Rolling Stones Comback Issue

COMEBACK KIDS EDITION THE RETURNS OF A CENTURY Featuring, AC/DC, Black Eyed Peas, Daft Punk, Foo Fighters, Jay-Z, Mariah Carey And More…

GETTING BACK TO THEIR ROOTS Best Comebacks In Music History

GRAMMY SEASON RS Exclusive Interviews

JAY-Z All Eyes On Him

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Will.i.am confirms Black Eyed Peas are REUNITING (and, awkwardly, he’s heartbroken) Amy Duncan for Rolling Stones Thursday 7 Apr 2016 4:10 pm Share this article with FacebookShare this article with TwitterShare this article with Google PlusShare this article through email

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BLACK EYED PEAS ARE REFORMING PEOPLE (Picture: Startraks Photo/REX/Shutterstock) You can now call Will.i.am your fairy godmother, because he’s gone and made our dreams come true by announcing… BLACK EYED PEAS ARE REFORMING. Yep – you read that right.

After five years, the quartet made up of Will, Fergie, apl.de.ap and Taboo have finally decided to stop depriving us of their tunes and are getting back together to make sweet music.

‘Yeah…so…yes… There will be a Black Eyed Peas reunion,’ Will confirmed to Roman Kemp on Capital’s Evening Show.

But then he admitted that it wasn’t the news he really wanted to be giving, adding: ‘It just, it breaks my heart that I even have to say that because really we should just…we should just always have been doing Black Eyed Peas actually. We shouldn’t have ever…right.’

If you’re confused by what he was trying to say, he was trying to say that the Black Eyed Peas should never have gone on a break in the first place. TOO RIGHT. The group announced they were taking a indefinite hiatus in July 2011, playing their last gig in November that year as they finished their The E.N.D. World Tour.

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BLACK EYED PEAS - TOP 5 Because this news has got us feeling all nostalgic, here are our fave five BEP tracks (soz if they’re not your faves too, but you didn’t write this article *he he he*).

5. Don’t Lie 4. Shut Up 3. Just Can’t Get Enough 2. Where Is The Love 1. Meet Me Halfway Listen to the brand new Capital Evening Show with Roman Kemp, tonight from 7pm to hear the full interview with will.i.am.

Are you glad Black Eyed Peas are reuniting?

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Yes - I loved their music • No - I never liked them

The Foo Fighters come back into the spotlight After a long hiatus, the popular rock band has made their 2017 debut with a brand new song, released three days ago.

Reed Hoerner

FOLLOW Curated byEvan Morgan Published on: 4 June 2017

Image from Blasting News Image Library.

After the band's last tour, "The Broken Leg" tour in 2015, the #Foo Fighters have yet to release any new music to the public...until now. The first single of 2017 by FF is simply titled "#Run" and if it says one thing, it's this: they are not growing soft. "Run" is heavy, fast, and loud. It's possibly the heaviest song they've ever made, and it shows in the #Music Video that went live on June 1st via their Vevo YouTube channel. The

video is just as heavy as the music, and many fans hope that the sound they've created in "Run" will permeate through a possible upcoming studio album in 2017.

The Foo's are back!

Not much can be said about the Foo Fighters over the past year of 2016.

They haven't released new music, they haven't toured, they just haven't done much worth noting. And who can blame them? After non-stop writing and touring for the past couple years, I'd say the sextuplet deserves some time off. However, with this video's release, we can count on the Foo's to pull out another studio album over the course of the next 12 months. It's safe to say that if "Run" is any indication of the rest of the album, we're in for a brand new sound from the Foo's. They have changed their sound over the years, and it's easy to see that another change is coming.

A long, long wait The video for "Run" is a very classic Foo Fighters sort of video. It is both equally serious and hilarious. The most recent classic FF music video prior to "Run" was called "Walk" -- released in 2014.

This video starred the singer and founder of the band, Dave Grohl, as an average Joe getting fed up with the everyday disasters in life, such as people texting while they drive, getting stuck in traffic, or some little 10-year old flipping him off from another vehicle.

Annoyed out of his mind, he leaves his car during bumper-to-bumper traffic and gets away from it all. At times in the video, he beats people up for wearing a shirt that would say something like "Tough guys wear pink." And at the end of the song, the cops track him down and arrest him for being violent.

'Run' The beginning of "Run" shows a smiling nurse bringing an old man his dinner and pills for the night. It's implied that the man lives in a retirement home. He is angered by the woman's behavior, throws away his pills, and then he's wheeled into a room with many other elderly folks as they watch the Foo Fighter's perform "Run." The funny part about the video is that each band member is wearing makeup and wigs to make them all look like stereotypical old people. The song starts and grows with a loud, fast-paced riff that endures throughout the rest of the song. All the while, the elderly folks start a riot and break out of the retirement home like a prison, and wreak havoc in the streets.

AC/DC - Back In Black There are exceptions to every rule. When it comes to the rule that losing your lead singer means the end of a band, AC/DC is the exception.

Normally, when a band replaces a lead singer, it just feels ugly. See INXS for a perfect example. It's just too hard to recreate that special magic that one voice has with one group of musicians. Apparently, finding someone with damn near the exact same voice goes a long way in making for a much smoother transition. It's doubtful that anyone expected much from AC/DC when Bon Scott passed. His voice was an iconic one for sure. But luckily for the remaining members, they stumbled upon Brian Johnson. His voice was the same, his attitude was different but still awesome. Everything worked. This first album with Johnson features some of the bands most enduring hits ever, including the wedding dance staple title track. It's also not only their best selling album ever, it hovers somewhere between the second and third spot for best selling album of all time.

By Adam Brown 27 Nov 2008

Daft Punk to make live comeback at 2017 Grammy Awards The Robots will perform alongside The Weeknd for their first live appearance since 2014

BY ALEX YOUNG ON JANUARY 31, 2017, 6:05AM

To the delight of Sean Spicer, Daft Punk will return to the stage at next month’s Grammy Awards for their first live appearance since 2014.

According to Pitchfork, the French electro robots are set to join The Weeknd to perform their recent charttopping collaboration, “Starboy”. The track, which appeared on The Weeknd’s latest album of the same name, marked Daft Punk’s first-ever No. 1 single.

Daft Punk’s last live appearance came at the 2014 Grammy Awards when they performed “Get Lucky” with Pharrell Williams, Nile Rodgers, and Stevie Wonder. That year, the robots also won Grammy Awards for Album of the Year (Random Access Memories) and Record of the Year (“Get Lucky”)

Despite their upcoming Grammys appearance, Daft Punk are not expected to tour in 2017, an industry source previously has told Consequence of Sound.

Why 'The Emancipation of Mimi' Made Mariah Carey a Star for the 2000s DL David Lehmann Apr 24 2015, 6:00am

Ten years ago, Mariah Carey reinvented herself for a new generation, and Jermaine Dupri remembers how it happened.

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SHARE TWEET In 2005, Mariah Carey needed a change: Her professional and personal life had already endured several years of derision—an eternity on pop’s fast-moving time scale. MadTV skits and legacy music publications alike regarded Carey, a titan of the 90s charts—not to mention its radio airwaves and high school dances—as a joke, a fallen pop diva.

Every album she released prior to 2001 had gone multi-platinum and contained at least one Billboard Hot 100 number one hit; her two most recent albums, Glitter and Charmbracelet, had sold relatively poorly (just regular platinum) and, combined, only landed one song in the Top 40. Her new album had a lot to prove. And it succeeded. With its revival of critical intrigue and stratospheric commercial success, The Emancipation of Mimi became, in the popular narrative, the flashpoint for Carey’s redemption. But as much as it provided a return for the singer, to call the album a comeback would be missing the point.

“I’m like, ‘I don’t really know how you can bring Mariah Carey back,’” Jermaine Dupri, who has worked with Carey since 1995’s “Always Be My Baby” and who produced Mimi’s biggest tracks, told me over the phone recently, referring to people who attribute Carey’s success to him. He later quipped, “I don’t know another artist who’s had Song of the Decade twice.”

The Emancipation of Mimi, which turned ten this month, marked a definitive shift for Mariah Carey. It’s an album that found Mariah embracing a more light-hearted version of herself, one that was less tied to the need to be a global pop star and more oriented toward her own identity as an R&B diva with a confidently absurd sense of humor. In a profile written around the time she had wrapped work on Mimi, Mariah said, “With Charmbracelet everyone wanted to hear the stories of my trials and tribulations. It was a healing experience—expressing things that had gone on and my father had just passed away. Now I'm like, okay, we've done that, this record is about having some fun.” The “fun” shines through on Mimi, kicking off a new phase of Mariah’s increased comfort with herself as both an artist and a media spectacle.

Mariah Carey has always been an R&B singer, but she wasn’t necessarily seen as one during the 90s, when R&B ballads were also chart-topping pop music. She worked with producers like Dupri and Babyface and talked about her deep connection to R&B, but she operated above all as a pop star, with the largest share of production credits on her albums going to pop producer Walter Afanasieff. Yet as the 90s concluded, so did the era of generous overlap between R&B and pop as genres. Caught in the middle, Carey sacrificed coherence in a bid for continued relevance. She covered Def Leppard. She flipped Cam’ron and Snoop Dogg classics. She returned to goopy ballads. None of these strategies worked, and the tension between the desire for mass appeal and the draw of R&B and hip-hop contributed to the disappointment surrounding both Glitter and Charmbracelet.

In contrast, The Emancipation of Mimi is undeniably an R&B album. It offers a varied view of the 2005 rap and R&B zeitgeist, with production credits from the likes of Kanye West and The Neptunes and features from Nelly and Twista. Jermaine Dupri produced the hits “It’s Like That,” “Shake It Off,” and “We Belong Together.” On songs like “We Belong Together,” Mariah sounds surer of how to bend her voice than she had on recent outings, building from the subdued ache of regret—”I was stupid / I was foolish/I

was lying to myself”—into the searing hysteria of loss—“When you left I lost a part of me / It’s still so hard to believe.”

Well-orchestrated performances like these were the result of conversations Dupri had with Carey to help her continue capitalizing on her voice—the voice—in a hip-hop and R&B setting. “I actually told her we had to get back to straight singing,” he said. “‘No, no, no,’ I told her… She needed to really sing as opposed to whispering because she had a style where she was whispering on a lot of records… Her full voice, that’s what people fell in love with, and that’s what I wanted to make sure was different with these songs.”

Noting the pair’s collaborative process and his role of drawing out Mariah’s ideas, he added, “I don’t know if I was actually trying to do anything that would go over well with audiences. I just was trying to complete our picture.”

On The Emancipation of Mimi Carey sounds more sure of herself as an R&B singer equipped for the 2000s—someone who can spread her talents between the jaunty VIP room (in a club that is not hosting a disco night) and the candle-lit bath tub. It is this adaptability, which had worked so well for Usher the previous year on Confessions, that likely prompted people, especially youth who had not heard contemporary Mariah on the radio since they were in elementary or middle school, to give Mariah another listen.

The album also allowed Carey to pivot into a new persona. Having been through the hell of public humiliation that accompanied Glitter’s failure and her erratic appearance on TRL in 2001, Carey was ready to let herself go, and Mimi made that clear. On the album’s clubbier bits, Mariah exults in weed smoke and Bacardi while luring dudes with the promise of her penthouse, jacuzzi, and expensive cars. Her phrasing gets more verbose, melodramatic, and confident, as well as sillier. Catch her sing-rapping to blow off a philandering ex on “Shake It Off”: “Hold up / My phone's breakin' up / I'ma hang up and call the machine right back.” Butterfly was overt in its symbolism in the wake of Carey’s divorce from her controlling husband, music executive Tommy Mottola, but it’s in the video for “We Belong Together” that Mariah takes things one step further, becoming a runaway bride in the dress from her early 90s wedding. Even the cover art framed Mariah as a diva Colossus.

ADVERTISEMENT These flourishes of personality, from goofy-but-sharp verses to tongue-in-cheek selfaggrandizement, have expanded over the course of Carey’s post-Mimi output. Her album titles have grown ever more endearing and ridiculous, from E=MC2 to the latest example, Me. I Am Mariah...The Elusive Chanteuse. She can cram an ultra-specific, absurd lyric like “even the Harvard University graduating class of 2010 couldn’t put us back together” into one breath for comedic and dramatic effect and succeed on both counts. Although her most recent two albums are barely commercial successes in comparison to Mimi, which sold 6 million copies in the US, Carey continues to be critically liked, and, outside of music, she has become beloved for her kookiness. As

Rich Juzwiak recently pointed out, “[S]he is in on the joke, she assures us. A pop diva with a bloodhound's nose, she's sniffing out appreciation where she can.”

The Emancipation of Mimi, then, did more than brighten Carey’s star—it shifted her career’s trajectory. Losing mass appeal and, with it, commercial traction in the early 2000s despite her workhorse determination was likely devastating. But this failure opened Mariah up to new possibilities, helping her embrace a sound that music critics have praised in her work from the past decade and a style of self-presentation that has made her a beloved celebrity. Though Mimi performed as well as or better than Mariah's 90s albums, it also transcended the commercial bar Carey’s previous successes has forced her to be judged by. It was a success on its own terms. It was a statement of self, and that’s worth something, too. As Dupri asserted during one tangent of our conversation, “If this business was still the way that business was in the 90s, that fuckin’ Emancipation album would have been a diamond.”

Jay-Z Read Inspiring New Poem 'Dream. On.’ Jay-Z reads an inspiring new poem, "Dream. On." in a video teasing his headlining set at the upcoming Budweiser Made in America Festival.

"Dream. On." finds Jay recalling in stark rhymes his youth in the Marcy Houses of Brooklyn and the ambition he cultivated there. "It takes tears, sweat, blood, five CCs," the rapper says. "Because I know what

a kid in apartment 5C see/ Heaven knows all I had was hella hope/ Speed dating with destiny, I couldn't tell her no."

The video complements the words with simple footage of a humble apartment. The camera jumps between peeling wallpaper, a steaming tea kettle, photographs stuck on the fridge, records, recording equipment and piles of notebooks. As Jay-Z closes "Dream. On." – "You are whatever you say you are/ Turn any situation around" – a pigeon on a windowsill takes off and a sunbeam lights the apartment.

The "Dream. On." clip will play at the beginning of Jay-Z's set at Made in America fest, which takes place September 2nd and 3rd in Philadelphia. The lineup also includes J. Cole, Solange, the Chainsmokers and Migos.