cream cannons. It was old school Vegas-style Entertainment with a capital E: singing, dancing, and charisma wrapped up in a few sparkly Ralph & Russo outfits.
Beyoncé entered larger than life as a center-stage shadow ordering the 5,500-strong crowd (with special guests Michelle, Sasha, and Malia Obama in box seats) to “stand up on your feet” for 4‘s “End of Time” and quickly demonstrated her voice and hips are as limber as ever. Flanked by her 11-piece all-female band, a corps of 10 dancers, and a few cleverly deployed LED screens flashing blocks of black and white and dizzying geometric patterns, Beyoncé devoted the first part of her set to light-hearted uptempos: “Love on Top,” “Get Me Bodied,” “Baby Boy.”
After her first costume-change break, she returned for a trio of numbers that paid homage to Vegas cabaret chic, breaking out fluffy feathered fans for a “Naughty Girl” that included a tribute to Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” But the party didn’t last, and she soon slipped into a series of earnest ballads, singing “1 + 1″ perched on her knees atop a grand piano after admonishing the front rows not to scuffle over a perspiration-covered souvenir:
“Okay, listen, don’t fight over this towel — it’s just a towel.”
We all know how it feels to be hurt and lied to,” Beyoncé insisted, asking the ladies to help her sing “If I Were a Boy” seamlessly mashed up with a bit of the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris.” The women belted even louder on her cover of Lauryn Hill‘s “Ex-Factor,” though, which served as an unfortunate reminder of how genius can go awry.
But right now Beyoncé is owning her brilliance like a boss. The Revel show highlighted how she’s become an accomplished multi-instrumentalist — her arsenal includes her powerhouse voice, her toned thighs, her whipping hair, her Vaudevillia
The lovefest was swiftly supplanted by the jilted-lover part of the set. “n eyes, and of course, her wind machine. And now she’s become even more adept at playing our emotions, too, eliciting Beatlemania screeches by revealing a mere glimpse of Blue Ivy during a video montage. She’s unlocked the secret to balancing her super-human talent with über-humanizing rhetoric like another megastar who only requires one name: Oprah.
As the night progressed, Beyoncé‘s strict black-and-white aesthetic began to slip, and in the set’s final frames, the LED screens flashed blinding walls of color heralding the arrival of “Countdown” like the conclusion of The Wizard of Oz. The swaggy march of “Run the World (Girls),” led into a funky version of “Why Don’t You Love Me,” then B hit the reset button again, returning for her Whitney Houston tribute “I Will Always Love You” dressed in red.
She wrapped, of course, with her ultimate razzle-dazzle, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” and a series of earnest thank yous — to her band, her dancers, her crew (“It’s very hard working for me because I want things perfect for y’all”), and to Revel “for building a place for all of us on the East Coast to go have a good time.” That’s entertainment, folks. In AC, the lady is a tramp, and this showgirl’s a business, woman.
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RIHANNA GOES TOPLESS FOR ESQUIRE MAGAZINE
This post requires no content, just look at how dope Rihanna looks! Aye, aye!
Watch the behind the scenes over at Esquire
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NEW VIDEO: JAY-Z & KANYE WEST - ‘NO CHURCH IN THE WILD’
It’s a little too artsy for me and they are not even in the video, either way, check it out below.
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Check out Kelly Rowland at the Glamour Awards in London. She looks real good!
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Are Rihanna and Drake creeping again? They were spotted at Club Liv in Miami and on set of French Montana’s ‘Pop That’ video this weekend.
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I completely forget about Mary J. Blige’s most recent album, “My Life II: The Journey Continues” but apparently she is still promoting the project that originally dropped last year. So, check out the new video for her current single, ‘Don’t Mind’
Wabash & Michigan is a Chicago based blog focused on covering celebrities and the news they create in the entertainment industry. Created and updated daily by me, Ryan.
