- Order:
- Duration: 3:51
- Updated: 15 Aug 2013
- published: 03 Apr 2013
- views: 406152
- author: MultiDeanslist
Plot
Keywords: concert, storyteller
You can call me anytime baby
Pick up the phone dial 555 On line
[Chorus:]
Let's have a party connect me to somebody
Let's have a party connect me to somebody 555 On line
Being the man that I am and the click that I got I wish
I was a little more like super cop it's a frenzy,
my friends be like Benz's to bentley this bad boy's
not bad so why don't you comprende
I've got your number don't you think it's time we hook
it up I'm all alone, ain't no mums in my area can't go
to your placem cus your mum's scarier you want to
bring some of your friends, the more the merrier
[Bridge:]
You got my number on your dial
Waiting, just to come around
Anytime, anywhere whatever's planned on
Mini skirts, high shoes and leather
tonight's the night turn me on
Jhelisa got the body julie got the the back
Lisa got the energy to help me stay on track
[Chorus]
I'm not talking about the laies who love to lead you on
Say they got you number, but they never ever call like
Eva the honey dip, Now I don't even wanna trip gave her
my number her man gave me a fat lip I don't bother
calling anyone anymore slipping the finest chauffeur
driven and I'm getting calls 555 laies love the cool J,
No mr Smith in this baby and get the real thing
[Bridge]
[Chorus]
Now I got digital and optical I'm even on the net I got MMM,
ah, oh I forget cos nothing in this world' like som sexual
healing toss it up baby, I'm ready, willing, receiving massage
understod loud and clear I'll be there you got my number
on your dial any time anywhere whatever's clever, Mini
skirts, high shoes or leather tonight's the night baby got to
get mo wetter
Girl you look so fine you just call me any time
you're driving me crazy can't get you off my mind [X3]
Let's have a party, connect me to somebody
Five bad boys with the power to rock you
Blowing your mind so you gotta get into
Five what you waiting Four if you wanna get
Three three
Two two
One Let's do it
Do you wanna get freaky
When the Five of us make one
You gotta push the good vibe on
If you really wanna feel it
Got da Flava in my Song
But I really need to known
Do you wanna get down
Do you wanna get funky
Do you wanna get down
Get on down
Chorus
Slam Dunk Da Funk put it up
( If you got that feeling )
Slam Dunk Da Funk put it up
( If you got that feeling )
Slam Dunk Da Funk put it up
( If you got that feeling )
Slam Dunk Da Funk
( Put it up )
You gotta shoot, pass, slam Baby Time to set it off
I'll be up, up away above the Rim and hook a shot
Ally oop Baby, Whoop, there it is and now I got ya
Three seconds left it's just enough for me to rock
Ya now check it, how I flip it rock a beat 'cause
I get with it and everybody wants to be a man
With a hea, Yippee, Yo Yippee four quarter slam
Everybody grab a party and just get on down
Do you wanna get down
Do you wanna get funky
Do you wanna get down
Get on down
Repeat Chorus
You wanna know what hits you like a Fork lift Truck
We got J, AB, Rich, Sean and Scott rocking the Extra
Curricular Ladies love particular fella
Who knock da meter get the Boom shake regular
Five bad Boys, Honey no we don't quit 'til we hit
The Rebound Sound with a Kick
So come on everybody in tune
As I boomshake 'n' Rock a Boody
Gimme Room
Clap your Hands
Stamp your Feet
Push it in, Pull it out to the Beat
Chorus
[Repeat until End]
All the things I said,
I should have said and didn't say,
And I wonder why.
Yes, I wonder why.
I think about the time we spent,
The places that we went,
Still makes me cry.
Yes, it makes me cry.
Why do they say that time will heal
This broken heart?
They would know it isn't true
If they lost someone like you, oh.
[Chorus:]
Some things can never be replaced.
Some things are with me for always.
These are the things I will remember
When I remember when.
I'd rather love and lose it all
Than never have you to recall.
These are the things I will remember.
Again and then again,
(Again and again)
When I remember when.
You taught me how to love,
I am all I am
Because of you.
Just because of you.
Everytime I lost my way,
you shine a light, you made my day,
You see me through.
Yes, you see me through.
So who's gonna come around to heal
This broken heart?
Show me how to laugh and cry,
But never how to say goodbye.
[Chorus]
This life goes on, you carry on,
You do, and it's okay.
(When I remember when)
This love goes on, and I will live
To love another day.
(Again and then again)
This life goes on, you carry on,
You do, and it's okay.
I would laugh, and I would cry,
But I will never say goodbye.
[Chorus]
Ooohh,
When I remember when.
Chorus:
It's the things you do
That have made me fall
So in love with you
You can have it all
What else can I do
Nothin' left to prove
It's the things you do
(It's the things you do)
You touched my love line
So deep inside
I never thought I'd feel so good
Oh no
No need to hide now
Open up your mind now
Let me make it understood
Bridge:
Cos nobody ever said to me
All of the things we shared within
Now that I know that you can see
Let me fill you up
(Chorus)
You make my neck twist like a cap from a Coca-Cola bottle
With your body looking finer than the finest model
Tell me baby can you shimmy
Can you make me feel hot
What you got is me in the right spot
One of the finest things on my mind is
How you make me feel like gold from queen Midas
Straight A plus the material I bust
But the things that you do
Keep me up and that's a must
(Bridge)
It's the things you do
That have made me fall
So in love with you
You can have it all
What else can I do (what else can I do)
Nothin' left to prove (baby nothing left to prove)
It's the things you do
That have made me fall
So in love with you
You can have it all
What else can I do
Nothin' left to prove
(It's the things you do)
Give me a chance and let me in
There's no need to hide what's there within
Now that I know that you can see
Let me fill you up
You got that Midas touch
I love you more than enough
For all the things that you do
It's the things you do
So in love with you
You can have it all
What else can I do
Nothin' left to prove
It's the things you do
(Yeah)
(I like that)
(You know what I mean)
(You're looking kind of fly tonight, girl)
(What's up?)
(Check it)
Baby, when the lights go out
(Hey)
(Yeah, yeah)
I'll show you what it's all about
(Coming at you, girl)
(You're gonna like this, girl)
(Here we go)
(Check it)
I ain't sorry for the way I feel
I know you think I'm being insincere
From the way I'm treating you
I never wanted to be so unkind
The only one thing on my mind
Baby it's not the way I feel
You know you must believe me
(Must believe)
Baby, it's not part of the deal
Oh no no
(Chorus)
Baby, when the lights go out
Every single word could not express
The love and tenderness
I'll show you what it's all about
Babe, I swear you will succumb to me
So, baby, come to me
When the lights go out
(Ah, yeah, check it)
(Check it out)
(Second verse, girl)
I know you think it may be just a lie
Ain't no good in putting up a fight
'Cos my heart is set on you
I see the trust is in your eyes
I ain't fooled by your thin disguise
I can see I'm getting through, babe
Girl, don't deny the way you feel
You know you gotta trust me
(You gotta trust)
Give me the chance to prove I'm real
Oh yeah, yeah
(Repeat chorus twice)
When I flick da switch
Make your hips wanna dip
Now I can get you off
'Cos I'm ready and equipped now
Swing for me, baby
Give me all that you got
Never wanna stop
'Cos you make me feel hot
I know what you wanna do
And that I feel the same way too
Give you what you want
Through the days and the night
Yeah, it's about time
That we turned out the lights
(Yeah, I like that)
(What's up?)
(Check it)
(Repeat chorus)
Baby, when the lights go out
(When the lights go out)
Every single word could not express
The love and tenderness
I'll show you what it's all about
(I'll show you what it's all about)
Babe, I swear you will succumb to me
So, baby, come to me
When the lights go out
(Repeat chorus to fade)
[Chorus:]
Straight up funk in your ear
If you really want it
It's over here [x2]
And yo it's mad funkiness and we be blowing up blough
tell me what you want boo and I'm a do it now its my turn da
Boss, baby, time to set it off be all up in your action with passion of course
Level with your mental, funk I get into
all of the things that you need to get into
Rock the set, straight up the concept cause we be going down, diggy diggy down
diggy down check
[Bridge:]
I know that you want something from me (yeah)
Well I've got something I know you need
From the east to the west everybody get up now
(Get on up, Get on up)
Cos this here's a party and we gotta get on down
(Break it down, Break it down)
[Chorus]
Ah yes you'll check me out rugged and raw
It's all I can stand and I can't stand no more
I'm bugging, renegade hooligan damn
5 bad boys got my back hear the plan
never have you ever seen or never will you chec
a fly human being I'm as funky as it gets
so step back relax the wax is boom diggy
watch the boys breaking it down city to city
[Bridge]
Everybody's got to feel the heat slide on over here
cos it's a party (Slide on over) from the east to the west
everybody get up now (Get on up, Get on up)
Cos this here's a party and you gotta get on down
(Break it down, Break it down)
[Chorus]
It's over just like a wack track you can't get with this
so you gotta get with that no doubt in my mind
the base so phatt baby let me bring it on wiggy wack
[Chorus]
Alright
Oh baby
Alright
I need some time to get my head round the things you said to me
Thoughts are whirling round my mind
Al right
I never knew that I could feel so strong like the way I feel for you
That seemed inpossible to me
Alright
Said oh oh
I wish that you could see
Said oh oh
It's the way it's meant to be - yeah
You're the only one I want at night
You keep me warm and make me feel alright
You know that we can work it out
Coz it's alright
I only wanna share my life with you
Cause I love all the things you do
Cause I know that it's alright
Come on
You know that I'm a dreamer
I can change reality
You know it's good times when we're together - come on
We could take our love around the world
We could dance upon the sea
A little bit of work won't be forever
Come on
Said ohoh
I wish that you could see
Said ohoh
It's the way it's meant to be - yeah
You're the only one I want at night
You keep me warm and make me feel alright
You know that we can work it out
Cause it's alright
I only wanna share my life with you
Cause I love all the things you do
Cause I know that it's alright
Now I've been sitting here reminiscing bout the way we used to be
And how I want those feelings back becasue they mean the world to me
So check it
I've seen around the world climed the highest hights
To prove my love for you is real to keep you warm through winter
nights
Now baby
I wanna let you know the way you got me feeling
It's guaranteed to keep me here because we're reeling
When there's a problem together we can solve 'em
yo all we gots to do is keep that perfect world revolving
Said ohoh
I wish that you could see
Said ohoh
It's the way it's meant to be -Yeah
You're the only one I want at night
You keep me warm and make me feel alright
You know that we can work it out
Cause it's alright
I only wanna share my life with you
Cause I love all the things you do
Cause I know that it's alright
Oh oh oh oh
Ooh check it
Ooh ooh ooh
Don't wanna let you go
We just wanna tell you
Just wanna let you know
That we'll stay around
So what else can you do
You've said all you have to
We're coming after you
So don't make a sound
I got this feelin
Could it be there's someone watching over me
Tell me who you are
I close my eyes and count from nine
To try and find some peace of mind
But it's gone too far
You see our faces every time you turn your head around
We'll be watching even when you turn the lights down
We will always be around
No matter where you are
Don't wanna let you go
We just wanna tell you
Just wanna let you know
That we'll stay around
So what else can you do
You've said all you have to
We're coming after you
So don't make a sound
I'm all alone now in the dark
Just one chance so we can talk
That is all I ask
I close my eyes and then I dream
I always wake up to a scream
Wonder where you are
Don't you know we're always gonna be around you
And there really isn't anything you can do
We will always be around
No matter where you are
Don't wanna let you go
We just wanna tell you
Just wanna let you know
That we'll stay around
So what else can you do
You've said all you have to
We're coming after you
So don't make a sound
Five bad boys with the power to rock you
Blowing your mind so you gotta get into
Five, whatcha waiting four if you wanna
Three (three)
Two (two)
One let's do it
Do you wanna get freaky
when the five of us make one
You gotta push the good vibe on
If you really wanna feel it
Got da flava in my song
But I really need to know
Do you wanna get down
Do you wanna get funky
Do you wanna get down
Get on down
[Chorus:]
Slam dunk da funk, put it up
(If you got that feeling)
Slam dunk da funk, put it up
(If you got that feeling)
Slam dunk da funk, put it up
(If you got that feeling)
Slam dunk da funk
(put it up)
You gotta shoot, pass, slam baby time to set it off
I'll be up, up away, above the rim and hook a shot
Ally oop, baby, whoop, there it is and now I gotcha
Three seconds left, it's just enuff for me to rock ya
Now check it, how I flip it rock a beat 'cause
I get with it and everybody wants to be the man
with a hey, yippee yo yippee four quarter slam
everybody grab a party and just get on down
Do you wanna get down
Do you wanna get funky
Do you wanna get down
Get on down
[Chorus:]
Slam dunk da funk, put it up
(If you got that feeling)
Slam dunk da funk, put it up
(If you got that feeling)
Slam dunk da funk, put it up
(If you got that feeling)
Slam dunk da funk
(put it up)
You wanna know what hits you like a fork lift truck
We got J, AB, Rich, Sean and Scott rocking the extra
Curricular ladies love particular fella
Who knock da meter get the boom shake regular
Five bad boys, honey no, we don't quit til we hit
The rebound sound with a kick
So come on everybody, everybody in tune
As I boomshake n' rock a body
Gimme room
Clap your hands
Stamp your feet
Push it in, pull it out to the beat
[Chorus:]
Slam dunk da funk, put it up
(If you got that feeling)
Slam dunk da funk, put it up
(If you got that feeling)
Slam dunk da funk, put it up
(If you got that feeling)
Slam dunk da funk
(put it up)
So here's ho wit started, it started with a beat
a beat in my head and it wouldn't go away
so I added a bass, the bass was fat
I played it to me boys on a 24 track, they like that
ah the hand clap followed by the mic check
no time for dinner - Five's out on the night shift
shady eyes in the middle of the night
into the dawn till the lyrics lock tight
on to the mix, tell the DJ quick Five boom
He kept playing my song on and on all night long [2x]
Bip it up everybody, rip it up one time
Let me bring your rigidy rugged flow for
your mind got what you need, let me break it down
Five on the low with the funk for your town
Down on the floor now let me see you move
this time tonight now it's time yo groove
who got the champion sound understand
rhyme for rhyme, Five on the low down
[Chorus:]
Like I said before, got the funk for your trunk
from the junk yard to the boulevard here we come
ladies, lock tight woo with that straight
Five dead right party's over here we got the five boom
all night we made a hit, yet another home runner
and sweet sugar J got you hot like the summer so I'm
a stepping back and let the DJ bust the mix Five boom
Get down [7x]
[Chorus]
Baby bounce let me see you bounce to this
I've got the mic technique to help you use your ears
So you sit by the radio, hands on the dial
soon Five on the jam time to pump up the volume
Another fly track to get down
Let me see you move, time for you to get down and prove it
Ain't no doubt that we're fly so don't deny
[Chorus]
I'm only human
of flesh and blood, I'm made
Human ... born to make mistakes
[Chorus:]
If 5 boys in da house say it loud
If 5 boys in da house check it out [2x]
Come on baby dry your eyes, wipe your tears
Never like to see you cry, please forgive me
I wouldn't ever try to hurt you
I just needed someone to hold me
To fill the void while you were gone
to fill this space of emptiness
[Chorus]
When I lay upon my bed reminisce then I wish
that I got you by my side with the cherry red kiss
hit me off make it soft hold me tight through the night
You know I'm gonna fight cos the thing we had was right
But if you go all I know I can't go a day without you
Here in my arms hypnotized with your charms now
I'm feeling for you baby ain't you hearing the alarms
You can't stop all the love that I got
Wanna rewind time to better days that were hot check it
bring back the better days for me baby
You gotta bring em back cos I'm going crazy
I go insane with your name up in my brain
Things will never be the same you ain't up in my frame
So what you gonna do what you gonna say
Tell me that you're gonna push your loving back my way
[Chorus]
Oh, You and I.
The time we spent together ends too soon,
Like sunsets to the moon,
So brief but beautiful,
Oh, I often find that I've been losing time,
Cos what you said last night,
That plays upon my mind,
Like thoughts of....
[Chorus]
You and I, You and I,
It goes round my head like a carousel,
And round and round my mind,
You and I, You and I,
I know what to do when I'm not with you,
I fill my mind with thoughts of you and I, You and I.
It seems to me of love is what you bring,
It plays on my heart strings,
Songs of love, To be loved,
Got me thinking of,
Of moments that are gone
but will not fade,
May live be to replayed
in my mind over time,
Like thoughts of....
[Chorus]
Well, I know we'll make mistakes,
But that's just the chance we take,
I hope you'll never say,
Cos I'll never say,
Goodbye, Say goodbye to....
[Chorus]
You and I, You and I.
yeh, yeh come on,
Two sides, from the heart
Well it's alright alright
wann know about me
Well it's the way it's got to be
there's more to me than what you see
on TV screens is make believe
Think you know about us
well it's an element of trust
come talk to me repectfully
cause these days we're public property
oh oh oh from the heart
oh oh oh oh like us from the start
Because there's two sides to every story
think you know me
you gotta show me but it's alriight, don't be sorry
it's just the way i am
because there's two sides to every story
think you know me you gotta show me
but i'm tellin' you once again
you gotta go for who i am
but i'm tellin' you once again
you gotta go for who i am
yeh yeh, it's alright
i'm tellin' you
there's two sides
yeh, yeh it's alright
it's the just the way i am
do you care about me
or the pictures that you see
are we just a face without personality,
yeh, yeh
do you care about us
or the funkin' that we bust
there's more to us than magazines and dance routines
and teenage dreams
oh oh oh, from the heart
oh oh oh, like us from the start
Because there's two sides to every sotry
Think you know me
You gotta show me
But it's alright, don't be sorry
it's just the way i am
Because there's two sides to every story
think you know me
you gotta show me
But I'm telling you once again
You gotta go for who i am
But I'm telling you once again
you gotta go for who i am
Yeh, yeh it's alright
I'm tellin' you
there's two sides
Yeh yeh, it's alright
it's just the way i am
because there's two sides to every story
think you know me
you gotta show me
but it's alright, don't be sorry
it's just the way i am
Because there's two sides to every story
think you know me
you gotta show me
but i'm telling you once again
you gotta go for who i am
You was down and I wasn't around,
so I just wanna let you know how I feel.
I guess I know that you're needing me now,
I wanna be there but I just don't know how.
BRIDGE
What was I gonna do 'cause you was there when I needed you,
and now I'm feeling down 'cause you need me and I'm not around.
Tell me can I make you see, make you feel and believe in me?
I don't know what it is but I need to let you know girl.
CHORUS
If you wanna,
then baby clap your hands now.
If you're gonna,
then I can show you how.
'Cause I can give you everything that you'll ever need,
so baby take your chances on me.
Now that I've just realized
that I haven't really been there for you,
I promise you I know how you're feeling
and I'm understanding what I should do.
BRIDGE
CHORUS x2
BRIDGE TWO
What was I gonna do 'cause you was there when I needed you.
How can I let you know that I need you so and I can't let go.
Tell me can I make you see, make you feel and believe in me?
I don't know what it is but I need to let you know girl.
CHORUS x3
We've been all around the world,
Seen so many things,
And tasted all the good things that life can bring,
We're like brothers now, and that ain't gonna change
And even when things go wrong, they're always by my side.
We each bought a ticket for this ride.
[BRIDGE]
We're only going one way,
Ain't no looking down
We'll be rockin' it all around.
[CHORUS]
Gotta get up, just to get down.
Us Five boys are always gonna rock you.
Hey, hey, we're movin' on now
All through the night, sing it now,
Yeah when the lights go down
Raise your hands if you got that feelin'
Hey, we've been rockin' it all around.
I remember all the times,
All the laughter and the tears.
Special little moments through all of the years
But the sands of time go by, we're older and we're wise,
Never dreamed we'd come this far, but we remember who we are.
Guess we've been guided by a lucky star.
[BRIDGE]
[CHORUS]
We've been all around the world,
We each bought a ticket for this ride,
We're only going one way,
Ain't no looking down
We'll be rockin' it all around
[CHORUS x3]
I woke up today with this feeling.
Better things are coming my way.
I know the sunshine has a meaning,
And nothing left can get in my way
When the rainy days are dying,
Gotta keep on, keep on trying
All the bees and birds are flying
Ahhhh...
Never let go gotta hold on and
Non stop 'til the break of dawn and
Keep on moving, don't stop rocking Ahhhh...
Get on up When you're down, baby,
Take a good look around.
I know it's not much, But it's okay.
We'll Keep on movin' on anyway
Feels like I have should be screaming,
Trying get through to my friends.
sometimes it feels that life has no meaning,
But all things will be alright in the end.
When the rainy days are dying,
Gotta keep on, keep on trying
All the bees and birds are flying
Ahhhh...
Never let go gotta hold on and
Non stop 'til the break of dawn and
Keep on moving, don't stop rocking Ahhhh...
Get on up When you're down, baby,
Take a good look around.
I know it's not much, But it's okay.
We'll Keep on movin' on anyway
When the rainy days are dying,
Gotta keep on, keep on trying
All the bees and birds are flying
Ahhhh...
Never let go gotta hold on and
Non stop 'til the break of dawn and
Keep on moving, don't stop rocking Ahhhh...
Get on up When you're down, baby,
Take a good look around.
I know it's not much, But it's okay.
We'll Keep on movin' on anyway
Everyday I got you on my mind
Everyday
I just keep
It all inside
You got me trippin'
Because I want you back and you don't know
But if you gave me a chance then maybe we'll find romance
Come on tell me are you ready to go?
You got me trippin'
Now baby tell me what I gotta do Cause when I'm laying in my bed and you pop into my
head all I wanna do is get with you.
[Chorus:]
Everyday
Round and round
I think about the times and the love I found.
Oh baby, Baby
Everyday
Round and round
My head is in the clouds and it won't be coming down.
Oh baby, baby
Everyday
I just can't find the time
I just wanna say:
A girl like you,
Is hard to find.
You got me trippin'
Because I want you back and you don't know
But if you gave me a chance then maybe we'll find romance
Come on tell me are you ready to go?
You got me trippin'
Now baby tell me what I gotta do
Cause when I'm laying in my bed and you pop into my head all I wanna do is get with you.
[Chorus:]
Everyday
Round and round
I think about the times and the love I found.
Oh baby, Baby
Everyday
Round and round
My head is in the clouds and it won't be coming down.
Oh baby, baby
Well there she goes again running circles round my mind -
Yeah I know just what you're saying but you know the girl is mine.
You but maybe I can get her if I show her what I got
What you got I got double come on give it a shot.
You trying to take my girl, trying to mess around with Mrs. Right?
Now but how can I be helping when I dream of her at night
There she is up in my head everytime I close my eyes
So I think I;m gonna call her just to see if she replies.
You got me trippin'
Because I want you back and you don't know
But if you gave me a chance then maybe we'll find romance
Come on tell me are you ready to go?
You got me trippin'
Now baby tell me what I gotta do
Cause when I'm laying in my bed and you pop into my head all I wanna do is get with you.
[Chorus 2X]
If ya getting down, baby
I want it now, baby
Come and get it on, baby
I want it now, baby
I wanna take a little time
to refresh your mind
because the boys are back in town with a different kind
of funk, who gots the funk, we gots the funk right
everybody wanna boogie down tonight
now throw your hands up in the sky
move around from side to side
I got what it takes, the beats, the breathes,
the funky base, I take your body crazy, chase
c´mon
I heard somebody saying ( what )
she´s at the party singing ( who )
I´m gonna get me some
ahhh
If ya getting down, baby
I want it now, baby
Come and get it on, baby
I want it now, baby
If ya getting down, baby
I want it now, baby
Move it all around, baby
I want it now, baby
Wiggy wiggy
I´m getting jiggy
open up the door, got the keys to your siggy
looking kind of pretty
dance till you drop, and it down stop till it goes ...
dance how you wanna dance
the soul´s getting down, while we got the chance
I still got 12 seconds on the ...
and I ain´t gonna stop till the sun don´t shine
line after line, I flow like rime after rime
just like time after time
keep it up till you feel the heat
and get down what you feel the beat
ah ah
I heard somebody saying ( what )
she´s at the party singing ( who )
I´m gonna get me some
ahhh
If ya getting down, baby
I want it now, baby
Come and get it on, baby
I want it now, baby
If ya getting down, baby
I want it now, baby
Move it all around, baby
I want it now, baby
doing a problem that we can fix
cause we can do it in the mix
now if you men getting trouble
and will be in to run a double
guarentee to will be hitting for six
c´mon yeah
I heard somebody saying ( what )
she´s at the party singing ( who )
I´m gonna get me some
aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh
If ya getting down, baby
I want it now, baby
Come and get it on, baby
I want it now, baby
If ya getting down, baby
I want it now, baby
Move it all around, baby
I want it now, baby
If ya getting down, baby
I want it now, baby
Come and get it on, baby
I want it now, baby
If ya getting down, baby
I want it now, baby
Move it all around, baby
I want it now, baby
I’ve been trying to ease my mind
From this life that I have been thrown into
I no longer know who to trust
They keep hurting me no matter what I do
It’s a big world out there
And sometimes it can swallow you up
But never give up yeah
[CHORUS]
I’ve been tryin' to find a friend in this crazy world
And the more that I try to find a friend in this crazy world
I’ll sail the seven seas
I would climb a mountain high
To get you in this world of mine
I’ve been dying to meet someone
Just to share all the things other people do
Just a laugh or a cry
Just a simple goodbye
I will see you soon, would do
I promise you I won’t let you down
Come to me
I will make you see yeah
[CHORUS]
To get you in this world of mine
I’ve been searching for someone to care
Someone who’ll always be there
[CHORUS]
To get you in this world of mine
I’ve been tryin' (I’m tryin') to find (I’m dying) a friend
(I’m fighting) in this crazy world (I’m fighting for you)
And the more that (I’m tryin') I try (I’m dying) to find
A friend (I’m fighting) in this crazy world (I’m fighting for you)
I’ll sail the seven seas
I would climb a mountain high
To get you in this world of mine
Yo I'm a battlestar knight like I'm jedi
Rough to the tough but I'm sharper than the geam in your eye
Galactic battlestar like I'm ready
Ready for the 12 check get steady, on your marks set
your best to throw you hands high
Heads to the sky keep your eyes peeled listen for the sign
A trip stage walk wire, I bring fire till I'm done
you cause there can only be one
How many times does it sound like this
here we come again the microphone specialists
Action time
Take back the track rewind
sing it for me one more time
[Chorus:]
If you feel the force throw your hands to the sky
Put your hands up, get em' up, put your hands high
If you wanna jump we can give you what you want
Put your hands up, get em' up, put your hands high (2x)
I lead the packs like Bruce Wayne leads da batz
Rocking top hats with my verbal attacks
yo when I raps boogie down
can you hear the bell tower ring when you're time travelling from
The funk that I bring fly wit me
I'll take you higher when I'm walking over fire, come on follow the messiah
I run jump skips over battle ships
Doing lyrical back flips on the stage that I rips
How many times does it sound like this
Here we come again the microphone specialists
action time
take back the track rewind
sing it for me one more time
[Chorus]
How many times does it sound like this
Here we come again the microphone specialists
action time
take back the track rewind
sing it for me one more time
[Chorus]
Ladies and Gentlemen
Live from Madison funky garden ... Five
Let's get ready to rumble
[Chorus:]
Get on down in the gutter getting nasty
bring that funky rhyme don't waste my time let's do this
There's a game that I know you will not play
No time to waste cos times a test let's do this
You got to work that body baby come on ladies show me
what you got ready or not cos here I come knocking
bring the beats to keep the whole block
rocking gimme some room and let me get down
can't hold back cos da Five's in your town
Everybody got to grab somebody wow let's party
[Bridge:]
Don't stop baby, baby shake if you really
want it Shake it baby Shake it now
[Chorus]
Bring that beat five boys want bass
got me stomping freak DJ spin that deck five girls caress
hey ladeez got hip hip Five, four, three, two freak me
show me what you got, how do you wanna be rude boys got to
get raw split the decks and open up the dance floor
[Bridge]
[Chorus]
Little Jack Horner sat in the corner sucking on some
butter in came Bo Peep naked to her feet
PPP Poor Boy start to stutter Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall
and da brother turned up da bass
we were freaking down to da funky sound
and everybody had food that day
Let me see ya freak dat funk [4x]
Yo ladies in the house tonight you're looking so fly
We got to rip the roof off this joint here we go ya
gots to repeat after me come on ladies, let's break it down
one time ladies
When I say Five you'll say rock five rock, five rock [4x]
[Chorus]
You gotta stop, listen up
Checking out my beats
Know the day uniques
Got ya jumping out ya seats, ah
Never bring the same flow upon a track
Better watch your back
When I bring the switch attack, now
People wanna nod, now they go and go
The funk thing that I bring
Make your head wanna ring
Here we come, you know we bring it raw
Get up on the floor 'cos
You gotta get some more
Friday night, party's just around the corner
She'll be there, so I just can't be late
Gotta get my groove thing on
'Cos I'll be dancing all night long
Send me to a place where I can have some fun
[Birdge:]
Once I get up on the floor
See me coming back for more
See me rockin' all my moves
Everybody's watching me
Switch
(music) [x4]
9 o'clock, finally my groove is swinging
Things are fine, now I guess it's time to rock
(Guess it's time to rock)
Now the party's on the way
Found out I gotta stay
People start to gather round
And round, and round, and round
[Bridge x2]
Switch (music)
inspector gadget
go mr gadget go thats the name
spell it out till it don't sound the same
its the g-a-d to the g-e-t
gadget on the mic wanna rock with me
yo stop that guy with a claw for a hand
go mr gadget with the master plan
inspect the scene of the crime
don't make me
but i'll hit ya with a go gadget rhyme
when theres a problem in your town go gadget now
if your in trouble there's no doubt he'll work it out
inspector gadget oh
if ya do the crime you're gonna do the time
inspector gadget oh
when he's on the case ya better hide your face
inspector gadget oh
the city's only saviour
inspector gadget oh
he's number one
now who's that man with a master plan
to bring peace to the land ya gotta understand
inspector g's the name and law's the game
he's gotta track down claw cos the guys insane
and so he works downtown as a...
looks kinda funny acts like the clown
but he be gettin criminals lock them in bars
go gadget copter jet propeller cars
he jumps up and out of the seat
and bounces higher with the springs in his feet
you know he'll always be around land or the sky
and you know inspector gadget is a hell of a guy c'mon
when theres a problem in your town go gadget now
if your in trouble there's no doubt he'll work it out
inspector gadget oh
he's gotta badge on his chest and you know he's the best
inspector gadget oh
anywhere that ya hide, gadget will find ya
inspector gadget oh
if a city's only saviour
inspector gadget oh
he's nummber one
when there's a problem in your town go gadget now
if your in trouble there's no doubt he'll work it out
inspector gadget oh
if ya do the crime you're gonna do the time
inspector gadget oh
when he's on the case ya better hide your face
inspector gadget oh
if a city's gonna be safe
inspector gadget oh
he's nummber one
inspector gadget oh
he's gotta badge on his chest and you know hes the best
inspector gadget oh
anywhere that ya hide gadget will find ya
inspector gadget oh
if a city's gonna be safe
inspector gadget oh
he's number one
1,2,3,4, Five will make you get down now (Baby bring on, bring it on mow)
Everybody get up singing
1,2,3,4, Five will make you get down now ( Get on up)
You gots to keep it real
You gots to keep it raw
I'm lyrically blessed so don't try to ignore
Time for some actiong creeping up your back and
Keep the beat nasty like Janet my reaction
Hard I'm addictive better lock ya kids in
Coming to you area ya don't know what your missing
Go tell your family here comes the enemy
Blowing up the spot tech remedy
CHORUS
Everybody get up singing
1,2,3,4, Five will make you get down now (Baby bring on, bring it on now)
Everybody get up singing
1,2,3,4, Five will make you get down now (5ive¡¯ll make you get down)
(Keep it move, keep it move, keep it moving on)
I'll be the resident president, I'm the 5th element
Jimmy Fly snooka stone cold is how I'm hittin em
Better get together put your hands in the sky
Stick em up punk hit em low hit em high
Now I'm the bad boy that you invite for dinners
Ain't got no manners cos I eat with my fingers
Lost boys terrorise the neighborhood
And hounds of the Baskerville be up to no good
So come on come on everybody keep checking us
Coming with the funk bring it on wickedness
(repeat chorus)
Everybody better recognise we got the funky rhymes
Keep it together, baby don't even try to organise
We be the roughnecks no concept no business
We here to get down and make em grab you by your biscuits
So everybody, anybody, somebody
Put your hands together represent like John Gotte
Paragraph after grammar for gas
The party's Armageddon hit em with the heavy class
I'm bugging hitting with the hooligan front
I know you wanna stand up so baby jump
(repeat chorus)
Girl you're kinda freaky
got something bout your smile
and when you bounce it up and down
I can't believe my eyes I got to give respect
cos you know how to tease
keep on walking I'll keep talkin'
you would not believe what I would do
[Bridge:]
With a girl like you
keep your body rockin'
I ain't gonna stop I just want you
and you know it's shockin' when you rock it
I'm a sick sick man cos
[Chorus:]
Girl I get dat cold sweat
creepin' up on me
I ache when you shake it
Girl I'm just a freak
Yeah, you set dat cold sweat
trippin' on me
Burnin' with the fever
Girl, you're killing me
Girl I'm just a freak in need of therapy
I count the ounce in every bounce
And I just want to feast
I love the way you work it
I love the way you grind
Ya got da funk in every pump If you could read my mind
What I would do....
[Bridge]
[Chorus]
Down, you're burnin' me down
You're burnin' me down
You're burnin' me down
I love the way you shake now love the way you break
now keep it comin' baby I don't wanna hesitate now
You got me hooked every look makes me freeze
180 degrees you make me buckle at my knees
crazy rumpshaker, sexy move maker baby bring it
on better sooner than later I feel a cold sweat creepin'
up on me we gotta get it on tell me what it's gonna be
[Bridge]
[Chorus]
There's something bout your eyes
That makes me search my soul
They make me try to realise
I'm trying to be a better man
You got to know what's on my mind
I will give you all my time
Oh I feel for you baby, Yes I do
All I want is you
And when I search my soul I find
A better place
To be around
I'm trying to tell you what's on my mind
But will I make it through in time
And when I search my soul I find
You make me wanna be yeah
A better man
I've never felt so in love
The way I feel
When you touch
Although it doesn't sound that much
All I have to do is look in your eyes
You gotta know what's on my mind
I will give you all my time
I feel for you baby, yes I do
All I want is you
And when I search my soul I find
A better place
To be around
I'm trying to tell you what's on my mind
But will I make it through in time
And when I search my soul I find
A better place
To be around
I'm trying to tell you what's on my mind
You make me wanna be, yeah
A better man,
Alright
I wanna take you higher
I wanna reach for the sky
I wanna show you fire
I'll never tell you goodbye
[2x]
You're on my mind
And when I search my soul I find
A better place
To be around
I'm trying to tell you what's on my mind
But will I make it through in time
And when I search my soul I find
A better place
To be around
I'm trying to tell you what's on my mind
You make me wanna be, yeah
A better man.
Bring that break funk
'cause I'm here giving what you want
like spread got time to stop got time to peel back the roof on my new drop top.
The day looking good to me,
got girls wanna know cause I freak like jodeci.
Besides that let's get with the ground wanna hear that again then press rewind.
BRIDGE
If you wanna get with me
you've gotta let go baby,
if you wanna get with me.
CHORUS
I don't know what it is but you make me high.
A burning feeling that starts inside.
It really doesn't matter who's wrong or right
we can go all night, we're going all night.
Base vibration.
Check it out when my rhyme began.
I'll drop my rhyme upon this beat
and make you people move your feet.
Everybody from the front to the back c'mon
feel the rhythm when I bounce the track.
I've gotta hit that, don't wanna sit back.
I really wanna see your hands could I get that c'mon
BRIDGE
CHORUS x3
(by M.Martin/A.Carlsson)
Now and forever
Until the time is through
I can't believe it
I don't know where to start
No baby
So many questions
Deep inside my heart
Bridge:
Give me a moment before you go
There's something you ought to know
Chorus:
Baby now and forever
Until the time is through
I'll be standing here
Waiting and never
Give up my faith in you
Trying to make it clear
Without your love I'd be half a man
Maybe one day you'll understand
Now and forever
Until the time is through
I'll be waiting
How can I tell you
So that you can see
You know that
Love has a meaning
When you are here with me
Bridge
Chorus
There is no one to comfort me
Here in my cold reality
I'm searching for words
What can I say
To make you see
Baby now
Until time
Is through
I'll be here
(x2)
Baby now and forever
Until the time is through
I'll be standing here
Waiting and never
Give up my faith in you
Trying to make it clear
Without your love I'd be half a man
Maybe one day you'll understand
Now and forever
I'll be here for you
Until the time is through
Five bad boys with the sound to rock you
Blowing your mind so you gotta get into
Five - What you waiting
Four if you wanna
Three - three
Two - two
One - let's do it!
Everybody get up singing
1, 2, 3, 4, Five will make you get down now
Everybody get up singing
1, 2, 3, 4, Five will make you get down now
You gots to keep it real
You gots to keep it raw
I'm lyrically blessed
So don't try to ignore
Time for some action
Creeping up your back and
Keep the beat nasty
Like Janet my reaction
Hard I'm addictive
Better lock your kids in
Coming to you area
Ya don't know what you're missing
Go tell your family
Here comes the enemy
Blowing up the spot tech remedy
Everybody get up singing
1, 2, 3, 4, Five will make you get down now
Everybody get up singing
1, 2, 3, 4, Five will make you get down now
Keep it moving on (x7)
Do you wanna get freaky
When the five of us make one
You gotta push the good vibe on
If you really wanna feel it
Got da flava in my song
But I really need to know
Do you wanna get down
Do you wanna get funky
Do you wanna get down
Get on down
Slam dunk da funk, put it up
(If you got that feeling)
Slam dunk da funk, put it up
(If you got that feeling)
Slam dunk da funk, put it up
(If you got that feeling)
Slam dunk da funk, put it up (put it up)
Clap your hands
Stamp your feet
Push it in, pull it out to the beat
Clap your hands
Stamp your feet
Push it in, pull it out to the beat
Clap your hands
Stamp your feet
Push it in, pull it out to the beat
I ain't sorry for the way I feel
I know you think I'm being insincere
From the way I'm treating you
I never wanted to be so unkind
The only one thing on my mind
Is just kicking it with you girl
Baby it's not the way I feel, you know you must believe me
Baby it's not part of the deal (oh no no)
Baby when the lights go out
Every single word can not express, the love and tenderness
I'll show you what it's all about
Babe I swear you will succumb to me, so baby come to me
When the lights go out
Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh
Na na na na na na
Na na na na na na nah... (x4)
Ah, move it at the back to the track
We got it going on we’re the leaders of the pack
Now if you feel right, hold it tight
see, we wanna carry on cos we gonna take it through until the dawn
Now everybody’s moving, everybody’s grooving
getting down with 5 when we come your way
So raise up your arms if we drop it on the 1
You see we're gonna carry on because the fun has just begun
Check us out now!
Yo! 7,6,5,4,3,2,1
I’m on the microphone, got you hot like the sun
So a 1,2,3 now I’m waiting on the 4
Kick down the door and turn it up a little more
If you got the feelin’, jump to the ceiling
Ah we’re getting down tonight
1 if you wanna, 2 if you’re gonna, 3 cos everything’s alright
If you got the feelin’, less of the dreaming
Ah, we’re getting down tonight
It’s just round the corner, tell me if you wanna
Five will make you feel alright
Five bad boys with the sound to rock you
Five bad boys with the sound to rock you
Five bad boys with the sound to rock you!
That's what you told me baby
That's what you told me baby
That's what you told me baby
You drive me crazy
I thought I was the one
when we were together
you would take me to
another place and time that I could feel free
you were all that I was searching for
[Bridge:]
That's just when I
I thought I could lean on you for life
I thought that the sun would always shine
but you took my dreams away
I remember the lies that you told me baby
[Chorus:]
One, you told me you love me you need me
Two, you told me you never deceive me
Three, you told me you'd always be true
Four, you told me we're through, that's what you told me
That's what you told me baby
That's what you told me
Tell me was it fun taking my love for granted
now I'm not the one
everything we used to share has up and gone
I won't need to tell you, you were wrong
[Bridge]
[Chorus]
That's what you told me baby
That's what you told me baby
That's what you told me baby
You drive me crazy [2x]
That's what you told me, girl tell me no lie
Do you want to fly super high, super dooper high no
mistakes when I'm with you
know exactly what I wanna do
lay you down and pursue me
I'm super fly, cos I'm super high
when I'm by your side if you like girl, tell me if you like
One, if you wanna
Two, if you're gonna
Three, time to Jive
four, five bring it live
[Chorus]
If you think you’re ready
Let the games begin
Just roll the dice now
May the best player win
Mamma told me it’s no sin (it’s no sin)
(oh oh) oh yeah
Any way you like it
Just let me know
Don’t try to hide it
If you’re ready let’s go
I won’t be lazy with you no no no
Whoa whoa whoa whoa
[CHORUS]
I tried to call you but you wasn’t around
I tried to see you but you was outta town
I tried to find you, tried to track you down
But my phone didn’t make a sound
I know you hear me now
Now the show has started
And we’re on the road
My tank is full now
I’m about to explode
It’s dangerous in overload
(Oh oh) oh yeah
I can keep a secret
Won’t tell my boys
What you get up to with your favourite toys
If ya feel me baby make some noise
Whoa whoa whoa whoa
[CHORUS]
I know you hear me know [x6]
If ya feel me baby make some noise
If ya feel me baby just enjoy
[CHORUS x2]
Jiggy jump to the beat
And keep bouncing
30 seconds and counting
Hot one, this choice critical
Situation is difficult
My calibre won't allow me to rhyme on a level where you people can hear me
see me, guess I know you wanna be me
In the meantime bounce to the beat see
[BRIDGE]
Music is my life
'Cause my life is music
The beat of the drum in your heart
[CHORUS]
Let's dance
Like you mean it, can't you feel it, don't you know
Let's dance
'Cos you need it, better believe it, here we go
Let's dance
Give your all when we're coming together on the floor
Let's dance
You know that you've got what I like
Check it down
Dropping verbal bombs on the beat
Hoping that you people think this sound is unique
'Cause I like to party
You like to party
Come on everybody got to get it started
I got something to get you jumpin'
When I kick a freaky rhyme I get the dance floor thumpin'
Just step back and take time to check
When I rock up on the mic you people never forget
So check it out.
You freak rhyming check the way I'm getting on the ground.
Make you shake that front and wiggle your behind.
Like whoop, tell her where it's at one, two microphone.
Secret agent the double O who?
A to the B the S, I rock a microphone in my jeans and my vest.
Puttin' to the test, decimal levels I burn 'em down
now how you like the way that sounds?
[CHORUS]
Everybody say Wayoo
in the club on a Friday night.
All the girls on the floor give a little bit more,
on and on to the morning light.
Everybody say Wayoo
when you breathe you can feel the beat.
It's another long night but your feelin' all right
and you know you can take the heat.
Here I come steppin' up the flow up on the beat.
Number one contender with my rhyme and ill defeat.
Anyone who wanna take a shot at what I got,
could you not get in my way because I'm getting hot.
Now tell me can you hear me comin' creepin' up behind you,
I'd already showin' up I'm standin' right beside like
Droppin' the verbally rugged sound upon your town
I'm a make you people boogie down
[CHORUS]
Walk this way and feel the heat we be getting down
walk this way and feel the heat, 'cause the time is comin' round.
Everybody wayoo move your body wayoo.
Walk this way
[CHORUS x2]
Bring that break funk
'cause I'm here giving what you want
like spread got time to stop got time to peel back the roof on my new drop top.
The day looking good to me,
got girls wanna know cause I freak like jodeci.
Besides that let's get with the ground wanna hear that again then press rewind.
[BRIDGE]
If you wanna get with me
you've gotta let go baby,
if you wanna get with me.
[CHORUS]
I don't know what it is but you make me high.
A burning feeling that starts inside.
It really doesn't matter who's wrong or right
we can go all night, we're going all night.
Base vibration.
Check it out when my rhyme began.
I'll drop my rhyme upon this beat
and make you people move your feet.
Everybody from the front to the back c'mon
feel the rhythm when I bounce the track.
I've gotta hit that, don't wanna sit back.
I really wanna see your hands could I get that c'mon
[BRIDGE]
[CHORUS x3]
I'm only human of flesh and blood
I'm made human born to make mistakes
[Chorus]
If 5 boys in da house say it loud
If 5 boys in da house check it out
[Repeat 2X]
Come on baby dry your eyes, wipe your tears
Never like to see you cry, please forgive me
I wouldn't ever try to hurt you
I just needed someone to hold me
To fill the void while you were gone
to fill this space of emptiness
[Chorus]
When I lay upon my bed reminisce then I wish
that I got you by my side with the cherry red kiss
hit me off make it soft hold me tight through the night
You know I'm gonna fight cos the thing we had was right
But if you go all I know I can't go a day without you
Here in my arms hypnotized with your charms now
I'm feeling for you baby ain't you hearing the alarms
You can't stop all the love that I got
Wanna rewind time to better days that were hot check it
bring back the better days for me baby
You gotta bring em back cos I'm going crazy
I go insane with your name up in my brain
Things will never be the same you ain't up in my frame
So what you gonna do what you gonna say
Tell me that you're gonna push your loving back my way
[Chorus]
Stop pushing me
I never felt like this before
It's just something in me
I need to close another door
Live my life to suit me
I just can't hide the confusion
That burns in my mind, oh no
Sometimes the pressure gets so high
Excuses come so easy
Just like a man lies to his wife
When honesty won't please her
I guess you'll find that I'm not what you think you can see
Not what you want me to be
[CHORUS:]
Stop pushing me
I gotta do it my way
Stop pushing me
Why don't you hear what I say?
Stop pushing me
Cos we all learn from mistakes
Stop pushing me
I'm gonna do it my way
It seemed to me like it won't end
But it was never meant to
Be more than just another trend
A phase that I would go through
You still don't see that I'm not your little baby no more, no
So please don't force me down that road
I'll choose where I'll be going
You can't dictate another day
Don't make me spend one on when
I wanna fight for myself
And be debted to nobody else
No one but myself
[Repeat chorus]
My way is the only way I trust
My way whatever its cost, oh
Now don't get me wrong
The respect hasn't gone
But when can I have my say
And do it my way?
[Repeat chorus to fade]
(C'mon)
My time to burn so sit back and check
The way I come through in the discotheque
I know you like what I got, my style, the original
Seventees dancefloor hot new material
Name ain't me down then you wait ain't
Come in, guestlist on the door
You plus to friends
As longs as they're female and got a fit ass
Pole osition never coming in last
Bass line yeah you know it's gonna get ya (yeah)
Free your mind if the system will let ya
Peace time so it's time to shout
Guys in the back throw your hands about
Rock the party
(We can go through the night)
If you livin' it up we're gonna let ya
If you givin' it up we're gotta get ya
Rock the party
(If you feelin' alright)
When you're having a good time together
And the Saturday night lasts forever
(Right about now...)
(C'mon)
You can't hold me back
I rock the dancefloor
Make a honey shake her booty
So I kick it some more
You know the score
How they rock a freaky move up on the spot
Never wanna stop, temperture is hot
Now visual contact, I've got all that
Make 'em booty for me when I verbally freak that
Line after line
Keep on hitting with my rhyme
Now what ya gotta do is bring your body next to mine
Check it out
Bass line if you know it's gonna get ya (yeah)
Free your mind if the system will let ya
Peace time so it's time to shout
Guys in the back throw your hands about
Rock the party
(We can go through the night)
If you livin' it up we're gonna let ya
If you givin' it up we're gotta get ya
Rock the party
(If you feelin' alright)
When you're having a good time together
And the Saturday night lasts forever
Reminisce girl on the way that it was,
Everything that I had was yours,
Give me kiss girl like you used to do
I'm gonna take my time with you
Make it feel like what you felt before,
Now you're back 'cause you want some more
I can't help but feel the way I do
and girl I got this to say to you
[BRIDGE]
They're runnin' around my mind got thoughts of you and me all the time
Well baby you've got to let me know what I gotta do,
'Cause if you'd only tell me,
Maybe you could help me,
Try to understand how to get with you
[CHORUS]
All the boys on the right give it up this time,
All the girls on the left give it up this time,
'Cause all the boys on the right want to check you out
and all the girls on the left wanna show you how.
Now it's on girl, got the best of you,
Now I wanna take the rest of you,
I don't want to take it slow with you
I wanna rock with you I wanna roll,
If you want girl we can take a ride
I'll be fine with you by my side,
I can't help but feel the way I do,
So I've got this to say to you
[BRIDGE]
[CHORUS]
Give me kisses, lay it on, rock it to the break of dawn,
I can do it nice and soft and give you everything you want,
'Cause what you need's what I got don't forget it
Baby I'm a-waiting right here come and get it
Kissin' necks, I'll perplex, any way you want ta flex
We should get together just to check out if our love connects,
Tell me now are you feelin' how I'm feelin'
I got a freaky feelin' deep inside this could be real and check it out.
[BRIDGE (2nd half)]
[CHORUS x2]
There's something in the air to end
Come on!
Got up outta bed today, I was feelin' on top, yeah
Looking forward to a brighter day with the good things I got
There was never any time for me to rest or to play, no
But I wanna get on up and change the world today
[CHORUS]
I feel on top (yeah) on top of the world
Don’t wanna stop (yeah) on top of the world (baby)
Just wanna rock (Yeah) on top of the world
Cause the way that I’m feelin' is the way that I feel tonight
I don’t think that I felt this good in such a long time (oh baby)
These good feelings runnin' through my veins, it must be a sign (oh no)
Gotta live everyday to the full, on me just rely
Have a good look around you, take a deep breath and sigh
[CHORUS]
And the way that I feel makes everything seem all right
Got up outta bed today, I was feelin' on top, yeah
Lookin' forward to a brighter day with the good things I got
There was never any time for me to rest or to play
Gonna get on up and change the world today
[CHORUS x3]
And the way that I feel makes everything seem all right
'Cause the way that I’m feelin' is the way that I feel tonight, yeah
Lately I've been thinking that I don't feel like I used to do.
I'm trying to keep my two feet on the ground.
Constantly surrounded everywhere I turn I'm hounded,
people stop and stare and look me up and down.
Now you shouldn't feel down from what everybody says
and don't let it bother you if anybody stares,
'cause you know that at times people can be cruel,
try to put you down make you feel like a fool.
But you got one shot now don't you ever stop,
keep your dreams high keep reachin' for the top,
'cause you know and I know if they had the chance
they'd be climbin' up on the stage trying to dance.
[CHORUS]
C'mon C'mon and get together.
Lets take a chance, it's now or never,
spread the word over the nation
that we are the new generation.
C'mon C'mon and get together.
Start living your life like it's forever.
Don't wanna stop if you're dreamin',
let everybody know what you're feeling.
Questions I can't answer got me going round in circles.
Make me feel as though I'm losing self control.
It's feeling like a dream to me. I've lost a touch of reality
deep inside I've searched with my soul.
Now it's good to keep searching and bettering yourself
but don't push too hard 'cause it's bad for your health.
And running round in circles will always get you dizzy.
And thinking too much that will make your head busy,
so just sit back and relax, you gotta chill.
I promise that all of your dreams will be fulfilled.
One day if you keep on looking you'll find,
you just gotta go with your heart and your mind.
[CHORUS x6]
[Chorus]
Can you jam with all the freaks tonight?
Can you jam? Just rock your body right,
Can you jam? Cos I just got to know,
Can you jam? Can you jam?
Jam! [X2]
If you wanna party, Here comes the funk,
Five's got da flava, So just give it up,
I can keep it coming, If you got time,
I can keep it swinging, But you gotta make up your mind!
If you're a freak, If you got the vibe, If you wanna rock tonight!
[Chorus]
Baby gotta check it the funk that I got now,
Make you wanna drop when I hit the right spot now,
Put 'em all up, Throw your hands in the air,
You know you wanna get down, So move it over there!
Level with whack drop phatness on a track,
So gotta move your body if you wanna party,
Gotta get raw the rugged beats that we slam,
Baby, Baby, Baby, Now I know you can jam!
If I'm getting freaky, It's cos you look fine,
And baby if you wanna, We can spend some time,
I can dig deeper, Down to the bone,
I can sing a sweet love, But girl I've got to know!
[Bridge and Chorus]
Ah, Rewind, Rewind, Got the funk for your mind,
Now there's no contest, Because we're one of a kind,
Keep kicking the fab flows cos we gotta, Try to make you hotter,
Make you move a lotta, Five! Live in your town,
You gots to boogie down, Let your legs snap,
Gotta move it all around, Make you move feets,
Gotta clear seats, You need beats, Cos it's a night for the freaks,
When wanna keep bringing flows that you feeling,
Make you wanna jump up to the ceiling,
Kick back, You gotta let your head bump,
We'll take you on a ride with the rugged raw funk now.
Jam! [X2]
[Chorus Until Fade]
his one right here, is for all you freaks!
Get it on (c'mon)
Now I know what I like and I like what you got,
get me hot make me wanna come and hit you in that freaky spot,
and anyway you wanna write it get excited, don't you fight it baby
you know, you know, you know, you know.
I wanna hit you off hard or soft smooth or rough. I can get the fire ignited
so we feelin' like we're taking off.
Now if you want to come and get it don't you fret it guarantee you won't regret it
as we kickin' bad athletics.
Check it out
[BRIDGE]
High heels, black leather.
Thigh high, even better.
Try me, any weather.
I wanna give it to you lady, more than ever.
[CHORUS]
Lay all your lovin' on me, (c'mon you know I'm gonna get ya)
Lay all your lovin' on me.
'Cause when the heat hits the fan
you won't find a better man. (so c'mon)
Lay all your lovin' on me.
Strapped with the thigh high,
leather down to the toes,
she even got leather panty hoes and only I know 'cause the girl nasty get at me
you know, you know, you know.
She got tattoos of cupid, she got me on one,
dangerous with them jeans and the thong on.
So the next time a girl hits you with the line lay your love on me.
Make a move for the waist line.
[BRIDGE]
[CHORUS]
Gotta check it out can you feel it now we're comin' at you [X3]
Gotta check it out, gotta check it
check it out now.
[CHORUS x2]
Constantly girl you're on my mind
Girl, I think about you all of the time
And even though words are hard to say
Girl I miss you, never thought I'd feel this way
(Bridge)
If you keep on taking
My heart you'll be breaking
So why do you do this to me?
You know how I'm feeling
It's you I believe in
Baby can't you see that I need you?
(Chorus)
(You know that it's true)
Every time I see your face I miss you lady
(You know that it's you)
I wanna let you know you're driving me crazy
I'd do anything to help you to see
I don't think you understand what you're doing to me
(You know that it's true)
Every now and then I wanna call you lately
(You know that it's you)
I send a prayer that you'll come back to me lady
(Oh yeah)
Life ain't anything alone, can't you see?
You're an angel in my eyes
Everyday, you're closer to me
Nobody's there when I call your name
(Ahhh...)
And nights are cold girl without your flame
(Nights are cold girl without your flame)
But if I could girl I'd make you see
(I'd make you see, yeah)
That I'm sorry, that I need you here with me
(Bridge)
(Chorus)
Everyday reminisce about the past
Of a love that we thought would last
How we used to be when it was you and me
How did it all disappear so fast
There are days that I can't forget
There are things that I now regret
I was there for you when you were there for me
And I was thinkin' we were set
Every night when I'm laying in my bed
I hear your voice going round in my head
Think of all the things I could have done and
All those things I could have said
I really will make it up to you
I know now what I've got to do
It took time but now I've realised how much I'm missing you
(Bridge)
(Chorus X2)
Breakdown (are you looking for a breakdown)
Shakedown (maybe a shakedown baby)
If you’re looking for a breakdown
If you’re looking for a shakedown
I can feel it in the air tonight and it feels all right
Didn’t see it comin'
And it’s something that I can’t deny
It takes me high
But I know that I’m not afraid, not gonna hide away
I feel alive
Tonight
Oh yeah yeah
[CHORUS]
If you’re looking for a breakdown
Where the kicks are comin' for free
Where the mood is right
And the beats are tight
You can kick it with me
If you’re looking for a shakedown
Where the mix is on the money
You know, I know that you can kick it with me
Everybody howdy howdy, shake your booty, move your body
Everybody make it rowdy that you can kick it with me
Hey girl I can see it to that you’re feelin' rude
Are you comin'?
'Cause you know that I aim to please
That’s the way it is (yeah)
Swing your fine self around to me
And I’ll make you see I feel alive
Tonight
Yeah oh yeah yeah
[CHORUS]
Baby, can we, get up, on it?
Better tell me, do you, want it?
[CHORUS x2]
We causing utter devastation
When we steppin' into place
And better believe that you can see
We're gonna rock and never stop
And here we go again
Hit you with the flow again
get up the second time around
and bring it on again - shout it out
Buddy you're a boy
Make a big noise playin' in the street
Gonna be a big man someday
You got blood in your face (c'mon)
big disgrace
Kicking your can (ah ah) all over the place
Singing
We will, we will rock you
(ha, ha)
We will, we will rock you
c'mon
How about a little something
To get you in the mood
Know what I mean?
Watch your back
We got Queen on this track
Bring the feedback
And let it drop
As long as five bring the funk
Queen bring the rock
And it don't stop
Buddy you're a young man
Hard man
shouting in the street
Gonna take on the world some day
You got blood on your face,
You big disgrace
Waving you're banner all over the place,
Singing
We will, we will rock you
We will, we will rock you
We will, we will rock you
We will, we will rock you ha ha
Go(x30)
Buddy, you're an old man, poor man
Pleading with your eyes gonna
make you something someday
You got mud on your face (c'mon),
big disgrace
Somebody better put you back in your place
Singing
we will, we will rock you
We will, we will rock you
We will, we will rock you
Are you ready for attack?
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
Stargate ah yeah
Yeah [etc]
Five have been around and livin' it up
We're changin' it around just keeping you right
When we get excited no we never stop
Everybody knows we can't get enough
People say we're dark but we're the light
'Cause we're the only ones that are keeping you tight
Everybody's gonna feel high tonight
Five's gonna show you how to rock it right
Do you want it?
Do you need it?
Can you feel it?
Tonight
[CHORUS]
'Cause you gotta get up
You gotta stay on top
Throw your hands to the sky
Wave them from side to side
It's gonna take all night
When you rock all right
Because we're wanted
Dead or alive
12345
(I said 12345)
Ready, steady for attack
When you feel me comin'
Keep comin' back
The more you want, the more we got
All you gotta do is just give it a shot
Drop it into fifth in the fast lane
Once you've had a taste you'll be back again
Everybody's gonna feel high tonight
Five are gonna show you how to rock it right
Do you want it?
Do you need it?
Can you feel it?
Tonight
[CHORUS]
(Said 12345) [x2]
Dead or Alive
We're comin' tonight
To make it all right
(Are you ready for attack)
Yeah [etc]
[CHORUS x2]
Exuse me can you help me straighting out my head?
O gotta new friend by the name of Mr Z
Well what's wrong with that don't you like what you see?
Hmm... If I had a choise yo I'd rather be me
You see he's kinda not like a kinda average kinda guy
Kinda say What make ya kinda say why
Did you see that what he did to his cat
It's all big and fat and now it wears caps
Here we go again
Mr Zuvaloppa got a crazy life
With a house on the conor for his kids and wife.
Works all day trying' to make ends meet
Just the same as everybody does down
His street
Mr Zuvaloppa got a brand new car
But he likes a little drink so he can't drive far
He used to have a mini but he's six foot four
Mr Zuvaloppa don't want it anymore
Yo you gotta sitt back relax while
I hit you with a tale of a guy
Who would try but he's always gonna fail
M I S T E R Z he doesn't relaise
that it thatit wasn't really ment to be
him at the top he never wanna stop
The fool up in the pool doin'
a bigg belly flop
Now even sunbathing he could
never get it right
Cause he even tried to do it in the middle of the night
Mr Zuvaloppa got a crazy life
With a house on the conor for his kids and wife.
Works all day trying' to make ends meet
Just the same as everybody does down
His street
Mr Zuvaloppa got a brand new car
But he likes a little drink so he can't drive far
He used to have a mini but he's six foot four
Mr Zuvaloppa don't want it anymore
All i gotta do
Is get it through to you
you take my hand and let me lead you away
same old words again
he just a friend
that's what you told me
But you're my one and only
[Bridge:]
If I tell you somthing now
I ask myslef just how you came in to my world
gotta keep on luvin' you
[Chorus:]
So let the sunshine wherever you are
It really doesn't matterhow long, how far
I took my time and realized
you're the only thing that matters now in my life
Just another song
while the beat goes on
you keep on movin and I'll bring you the groove
I guess it's just the way
nothing left to say
hard everyday
DJ take me away
[Bridge]
[Chorus]
stop, look, check and listen
I freaks the funk that will keep you wishin'
you're a superstar
No matter who you are
You gotta keep your dreams
becos' they're never too far
Now can you see what I'm tryin' to do
realize that what it's never too late now
can you feel what I'm tryin to say
until the beat goes on and on until the break of dawn
[Bridge]
[Chorus]
Yeah, (hahahah) yeah, yeah, yeah
Boogie down, boogie down
You gotta get serious
What, what come on
Perplexing as I recks the decks so check the flex poetical sex I bring the
funk to your necks check it
Second time around better than the first, I quench your thirst, my rhymes
fill ya till ya burst
Get serious
Cause we're gonna do for you, you know it's true we got a second album
coming through
Too many people thoght we couldn't go on
But yo, we're still number one see we shine like the sun
Hands up in the air,
Wave 'em like you care
Feel the funky beat
EVerybody on your feet
[Chorus:]
Get serious
We got it going on tonight
Get serious
Everything will be alright
All I know is true that I wanna be with you
You gotta get serious, serious, serious
Could I be the one that twists thighter than a curl
Coming through from the mist
Check my defenition, rhyme composition
On the double o-5ive mission
With the aim to please any beef with the rod gone fishing
Check if you're down tonight
Put your hands in the air if you feel alright
Got enough for what you need
So get serious Baby please
Hands up in the air,
Wave 'em like you care
Feel the funky beat
Everybody on your feet
[Chorus]
Now we've been waiting for so long
Give me a chance to get it through
You are the flavour to my song
That's why I wanna be, wanna be with you
Stop, clear the stage so we can get busy
Open up your mind while I hit you with the nitty gritty
We came to rhyme, we came to get down
Wo when we rock the mike we bring the funk into your town
So I drop a rhyme onto the mike while it's mine then you gotta pass it on
while I rock you with a line
As we hip we hop we're getting others in the run
Flicking switches on the buttom of the mike cause we're done
[Chorus x2]
You say I'm crazy
But I don't have the time (time time)
Stargate (time time)
Uh - Five
You say I'm crazy
But I don't have the time (time time)
Yeah (time time)
C'mon
(Verse 1)
I I I
I have been runnin' 'round all after you
You you you
You have been playin' me for a fool
My my my
My situation's got me all confused
What what what
What should I be holdin' out for you
(Bridge 1)
It could have been so easily
It's hurtin' me
Can't you see
(Chorus)
You say I'm crazy
But I don't have the time
I'm wincin' lately
'Cause you're always on my mind
I can't always be what you want me to be
If I'm not for you
The baby set me free
Uh uh uh
Set me free - yeah
Uh uh uh
C'mon
(Verse 2)
I I I
I have been thinkin' of you constantly
You you you
You got me thinkin' of you sexually
My my my
My lonely nights (Ah)
Why why why
'Cause all I wanna do is you
(Bridge 1)
It could have been so easily
Aoo (Ao!)
It's hurtin' me
Can't you see
(Chorus)
You say I'm crazy
But I don't have the time (no no - no no)
I'm wincin' lately
'Cause you're always on my mind (yeah)
I can't always be what you want me to be (want me to be - yeah)
If I'm not for you
The baby set me free
(Bridge 2)
There'll come a time
You will be mine
Baby I feel it deep inside
I'm beggin' you please
Get down on your knees
'Cause I wanna rock you all night long (rock you all night long)
Yeah yeah yeah ye-eah
Yeah
C'mon
I'm gonna rock you all night long
(Chorus)
You say I'm crazy (crazy)
But I don't have the time
I'm wincin' lately
'Cause you're always on my mind
I can't always be what you want me to be (wanna be - wanna be)
If I'm not for you (wanna be - wanna be)
The baby set me free
(Chorus)
You say I'm crazy (crazy)
But I don't have the time (gonna rock you baby)
I'm wincin' lately (wincin')
'Cause you're always on my mind
I can't always be what you want me to be (crazy)
If I'm not for you
The baby set me free
VH1 | |
---|---|
Current VH1 logo | |
Launched | January 1, 1985 |
Owned by | Viacom |
Picture format | 16:9 (1080i, HDTV) |
Slogan | Watch and discuss |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Headquarters | New York City, United States |
Formerly called | VH-1: Video Hits One VH1: Music First |
Sister channel(s) | MTV, VH1 Soul, VH1 Classic |
Website | VH1.com |
Availability | |
Satellite | |
DirecTV (U.S.) | 335 (SD/HD) 1335 (VOD) |
Dish Network (U.S.) | 162 (SD/HD) |
Yes (Israel) | 76 |
Tata Sky (India) | 725 |
Airtel digital TV (India) | 386 |
Videocon_d2h (India) | 557 |
Cable | |
Available on many cable systems | Check local listings for specific channels |
IPTV | |
Verizon FiOs | 217 |
Part of a series on MTV MTV channels |
VH1 or Vh1 (known as VH-1: Video Hits One from 1985 to 1994) is an American cable television network based in New York City. Launched on Tuesday January 1, 1985 in the old space of Turner Broadcasting's short-lived Cable Music Channel, the original purpose of the channel was to build on the success of MTV by playing music videos, but targeting a slightly older demographic than its sister channel, focusing on the lighter, softer side of popular music. The channel was originally created by Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment, at the time a division of Warner Communications and owner of MTV. Both VH1 and its sister channel MTV are currently part of the MTV Networks division of corporate parent Viacom. While VH1 still occasionally plays music videos and the Top 20 Video Countdown, its more recent claim to fame has been in the area of music-related reality programming, such as Behind the Music, the I Love the... series, the Celebreality block of programming, and the channel's overall focus on popular culture.[1]
Contents |
VH-1's aim was to focus on the lighter, softer side of popular music,[1] including such musicians as Carly Simon, Tina Turner, Elton John, Billy Joel, Eric Clapton, Sting, Donna Summer, Rod Stewart, Kenny G, and Anita Baker, in hopes of appealing to people aged 18 to 35, and possibly older. Also frequently featured in the network's early years were "videos" for Motown and other 1960s oldies consisting of newsreel and concert footage. It was introduced on January 1, 1985 with the video performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by Marvin Gaye.[1]
From the start, Video Hits One was branded as an urban version of its sister/parent channel. It played more jazz and R&B artists than MTV and had a higher rotation of urban-contemporary performers. Its early on-camera personalities were New York radio veterans Don Imus (then of WNBC); Frankie Crocker (then program director and DJ for WBLS); Scott Shannon (of Z100); Jon Bauman ("Bowzer" from Sha Na Na); Bobby Rivers; and Rita Coolidge.
Later VJs included Tim Byrd of WPIX-FM (now WRXP), a station whose eclectic ballad-and-R&B oriented format mirrored that of VH-1; and Alison Steele ("The Nightbird" of WNEW-FM). Rosie O'Donnell later joined the outlet's veejay lineup. O'Donnell would also host a stand up comedy show featuring various comedians each episode. As an added touch to make the network more like a televised radio station, the early years of the network featured jingles in their bumpers produced by JAM Creative Productions in Dallas, who had previously made jingles for radio stations worldwide.
The format left room for occasional ad-libs by the VJ, a godsend for emcees such as Imus and O'Donnell. In true Imus style, he used a 1985 segment of his VH-1 show to jokingly call smooth-jazz icon Sade Adu a "grape" for her oval-shaped head.
VH1 catered to adult top 40, including musicians such as Ace of Base, Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, Lisa Loeb, Seal, and other slightly more rock-oriented popular music than what it had originally played, though favorites such as Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Cher, Elton John, Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Céline Dion, still received heavy play as well. It should also be noted that the logo didn't start appearing on the screen during the programming until 1991.
VH1 started out using MTV’s famous Kabel typeface font for their music video credit tags. It was later replaced by a larger type font. In addition, the year the video was made was added to the column that identified the record label the album was released on. In 1993, the name of the videos’ director was included at the bottom of the credits.
VH1 had a short-lived hour-long program called "By Request" in which viewers could call a 1-900 hotline number to request their videos.
Typical of VH1's early programming was New Visions, a series which featured videos and in-studio performances by smooth jazz and classical and New Age bands and performers, including Spyro Gyra, Andy Narell, Mark Isham, Philip Glass[2] and Yanni. At first many different musicians guest-hosted the program, but eventually musician/songwriter Ben Sidran established himself as permanent host.
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In the fall of 1994, VH1 rebranded itself as VH1: Music First, following a ratings decline in the early 1990s.[1] They began airing “History Of Music Videos A to Z” during the July 4th weekend from 1994 to 1998 where they'd show a large percentage of their library of music videos, which would include mini-marathons of videos by artists with a large number of videos. The success of A to Z led to a weeknight 11pm hour-long broadcast of Madonna videos, titled The Madonna Show. The videos were aired without introduction by a VJ and the program was soon shortened to thirty minutes, and then scrapped all together. By 1996, VH1 was heading down the same path as its sister channel, MTV, choosing to focus more on music-related shows than on music videos. Additionally, the network began to expand its playlist of music videos to include more rock and rap music.[1] Old episodes of American Bandstand could regularly be seen on the channel. By that time, the channel's ratings were beginning to fall.
As part of VH-1's rebranding as "VH1: Music First" in 1994, the channel launched a new series, the VH1 Top 10 Countdown, that counted down the top ten music videos played on VH1 each week. A combination of record sales, radio airplay, video spins, message board posts, and conventional mail would decide the order of the countdown. A rotating cast of VJs picked up hosting duties for the show over the years. The series expanded from ten to twenty music videos, becoming the VH1 Top 20 Video Countdown, in 2001. VH1 Top 20 Countdown is premiered every Saturday at 3:00 AM with an encore presentation at 9:00 AM, also shown on Sunday at 8:00 AM and lastly on Tuesday at 9:00 AM during the same week.
In the fall of 1996, VH1 premiered Pop-Up Video, in which music videos were accompanied by "pop-ups" (also known as "bubbles" or "info nuggets")--small enclosed areas of the screen containing facts about the band or artist, such as career highlights, discography, biographical details, quotes, and anecdotes.
In February 1996, VH1 again hit it big with the premiere of the first of the network's flagship shows, VH1 Storytellers. The show started with a broadcast of Ray Davies, during his "Storyteller" tour, and took its name from this first show. In each hourlong episode, artists appear in front of a (mostly small and intimate) live audience, interspersing musical performances with anecdotes related to the songs' meaning, the songwriting process, audience reaction, etc. Along with Davies, the series has featured a widely diverse list of artists, including Culture Club, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, Kanye West, Tom Waits, and Def Leppard. Meat Loaf enjoyed the show's format so much that he bought the stage decorations from VH-1 and went on to do a "Storytellers" tour in 1998/1999.[3]
VH1 scored another hit in August 1997 with the debut of Behind the Music. The hourlong show features interviews and biographies of some of popular music's biggest stars qualified to be profiled on the series. The premiere episode featured Milli Vanilli. Episodes have ranged from Aaliyah to Stryper to Queen, as well as others such as Meat Loaf, MC Hammer, Oasis, Fleetwood Mac, TLC, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Megadeth, Britney Spears, Selena, Petra, Pantera, and Eminem, with more episodes being produced periodically. By the late 1990s, the show began to run out of artists to profile, leading to the short-lived BTM2 program, half-hour looks into bands and artists whose popularity was rising, but not yet at its peak.
Shortly after, VH1 created a companion series, Legends (originally sponsored by AT&T), profiling artists who have made a more significant contribution to music history to qualify as "Legends" (that is, those artists who have gone beyond the category of Behind the Music biographies). The artists profiled so far have included Aerosmith; The Bee Gees; David Bowie; Johnny Cash; Eric Clapton; The Clash; George Clinton; Sam Cooke; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; The Doors; John Fogerty; Aretha Franklin; Marvin Gaye; The Grateful Dead; Guns N' Roses; Jimi Hendrix; Michael Jackson; Elton John; Janis Joplin; B. B. King; Led Zeppelin; John Lennon; Curtis Mayfield; Nirvana; Pink Floyd; The Pretenders; Red Hot Chili Peppers; Queen; Bruce Springsteen; Tina Turner; U2; Stevie Ray Vaughan; The Who and Neil Young.[4]
Founded in 1997, the VH1 Save The Music Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating systemic change in the American public school system by restoring instrumental music programs and by raising public awareness about the importance of music as part of each child's complete education. The Foundation is a 501c3 public charity that began as a public affairs initiative of Vh1 the cable music channel.
The Save The Music Foundation's 2012 Ambassador class includes Gavin Rossdale, Jordin Sparks, Vanessa Carlton, Lupe Fiasco, Katy Perry, Chris Daughtry, Mathew Morrison and AJ Mclean, joining Alumni Ambassadors including: Kelly Clarkson, John Mayer, Natasha Bedingfield, John Legend, The Fray, Colbie Calliat, NE-YO, Nick Lachey, among many other musicians, singers, athletes and celebrities dedicated to the cause [5]. VH1 Save The Music Ambassadors help raise awareness and deliver key messages about the importance of music education in a young person's life, as well as help raise funds to further the Foundation's mission to restore instrumental music education programs in U.S. public elementary and middle schools.
Since its inception in 1997, the VH1 Save The Music Foundation has provided $48 million in new musical instruments to 1,800 public schools in more than 100 cities around the country, impacting the lives of over 1.8 million children. The Foundation hosts a series of special fundraising events each year, along with executive various cause marketing campaigns to mobilize people around the importance of music education.
In 1998, VH1 debuted the first annual VH1 Divas concert and featured the "divas" Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, Shania Twain, Gloria Estefan and Celine Dion, and the "special guest" Carole King.[6] The most successful of these "diva" shows was produced in 1999 featuring Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Cher, LeAnn Rimes, Mary J. Blige, Faith Hill, Chaka Khan, Brandy, and special "divo" Elton John.[7] It became a huge success and was featured in the following years starring Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Destiny's Child, Jordin Sparks, Miley Cyrus, Jennifer Hudson, Shakira, Deborah Harry, Anastacia, Dixie Chicks, Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, and Jessica Simpson. Some artists such as Whitney Houston, Cyndi Lauper, Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, Celine Dion, Cher, Chaka Khan, and Faith Hill were featured in two or more VH1 concerts.
In 1999, VH1 aired its first original movie, a bio-pic on Sweetwater. Their third original movie (which aired in 2000), Two of Us, focused on a fictional meeting between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Over the next three years, they made over a dozen movies, including bio-pics on Jim Morrison and The Doors, Ricky Nelson, MC Hammer, The Monkees, Meat Loaf, and Def Leppard.
VH1 continues to air "Movies That Rock" on a regular basis, expanding to include movies not produced by VH1. The subject matter remains mostly focused on music and musicians.
In the late 1990s, VH1 continued to get more diverse and teen-based with its music selection, and with that, the network updated its 1994 "Big 1" logo. Various late-night rock shows have been shown on VH1, featuring alternative rock and metal videos from the 1980s and 1990s. VH1 eventually warmed up to harder rock acts such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Foo Fighters, the Stone Temple Pilots, and Metallica. Their new videos began being added into VH1's playlist right away.
Around late 2002, VH1 even began to play mainstream rap musicians.[1] The latest videos by Eminem, Nelly, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, and Eve began to be shown in VH1's rotation and even started to crop up on VH1's top 20 countdown. VH1 also plays music from Latin artists such as Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony, Enrique Iglesias, Thalía and Shakira.
rockDocs was the title under which VH1 aired various music documentaries, both those produced by VH1 and those produced by third-parties. Such documentary series produced by VH1 include "And Ya' Don't Stop", a five-part series on the history of hip-hop and rap,[8] a four-part series on the history of heavy metal, Heavy: The Story of Metal, and The Drug Years, which tells the story of various drug cultures that changed America. Films produced by other studios have also been aired as rockDocs, including Woodstock, Madonna: Truth or Dare, Tupac: Resurrection, Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!, a documentary on the Beastie Boys, and most recently Last Days of Left Eye which documented the last month of Lisa Lopes's life from the band TLC and N.W.A.: The World's Most Dangerous Group, featuring the narration of comedian Chris Rock, which chronicled the rise and fall of N.W.A.
VH1 endured criticism for Music Behind Bars, which mainly focuses on musicians in custody. Critics have claimed prisoners, mainly those convicted of murder, should not be entitled to any exposure, especially nationally.[9]
The channel aired Where Are They Now? from 1999 to 2002. It featured former celebrities and their current professional and personal statuses. Each episode was dedicated to a specific genre, ranging from past child stars to Aaron Spelling's notable productions, to controversial news figures.
In 2003, the network changed its focus again, dropping "Music First" from its name, and introducing their new and current box logo. Having saturated its Behind The Music series (and spinoff BTM2, a 30-minute version that told the stories of current chart-toppers), gotten past the point of showing music videos on a regular basis, and endured a 35% ratings decline over the past several years, the network began to target the pop culture nostalgia market just like its sister MTV.[1][10] The network primarily plays reality shows now.
The network is currently working on four new reality projects, slated to run in spring 2010. They include a makeover series for women, a dating advice show for men, a documentary series about the deaths of several celebrities and a series that follows the lives of people at a ski resort in Vancouver, B.C.[11]
In 2002, VH1 broadcast a ten-part series entitled I Love the '80s. The idea was taken from a BBC series, first broadcast in 2000,[12] in which current entertainers and pop-culture figures offered their take on the trends, events, and personalities of another decade. The success of VH1's I Love the '80s, coupled with the growing nostalgia for ever-more-recent times, led the network to create a parade of similarly themed programs. These ranged from 2003's I Love the '70s, to further variants like I Love the '80s Strikes Back, I Love the '90s, and I Love the '90s: Part Deux. More recently, VH1 premiered I Love the '80s 3-D and I Love the '70s: Volume 2, along with the non-decade-based I Love the Holidays and I Love Toys.
The format of these shows has been repeated for the weekly program Best Week Ever. In a sketch on Fox's MADtv envisioning an as-yet fictitious "I Love the 00s" show, VH1 was referred to as "the bitter comics ragging on real celebrities" network. On June 22 of that years, VH1 premiered I Love the New Millennium, focusing on the years 2000-2007.
VH1 also produces its The Greatest series in which a similar format is used to countdown lists like "The 50 Sexiest Video Moments", "100 Greatest Songs of Rock 'N' Roll", "100 Greatest Songs from the Past 25 Years", "100 Greatest One-hit Wonders", and "100 Greatest Kid Stars". In 2001, Mark McGrath hosted VH1's miniseries "100 Most Shocking Moments in Rock 'N' Roll", which compiled a list of the moments in music history that changed its course and shook its foundations.[13] Recently in late December 2009, an updated series titled "100 Most Shocking Music Moments" aired on VH1.[14][15] In 2008 and early 2009, the channel premiered the "100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs", "100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs", "100 Greatest Songs of the 90s", and "100 Greatest Songs of the 80s".
In 2004, VH1 began this mini-series category with "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs...Ever". Additional series in this group include "40 Most Awesomely Bad Dirrty Songs...Ever",[16] "40 Most Awesomely Bad Break-up Songs...Ever"[17] "40 Most Awesomely Bad #1 Songs...Ever",[18] "40 Most Awesomely Bad Metal Songs...Ever",[19] and "40 Most Awesomely Bad Love Songs".[20]
In January 2005 VH1 launched its Celebreality programming block of reality shows featuring celebrities, anchored by The Surreal Life, which mimics MTV's The Real World, instead placing celebrities from the past into a living environment.[21] The word "celebreality" is a portmanteau combining the words "celebrity" and "reality" and is generally used to describe reality TV shows in which celebrities participate as subjects. The term appears to have been coined by Michael Gross, writing for The Toronto Star on May 12, 1991. In his article, entitled "Celebrity's New Face," Mr. Gross used a hyphenated form of the word ("celeb-reality") to describe the tendency of certain contemporary celebrities to downplay the traditional trappings of Hollywood glamour. "You could see the new celeb-reality on display at this year's Oscars," wrote Gross. "It is Kathy Bates and Whoopi Goldberg, not Kim Basinger and Michelle Pfeiffer. It is Jeremy Irons in black tie and the sneakers he says keep his feet on the ground. It is Kevin Costner, fighting small, important battles, winning big, but reacting with modesty and going off to party privately. The new celebrities are human first, famous second."
The next known citation of the word is by Joyce Millman, writing for The New York Times on January 5, 2003. In an article entitled, "Celebreality: The ‘Stars’ Are Elbowing Their Way In," Ms. Millman wrote: "Celebreality, the junk genre du jour, turns the notion of reality TV upside down. Instead of real people acting like celebrities on shows like "Survivor", "Big Brother" and "The Bachelor", celebreality gives us celebrities acting like real people on shows like "The Osbournes", "The Anna Nicole Show" and "Celebrity Boot Camp." I'm using the term "celebrity" loosely here — we're not talking about Russell Crowe, Julia Roberts and Dame Judi Dench eating bugs and scrubbing latrines. No, the celebrities of celebreality are a motlier crew, like, well, Mötley Crüe's Vince Neil, the former rap superstar M. C. Hammer and the wee ex-Michael Jackson ornament Emmanuel ("Webster") Lewis. Those three will be setting up housekeeping together on Thursday in "The Surreal Life" on WB, a celebreality spin on MTV's "Real World." Not to be outdone, ABC sends a Baldwin brother (Stephen), a supermodel (Frederique) and a former "L.A. Law" star (Corbin Bernsen) to Hawaii for "Celebrity Mole Hawaii", beginning Wednesday."
The VH1 Celebreality block has also aired shows such as:
Since the controversy over the murder-suicide of a contestant from Megan Wants a Millionaire, the channel has toned down its reality programming.[22][23]
Since 2004, VH1 has showed their appreciation for hip-hop and rock music by honoring pioneers and movements. Hip-hop musicians honored include Eazy-E, LL Cool J, 2Pac, The Notorious B.I.G., and Public Enemy. All of the shows have been taped in the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City. On May 25, 2006, Queen, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, and Kiss were the inaugural inductees into the VH1 Rock Honors in Las Vegas. The ceremony aired on VH1 six days later. In 2007, ZZ Top, Heart, Genesis and Ozzy Osbourne were inducted into the VH1 Rock Honors. 2008's sole Rock Honors inductees were The Who.
On July 1, 2007, VH1 and MHD, the high-definition music channel of MTV (now called Palladia), simulcast live the entire Concert for Diana from London, England, on the birthday of Princess Diana, Princess of Wales.[24]
Although VH1 has drastically reduced its emphasis on music, it does continue to play music videos (just like its sister network, MTV) from 4 a.m. until 11 a.m. ET. The overnight block was called Insomniac Music Theater until August 2005, when it was renamed Nocturnal State. As of the beginning of October 2008, Nocturnal State has been cut down to one hour, and Fresh: New Music has been supplanted by additional hours of Jump Start, thus meaning that VH1 now plays 7 hours of music daily.
As of the beginning of May 2010, VH1 has permanently retire the named Nocturnal State and had temporarily cancelled the 5AM ET hour of Jump Start to make room for more reality show re-airs. Also, VH1's music has leaned more and more Top 40-based over the past year. More recently, the 4 and 5AM ET hours reverted back to music on most days, and all of its music hours are now branded as Jump Start. Jump Start runs typically from 4AM-9AM weekdays and Saturdays (until 8AM on Sundays).
From April 28 – May 2, 2011, from Tampa to Cozumel music fans can experience non-stop music performances from headliners Train, Lifehouse, Colbie Caillat, and The Script. Other bands include Alpha Rev, Civil Twilight, Mat Kearney, One eskimO, SafetySuit, Thriving Ivory, Trailer Park Ninjas, and Ryan Star. The cruise is on The Carnival Cruise Line ship Carnival Inspiration.
VH1 HD is a 1080i high definition simulcast of VH1. Only newer shows such as Rock of Love Bus, The T.O. Show and Brooke Knows Best air in full 16:9 aspect ratio HD on it however, and most other programs are shown in 4:3 aspect ratio with the video upconverted. The HD channel is available nationally on Verizon FiOS, DirecTV, AT&T U-verse, Comcast, and Dish Network.
Like MTV and Nickelodeon before them, VH1 also launched spinoff digital networks as part of The Suite From MTV. Initially, four VH1 spinoff networks were formed. Others later joined the staple, including:
VH1's online destination, VH1.com, launched in the 1990s. In the 2000s, VH1 created VSPOT, a broadband video channel that followed the model of MTV Overdrive, containing the shows aired by VH1 and music videos. VSPOT was renamed to Video.VH1.com in late 2007.
As with other MTV channels, MTV Networks broadcasts international versions of VH1:
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: VH1 |
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Stevie Ray Vaughan | |
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Stevie Ray Vaughan performing on Austin City Limits in 1989 |
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Background information | |
Birth name | Stephen Ray Vaughan |
Also known as | SRV |
Born | Dallas, Texas |
October 3, 1954
Died | August 27, 1990 East Troy, Wisconsin |
(aged 35)
Genres | Blues rock, electric blues, Texas blues, instrumental rock |
Occupations | Musician, songwriter |
Instruments | Guitar, vocals |
Years active | 1965 | –1990
Labels | Epic, Legacy, Sony |
Associated acts | Double Trouble, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Roomful of Blues, Jeff Beck, Joe Cocker |
Website | srvofficial.com |
Notable instruments | |
Fender Stratocaster |
Stephen Ray "Stevie" Vaughan (October 3, 1954 – August 27, 1990) was an American guitarist, vocalist, songwriter, and a notable recording artist. Often referred to by his initials, SRV, he is best known as the leader of the blues rock band Double Trouble, with whom he recorded four studio albums. Influenced by guitarists of various genres, Vaughan emphasized intensity and emotion in his guitar playing, and favored vintage guitars and amplifiers. He became one of the leading blues rock musicians, encompassing multiple styles, including jazz and ballads.
Born and raised in Dallas as the younger brother of Jimmie Vaughan, he moved to Austin at the age of 17, and formed the band, Triple Threat Revue, that evolved into a band called Double Trouble, in 1978. Accompanied by drummer Chris Layton, bassist Tommy Shannon, and later, keyboardist Reese Wynans, Vaughan became an important figure in Texas blues, a loud, swing-driven fusion of blues and rock. Despite the breakthrough success of Double Trouble's debut Epic album, Texas Flood (1983), Vaughan entered a period of alcohol and drug addiction. In 1986, he successfully completed rehabilitation and released the album In Step in (1989). On August 27, 1990, while departing a concert venue by helicopter in East Troy, Wisconsin, Vaughan was killed when the helicopter crashed into the side of a ski hill. His death triggered a global outpouring of grief, and as many as 3,000 people reportedly attended his public memorial service in Dallas.
Vaughan was highly rated and is considered to be one of the greatest guitarists of all time. He has received critical recognition for his guitar playing, ranked at #7 on Rolling Stone's list of "100 Greatest Guitarists" in 2003. He ranked #3 on Classic Rock magazine's list of "100 Wildest Guitar Heroes" in 2007. Vaughan won six Grammy Awards, including Best Contemporary Blues Performance for In Step. Vaughan was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2000 and won five W.C. Handy Awards. As of 2012, Vaughan has sold over 11.5 million albums with Double Trouble.
Contents |
Stephen Ray Vaughan was born on October 3, 1954, the younger brother of Jimmie Vaughan, at Methodist Hospital in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, Texas, a community southwest of the central business district. His mother, Martha Jean Cook, was a secretary,[1] and his father, Jimmie Lee "Big Jim" Vaughan, was an asbestos worker,[2] who was a US Navy veteran of World War II.[3] Throughout his childhood, Vaughan lived in several different cities. Martha acknowledged that the family traveled when Big Jim didn't find work in Dallas.[2] In July 1997, Jimmie recalled their early childhood:
It wasn't really a comfortable 'Leave It to Beaver' kind of a deal, you know. There was a lot of tension, and there was moving all the time, and never really getting to know people ... on the highway all the time and going to school for two weeks here and three weeks here ... It was the absolute perfect training for us to do what we did ... They were great parents, and my mother's the sweetest mother in the world. And I love my dad. There was a lot of happy times and it wasn't all weird and crazy, but there was a lot of that too. We didn't ever know what our old man was gonna do, you know. He'd go off like a rocket. [But] we had the absolute best parents in the world for being the guitar players that we are, when I look back on it now.[2][4]
After watching Jimmie begin playing guitar, Vaughan became fascinated with the instrument, and when he turned seven, Big Jim bought him a toy guitar from Sears.[5] Among the first songs he learned to play were "Wine, Wine, Wine" and "Thunderbird" by the Nightcaps,[6] a Texan garage rock band formed in the 1950s.[7] He also learned to play songs by Jimmy Reed, which ignited Vaughan's love for blues music.[6] Vaughan would spend hours playing along to records note for note and soon became consumed with playing the instrument;[6] he would often practice to records that Jimmie brought home, which exposed him to guitarists such as Lonnie Mack, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King.[8] One of the first to take notice was musician Doyle Bramhall, who said that Vaughan "had it from the get-go", and collaborated with Vaughan extensively in later years.[9]
Vaughan attended Justin F. Kimball High School and was described by Vaughan as "beserk". He often would receive a note from the principal every day stating that his appearance was unacceptable to attend school.[10] After failing music theory, Vaughan briefly attended Southern Methodist University after winning a scholarship to an evening experimental art class.[11] He later fondly spoke of the class, saying: "It was a night class and it was a few kids from all over the city. It was completely wide open. We brought records and talked and worked. If you were working on a piece of sculpture and you decided to come in and smash it, you did it. If you wanted to look at it, you did that. The class was great, I learned a lot in it, but it was on the nights when I was supposed to be rehearsing."[12]
Vaughan began performing with bands at age 10,[13] playing bass guitar in Jimmie's band, Texas Storm,[11] and forming his own group, Blackbird.[14] He made his first recordings with Cast of Thousands, a group that featured future actor, Stephen Tobolowsky, on vocals.[15] By the time he entered high school, Vaughan began getting paid for late-night performances in local bars and clubs, leaving him exhausted for class the next morning.[16] After Jimmie moved out of the home at age 15, Vaughan's parents were starting to express apprehension on his career choice. He took a job washing dishes at a local dairy mart for $0.70 an hour, later falling into a barrel of grease.[17] He ultimately quit and devoted his life to being a professional musician:
When I was about twelve, I had been a dishwasher for a while, and part of my job was to clean out the trash bin. That involved standing on these big 55-gallon barrels with wooden lids on them, where they'd put all the hot grease.One day I was out there cleaning out the bin, having a blast, and the top broke and I fell in. Just as I finally got out—I'd been up to my chest in grease—they came with two fresh hot vats of boiling grease and I got out just in time. If I'd taken a break later, I would have been a fried guy! The woman fired me because I broke the lids on the barrel, and right then and there I decided, 'Wait a minute. This is not what I want to do. I want to play guitar like Albert King!' And that's the last job I've had other than playing guitar. So, thank you, Albert, for helping me there.[18]
Vaughan left school after seven weeks of his senior year and moved with Blackbird to Austin, Texas.[19] Upon arrival, Vaughan recalls that he lived in a club called Rolling Hills—which later became the Soap Creek Saloon—and slept on either the pool table, stage, or floor, though he also said that it was one of his favorite times.[18] In December 1972, Blackbird reformed as Krackerjack and included bassist, Tommy Shannon.[20] After two months Vaughan parted with the band to join Marc Benno and the Nightcrawlers, which included singer, Doyle Bramhall. With the help of producer, David Anderle, the Nightcrawlers recorded an album at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood for A&M Records.[21] Vaughan co-wrote two of the songs from the album including "Crawlin'" and "Dirty Pool". When co-founder, Jerry Moss, suggested adding horns to the album, Benno refused. As a result A&M shelved the project, and the Nightcrawlers returned to Texas without Benno.[22] The group continued to perform in venues like the Armadillo World Headquarters only to break up a year later.[23] In 2006, the recordings were later released by Blue Skunk Music.[24]
In 1975 Vaughan joined guitarist, Denny Freeman, in Paul Ray and the Cobras, a group that appeared weekly at the Soap Creek Saloon.[25] After two years of performances, Paul Ray was diagnosed with nodes on his throat, leaving the vocal duties to Vaughan during his absence.[26] This prompted Vaughan to quit the Cobras and form a group called Triple Threat Revue, which included vocalist Lou Ann Barton, bassist W. C. Clark, and drummer Fredde "Pharoah" Walden.[27] After Clark left to form his own band, he was replaced by Jackie Newhouse, and the group was renamed Double Trouble after a song by Otis Rush.[28] Chris Layton replaced Walden after he quit the band in July 1978.[29] Barton was later fired due to a drunken incident following a performance,[30] and Double Trouble became a power trio. Tommy Shannon, who played with Vaughan in Krackerjack, replaced Newhouse after attending a Double Trouble performance in Houston.[32][33]
In 1983 Vaughan contributed to David Bowie's album, Let's Dance; the album sold over three times as many copies as Bowie's previous best-seller.[34] Vaughan was invited to join Bowie's band for the Serious Moonlight Tour, but Vaughan declined at the urging of his management.[17] Double Trouble's reputation began to build, and a July 1982 appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival brought them to the attention of record producer John H. Hammond.[35] In March 1983, Double Trouble signed with Epic Records, a subsidiary of CBS Records.[35] In June of the same year Epic remixed and released Texas Flood.[36] The album had spawned several singles, including "Pride and Joy", "Love Struck Baby", and "Mary Had a Little Lamb".[37]
In the fall of 1983 Double Trouble opened 17 shows for The Moody Blues; the band received $5,000 per show, plus a bonus for successful ticket sales.[38] In December of '83, Stevie Ray recorded a CD and DVD session with Albert King and also that same December 1983, Double Trouble performed for a taping of Austin City Limits;[39] the show aired on February 28, 1984, and featured Jimmie's band, The Fabulous Thunderbirds.[40] Producer, Terry Lickona, agreed that Vaughan's performance was "a combination of nervous, paranoid, and so insecure", saying that he had "zero self-confidence" and was "sweating big-time the whole night".[41] Double Trouble also performed a sold-out show in New York City's Beacon Theatre, with Rolling Stones vocalist Mick Jagger in attendance.[40] By the end of 1983, Texas Flood received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Traditional Blues Recording. "Rude Mood" was nominated for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.[42]
Couldn't Stand the Weather, Double Trouble's second album, was released in 1984 to generally favorable reviews. Allmusic gave positive, although reserved, feedback, saying that there aren't "many weaknesses on the record, aside from the suspicion that Vaughan didn't really push himself as hard as he could have".[43] Music critic Robert Christgau called it "a roadhouse album with gargantuan sonic imagination".[44] The album was commercially successful, and while it did not receive better accolades, it peaked at number 31 on the US Billboard 200 chart.[43]
On October 4, 1984, Double Trouble performed a sold-out benefit concert at New York City's Carnegie Hall. In celebration of Vaughan's thirtieth birthday, the show featured many special guests including the Roomful of Blues horn section, keyboardist Dr. John, Jimmie Vaughan, vocalist Angela Strehli, and drummer George Rains. The band wore custom velvet "mariachi" suits and designed a stage set of blue and gold.[45] Vaughan originally planned to film the performance for future video release, though CBS Records declined. Strehli recalls: "...it was supposed to be videoed and at the last minute they pulled some kind of union thing: 'Well, this show is going to run past eleven, so that means we get double time.' So they had to cancel the video part, which is just a shame."[46]
The concert was sold-out with Vaughan's closest friends, and family in the audience;[45] the proceeds benefited the T.J. Martell Foundation's work in leukemia and cancer research.[47] Vaughan was extremely excited and nervous, saying: "The last time I was that nervous is when I got married, but I couldn't show that to anybody ... I calmed down about halfway through 'Voodoo Chile.' I looked over at Tommy [Shannon], and he was just sort of staring at me, and that's when I knew it was gonna be all right."[48] An afterparty was thrown by MTV for the band, record company, and other VIPs.[49] According to the Dallas Times Herald, it took Vaughan an hour just to walk from the bar to the table across the room where his parents were sitting; the article also said, "Stevie Ray found his father, a retired asbestos worker who hadn't taken a plane ride since the Korean War, and hugged him until they both cried." After the show, Jimmie recalled that he was worried that the crowd would have been "a little stiff", saying "[It] turned out they're just like any other beer joint."[50]
Following the Carnegie Hall performance, Double Trouble toured Australia and New Zealand, performing two shows at the Sydney Opera House.[51] With increasing exposure, Vaughan's talent earned him two W. C. Handy Awards. He was the first white musician to receive Entertainer of the Year and Instrumentalist of the Year.[52] Vaughan also co-produced and played on Lonnie Mack's album Strike Like Lightning. Released in April 1985, the album become Alligator Records' best seller.[53]
In April 1985, Vaughan appeared on opening day at the Houston Astrodome to perform "The Star Spangled Banner". Although he was the first guitarist to have opened a major league baseball game with the national anthem, Vaughan supposedly did not receive a positive reception for the rendition;[54] one reporter said, "I was sure he'd be dead by the time he hit 30."[4] Double Trouble's third studio album, titled Soul to Soul, was released on September 30, 1985, and featured new keyboardist Reese Wynans. Vaughan suggested that the album was named Soul to Soul because the band "learned a lot" and "grew a lot closer".[55] Two singles from the album—"Change It" and "Look at Little Sister"—both peaked at number 17 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.[56]
In March 1986, Double Trouble shared the bill with The Fabulous Thunderbirds during a tour of Australia and New Zealand.[57] The band recorded live concerts across three nights of a subsequent US tour in Austin and Dallas.[58] These recordings, along with a 1985 appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival, were released as Live Alive on November 17, 1986. The album included a previously unreleased cover of Stevie Wonder's song "Superstition".[59] Vaughan later admitted that the album wasn't his best, saying, "I wasn't in very good shape when we recorded Live Alive. At the time, I didn't realize how bad a shape I was in. There were more fix-it jobs done on the album than I would have liked. Some of the work sounds like [it was] the work of half-dead people. There were some great notes that came out, but I just wasn't in control; nobody was."[60]
Vaughan developed a serious alcohol and cocaine habit while touring with Double Trouble; his performance contract called for two fifths of Crown Royal and one fifth of Smirnoff.[61] His cocaine use increased to a quarter-ounce a day (about seven grams) and spiraled into a life-threatening dependency. Doyle Bramhall recalls that there were "mounds of cocaine laying on top of the organ", saying, "Where I was doing a lot, Stevie was doing five times, ten times more than I was doing."[4] Vaughan's stomach became fiercely scarred from dissolving half a gram of cocaine in alcohol,[62] leaving hundreds of small cuts in the stomach lining.[63] During a tour of Europe a month later, Vaughan was hospitalized in Ludwigshafen for suffering from near-death dehydration after years of alcohol and substance abuse. Tommy Shannon said that as Vaughan tried to get up from his hotel bed, he vomited all over his chest and was covered with a puddle of blood. Layton recalled:
We called an ambulance, and these German medics showed up in long white coats, shouting German to one another. They pulled out I.V.'s and we were screaming, 'Hey! Wait a minute! What the hell's going on?' They spoke not a word of English, and we spoke no German. They put I.V.'s in him, and they wanted to take him to the hospital. We were yelling, 'Where are you taking him? What's happening? How will we find him?' They were giving him saline solution because they'd determined, by looking at his eyes and checking his vital signs, that he was suffering from near-death dehydration. They were trying to hydrate him. While he was laying on the bed, I looked into his eyes, and it was like looking into the eyes of a dead deer on the side of the road. They were almost dry, with no life in them. I got scared shitless.All of a sudden, the life came back into his eyes, and he said, 'I need help,' real weakly. I took that as the moment where he realized this has got to change. Not like, 'I need to get better so I can go back to doing what I've been doing,' but 'everything has to change.'[64]
Vaughan was urged by a doctor to check into Peachford Hospital, a drug rehabilitation clinic in Atlanta, to begin a full recovery.[65] About a month later, he checked out of Peachford and went back to touring.[66] Fully recovered and healthy, Vaughan began living a more spiritual, ascetic lifestyle. He became more health-conscious and quit smoking cigarettes.[59] To maintain his sobriety and prevent a relapse, Vaughan removed a stipulation for being provided with alcohol backstage.[67]
In October 1988, Vaughan began recording his fourth studio album with Double Trouble, In Step (1989);[68] he enjoyed the chance the album gave him to express his experience with sobriety.[69] Vaughan brought with him his deep devotion to music and sobriety, which had an impact on the band's positive attitude during the album. His goal to improve his guitar playing on the album was largely driven by a desire to make better music, or as drummer Chris Layton put it, more "essential music".[70] Many of the songs written for In Step were composed during the Live Alive Tour.[71] The album was stylistically unlike their previous albums, with less blues and more original, groove-oriented material.
In January 1990, Vaughan gave a speech at an AA meeting; a recording and transcript of the speech have been widely circulated on the internet.[72] On January 30, Vaughan made a guest appearance on MTV Unplugged in New York City, performing "Rude Mood", "Pride and Joy", and "Testify".[73] In March, Vaughan collaborated with his brother, Jimmie, to record Family Style, produced by Nile Rodgers[74] which was released on September 25, 1990.[75] Containing ten songs, the album was a long-awaited project for both brothers; Jimmie said that the sessions "seemed natural" and "almost like we were back home".[76] Vaughan said, "We've probably gotten closer making this record than we have been since we were little kids at home, and I can honestly say I needed it."[4]
In August 1990, Double Trouble opened for Eric Clapton during two concerts held at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin. The second of the two shows took place on August 26 and featured a jam session, including Vaughan, with Clapton, Robert Cray, Buddy Guy, and Jimmie Vaughan, who performed "Sweet Home Chicago" as the finale to Clapton's set;[77] Clapton introduced them as "the best guitar players in the entire world".[78] Drummer Chris Layton recalled the conversation he had with Vaughan backstage after the show:
The conversation was actually very light; there was nothing heavy in it. It was just like, 'this is a great coupla nights and wasn't it great to be here,' and talked about the record that he and Jimmie just made, how they had a lot of fun and that was exciting. He was looking forward to that coming out and looking forward to us making another record. He was in great spirits. I mean, we just had two great nights and we talked about all kinds of stuff, talked about the son that my wife and I were getting ready to have–we didn't know it was a boy–but just anything and everything. We talked for, I guess, almost 30 minutes.Then he got up and said, 'I'm gonna go back down to the dressing room for a minute.' I don't know, maybe five minutes or so later, he came back up and he had his jacket on, he had his bags. He was making this turn, and I said, 'Hey, what are you doin'?' And he said, 'I'm gonna go back to Chicago.' I said 'Well, now?' And he said, 'Yeah, I gotta get back. I want to call Janna,' his girlfriend, in New York. I thought, 'Jeez, you could actually call her anywhere and then call her later,' but he turned around and said, 'Call me when you get back. I love you,' and kinda gave me that wink of the eye he would do. And then he was gone. He just disappeared into the night.[79]
On August 27, 1990, all of the musicians boarded four helicopters bound for Chicago, which were waiting on a nearby golf course. According to a witness, there was reportedly haze and fog of varying intensity with patches of low clouds. Despite the conditions, the pilots were instructed to fly over a 1000-foot ski hill. Vaughan, along with three members of Clapton's entourage, boarded the third of the four helicopters–a Bell 206B Jet Ranger–flying to Meigs Field. At about 12:50 am (CDT),[80] the helicopter departed from an elevation of about 850 feet, veered to the left and crashed into the hill. All of the passengers, including the pilot, Jeff Brown, were killed instantly.[81]
At 4:30 am, Civil Air Patrol was notified of the accident, ultimately locating the crash site almost three hours later.[80] Both Clapton and Jimmie were told to identify the bodies; a Coptic cross necklace, worn by Vaughan, was given to Jimmie. The Walworth County coroner conducted an autopsy and found that Vaughan suffered from multiple internal and skull injuries.[82] The cause of death was officially stated as "exsanguination due to transverse laceration of the aorta".[81] According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a veteran pilot for Alpine Valley suspected that Brown attempted to fly around the ski hill, but misjudged the location.[83] Clapton issued a statement the next day, saying that the victims "were my companions, my associates and my friends. This is a tragic loss of some very special people. I will miss all of them very much."[84]
Vaughan's memorial was held on August 30, 1990, at Laurel Land Cemetery in Dallas, where he was buried next to his father,[85] and was preceded by a private chapel service for close friends and family. Reverend Barry Bailey of the United Methodist Church in Fort Worth, who was Vaughan's AA sponsor, opened the service with personal thoughts: "We're here to thank God for this man's life. He was a genius, a superstar, a musician's musician. He captured the hearts of thousands and thousands of people. I am thankful for the impact of this man's influence on thousands of people in getting his own life together in the name of God." Kim Wilson, Jeff Healey, Charlie Sexton, ZZ Top, Colin James, and Buddy Guy attended the event. Stevie Wonder, Jackson Browne, and Bonnie Raitt sang "Amazing Grace" at the event.[86] Nile Rodgers gave a eulogy,[87] while a member of the Nightcrawlers read chapters five and eleven from The Big Book, a self-help book by Alcoholics Anonymous.[88] In 1995, the Vaughan family received an undisclosed settlement for wrongful death.[89]
In the months that followed his death, Vaughan sold over 5.5 million albums in the United States.[90] On September 25, 1990, Epic released Family Style, with several promotional singles and videos.[75] In November 1990, CMV Enterprises released Pride and Joy, a collection of eight Double Trouble music videos.[91] Sony signed a deal with the Vaughan estate to obtain control of his back catalog, as well as permission to release albums with previously unreleased material and new collections of released work.[92] On October 29, 1991, The Sky Is Crying was released as Vaughan's first posthumous album with Double Trouble, and featured studio recordings from 1984–1985.[93] Other compilations, live albums, and films have also been released since his death.
On October 3, 1991, former Texas governor Ann Richards proclaimed "Stevie Ray Vaughan Commemoration Day", during which a memorial concert was held at the Texas Theatre.[93] In 1993, a memorial statue of Vaughan was unveiled on Auditorium Shores and is the first public monument of a musician in Austin.[94] In September 1994, a Stevie Ray Vaughan Memorial Run for Recovery was held in Dallas; the event was a benefit for the Ethel Daniels Foundation, established to help those in recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction who cannot afford treatment.[95] In 2005, Martha Vaughan established the Stevie Ray Vaughan Scholarship, awarded by W.E. Greiner Middle School to students who intend to attend college and pursue the arts as a profession.[96]
Vaughan and Lenora "Lenny" Bailey met in 1973 after one of Vaughan's performances with the Nightcrawlers at La Cucaracha, a nightclub in east Austin.[97][98] Although moved by Vaughan's musical prowess, she was attracted to his charmingly modest personality.[99] Double Trouble's song "Love Struck Baby", he said, was written about her, after claiming July 5 as their "love struck day".[100] The couple were married on December 23, 1979, between sets at the Rome Inn in Austin, using pieces of wire for rings. Drummer, Chris Layton, described the ceremony as "spontaneous",[4] saying, "It wasn't like there was invitations sent out or a certain group of people attended—it was just whoever was there was hanging around." Layton also said their marriage was "pretty excitable and passionate".[101]
Upon return to their home in Austin from touring, Vaughan found the house padlocked, electricity shut off, and Lenny nowhere to be found. Biographers, Joe Nick Patoski and Bill Crawford, wrote that she, "squandered his road earnings on dope while running around with other men that one acquaintance glibly described as 'police characters.'"[100] After she declined to visit Vaughan in treatment for substance abuse, he filed for divorce three months later. The case was settled out of court, with Lenny receiving alimony, plus $50,000 in cash and twenty-five percent of net royalties (excluding albums after Live Alive).[102] Vaughan's manager attributes the demise of their marriage to "jealousy" and "unfaithfulness", and as a result, they were both brokenhearted.[103]
On March 12, 1986, Double Trouble arrived in New Zealand for a performance at the Wellington Town Hall, where Vaughan was sitting outside his hotel room. Janna Lapidus, who was born in Russia, ran into Vaughan on the street and immediately struck up a friendship. In October 1986, while Vaughan was in the London Clinic for substance abuse, Lapidus visited him;[104] they both decided to be together after seeing an older couple in front of them during a walk in Hyde Park.[105]
During Vaughan's last two years before his death, he referred to Lapidus as his fiancée. They often made public appearances together including a commercial for Europa, a New Zealand-owned oil company.[106] Janna also appeared in the video for 'The House is a Rockin' They first lived at Vaughan's childhood home in Dallas,[107] then moved to a house on Travis Street on May 3, 1987.[108] Lapidus found modeling work in New York City, and they relocated to a Manhattan apartment at Park Avenue and 24th Street in May 1990, splitting their time between Dallas and New York City.[109]
Vaughan's music took root in blues, rock, and jazz. He was influenced by the work of blues artists such as Albert King, B.B. King, Freddie King, Albert Collins, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf, Otis Rush, Guitar Slim, Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters. According to nightclub owner Clifford Antone, who opened Antone's in 1975, Vaughan jammed with Albert King at Antone's in July 1977 and almost "scared him to death", saying that "it was the best I've ever saw Albert or the best I ever saw Stevie".[110] He was influenced by rock artists including Jimi Hendrix and Lonnie Mack, along with jazz guitarists like Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, and George Benson.[111] While Albert King had a substantial influence on Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix was Vaughan's greatest inspiration. Vaughan declared: "I love Hendrix for so many reasons. He was so much more than just a blues guitarist–he played damn well any kind of guitar he wanted. In fact I'm not sure if he even played the guitar–he played music."[112]
Vaughan owed his guitar technique in large part to Lonnie Mack, who Vaughan observed in live performance as "ahead of his time".[112] Mack later recalled his first meeting with Vaughan in 1978: "We was in Texas looking for pickers, and we went out to see the Thunderbirds. Jimmie was saying, 'Man, you gotta hear my little brother. He plays all your [songs].' He was playing a little place called the Rome Inn, and we went over there and checked him out. As it would be, when I walked in the door, he was playing 'Wham!' And I said, 'Dadgum.' He was playing it right. I'd been playing it wrong for a long time and needed to go back and listen to my original record. That was in '78, I believe."[57] Vaughan owed part of his enduring style—especially his use of tremolo picking and vibrato—to Mack. He acknowledged that Mack taught him to "play guitar from the heart".[113]
Vaughan owned and used a variety of guitars during his career. His guitar of choice, and the instrument that he became most associated with, was the Fender Stratocaster, his favorite being a 1963 model acquired in a trade in 1974.[114] He started using the model during high school and used them exclusively in his live performances and recordings. Vaughan bought many Stratocasters and gave some away as gifts. A sunburst Diplomat Strat-style guitar was purchased by Vaughan and given to his late girlfriend Janna Lapidus to learn to play on.[115] Vaughan used heavy strings, tuned a half-step below standard tuning. Heavy use of the vibrato bar necessitated frequent replacements; Vaughan often had his roadie, Byron Barr, obtain custom stainless steel bars made by Barr's father.[116] Vaughan was also photographed playing a National Duolian, Epiphone Riviera, Gibson Flying V, as well as several other models.[117] Vaughan used a Gibson Johnny Smith to record "Stang's Swang", and a Guild 12-string acoustic for his performance on MTV Unplugged in January 1990.[115] On June 24, 2004, one of Vaughan's Stratocasters, dubbed "Lenny", was sold at an auction to benefit Eric Clapton's Crossroads Centre in Antigua; the instrument was bought by Guitar Center for $623,500.[118]
Vaughan was a catalyst in the revival of vintage amplifiers and effects during the 1980s. His loud volume and use of heavy strings required powerful and robust amplifiers. Vaughan used two black-face Fender Vibroverbs, which were crucial in shaping his clear overdriven sound. He would often blend other amps with the Vibroverbs including black-face Fender Super Reverbs,[115] and brands such as Dumble, and Marshall.[119] While his mainstay effects were the Ibanez Tube Screamer and a Vox wah-wah pedal,[120] Vaughan experimented with a range of effects. He used a Fender Vibratone,[115] designed as a Leslie speaker for electric guitars, and provided a warbling chorus effect, which can be heard on the track "Cold Shot". He used a vintage Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face that can be heard on In Step, as well as an Octavia.[120]
Vaughan throughout his career revived blues rock and paved the way for many other artists. Vaughan's work continues to influence numerous blues, rock and alternative artists, including John Mayer,[121] Kenny Wayne Shepherd,[122] Mike McCready,[123] Albert Cummings,[124] and Los Lonely Boys,[125] among others. Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine described Vaughan as "the leading light in American blues" and developed "a uniquely eclectic and fiery style that sounded like no other guitarist, regardless of genre".[126] In 1983, Variety magazine called Vaughan the "guitar hero of the present era".[127]
Vaughan won five W. C. Handy Awards[128] and was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2000.[129] In 1985, he was named an honorary admiral in the Texas Navy.[130] Vaughan had a single number one hit on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart for the song "Crossfire".[131] His album sales in the US stand at over 15 million units. Family Style, released shortly after his death, won the 1991 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album and became his best-selling, non-Double Trouble studio album with over a million shipments in the US.[90] In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked him seventh among the "100 Greatest Guitar Players of All Time".[132] He also became eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008.[133]
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Lil Wayne | |
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Lil Wayne in 2006 |
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Background information | |
Birth name | Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. |
Born | September 27, 1982 |
Origin | New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. |
Genres | Hip hop |
Occupations | Rapper, songwriter |
Years active | 1992–present |
Labels | Cash Money, Young Money,Universal Republic |
Associated acts | Birdman, Drake, Cash Money Millionaires, Hot Boys, Young Money, The B.G.'z, Nicki Minaj, Juelz Santana[1] |
Website | lilwayne-online.com |
Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. (born September 27, 1982), better known by his stage name Lil Wayne, is an American rapper. At the age of nine, Lil Wayne joined Cash Money Records as the youngest member of the label, and half of the duo, The B.G.'z, with B.G.. In 1997, Lil Wayne joined the group Hot Boys, which also included rappers Juvenile, B.G., and Young Turk. Hot Boys debuted with Get It How U Live! that year. Lil Wayne gained most of his success with the group's major selling album Guerrilla Warfare, released in 1999. Also in 1999, Lil Wayne released his Platinum debut album Tha Block Is Hot, selling over one million copies in the U.S.
Although his next two albums Lights Out (2000) and 500 Degreez (2002) were not as successful (only reaching Gold status), Lil Wayne reached higher popularity in 2004 with Tha Carter, which included the single "Go D.J." Wayne also appeared on the Destiny's Child top ten single "Soldier" that year. In 2005, the sequel to Tha Carter, Tha Carter II, was released. In 2006 and 2007, Lil Wayne released several mixtapes and appeared on several popular rap and R&B singles. His most successful album, Tha Carter III, was released in 2008 and sold over 1 million copies in the U.S. its first week of release. It included the number-one single "Lollipop" featuring Static Major. It also includes the singles "A Milli" and "Got Money" featuring T-Pain and won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album.
Lil Wayne released his debut rock album, Rebirth, in 2010 to primarily negative reception from critics. The album eventually went gold. In March 2010, Lil Wayne began serving an 8-month prison sentence in New York after being convicted of criminal possession of a weapon stemming from an incident in July 2007. While in prison he released another album entitled I Am Not a Human Being in September 2010, featuring Young Money artists such as Drake, Nicki Minaj and Lil Twist. His ninth studio album and first since being released from prison, Tha Carter IV, was released on August 29, 2011.[2] The album includes the songs "6 Foot 7 Foot" featuring Cory Gunz, "How to Love" and "She Will" featuring Drake. It sold 964,000 copies in the U.S. its first week out.
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Lil Wayne was born Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. and grew up in the Hollygrove neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana.[3] Carter was born when his mother, a chef, was 19 years old. His parents were divorced when he was 2, and his father permanently abandoned the family. Carter enrolled in the gifted program of Lafayette Elementary School and in the drama club of Eleanor McMain Secondary School.[4]
He wrote his first rap song at age eight.[5] In the summer of 1991, he met Bryan Williams, rapper and owner of Cash Money Records. Carter recorded freestyle raps on Williams's answering machine, leading him to mentor the young Carter and include him in Cash Money-distributed songs. He also recorded his first ever collaboration album True Story with rapper B.G.. At the time, Carter was 11, and B.G. was 14, and was billed as "The B.G.'z".[6] When he was 12, he played the part of the Tin Man in his middle school drama club's production of The Wiz.[7] At age 13, he accidentally shot himself with a 9 mm handgun, and off-duty police officer Robert Hoobler drove him to the hospital.[8] At McMain Magnet School, Carter was an honor student, but he dropped out at the age of 14 to focus on a musical career.[9]
In 1997, Carter joined the Hot Boys along with rappers Juvenile, B.G., and Turk. At age 15, Carter was the youngest member at that time. Hot Boys' debut album Get It How U Live! was released the same year, followed in 1999 by the group's major-label debut Guerrilla Warfare,[3] which reached No. 1 on the Billboard magazine Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart and No. 5 on the Billboard 200.[10] During their career, the Hot Boys had two charting singles, "We on Fire" from Get It How U Live! and "I Need a Hot Girl" from Guerrilla Warfare.[11] Carter was also featured on Juvenile's single "Back That Azz Up", which reached No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 5 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks.[12] Let 'Em Burn, a compilation album of unreleased tracks recorded during 1999 and 2000, came out in 2003, several years after the group disbanded.[13] It reached No. 3 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart and No. 14 on the Billboard 200.[10]
Carter's debut solo album Tha Block Is Hot at age 17 featured significant contributions from the Hot Boys and was certified platinum, debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard album charts.[3] The album earned him a 1999 Source magazine award nomination for "Best New Artist",[14] and also became a Top Ten hit.[3] The lead single was "Tha Block Is Hot". After the release of Tha Block is Hot, Carter was featured on the single, "Bling Bling", with B.G., Juvenile, and Big Tymers. His verse was featured on the radio edition, and on the album version, only his hook was featured on the single.
His 2000 follow-up album Lights Out failed to attain the level of success achieved by his debut[3] but was certified gold by RIAA.[15] Critics pointed to the lack of coherent narratives in his verses as evidence that he had yet to mature to the level of his fellow Hot Boys.[16] The lead single was "Get Off The Corner" which was noticed for an improvement in lyrical content and style, it also received a music video. The second single which received less attention was "Shine" featuring The Hot Boys. Near the release of Lights Out, Lil Wayne was featured on the single, "1# Stunna" with Big Tymers and Juvenile, which rose to 24th place on the Hot Rap Tracks charts.
Lil Wayne's third album 500 Degreez, released in 2002, followed the format of his previous two, with significant contributions from the Hot Boys and Mannie Fresh. While certified Gold like its predecessor,[15] it too failed to match the success of his debut.[3] The title was a reference to the recently estranged Hot Boys member Juvenile's recording, 400 Degreez.[17] The lead single was "Way Of Life" which like the album failed to match the success of his previous singles. After the release of 500 Degreez, he was featured in the single "Neva Get Enuf" by 3LW.[18]
In the summer of 2004, Wayne's album Tha Carter was released, marking what critics considered advancement in his rapping style and lyrical themes.[19] In addition, the album's cover art featured the debut of Wayne's now-signature dreadlocks.[3] Tha Carter gained Wayne significant recognition, selling 878,000 copies in the United States, while the single "Go DJ" became a Top 5 Hit on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart.[20] After the release of Tha Carter, Lil Wayne was featured in Destiny's Child's single "Soldier" with T.I., which peaked at No. 3 on the U.S. Hot 100 and the U.S. R&B Charts.[21]
Tha Carter II, the follow-up to the original Tha Carter album, was released in December 2005, this time without production by longtime Cash Money Records producer Mannie Fresh, who had since left the label. Tha Carter II sold more than 238,000 copies in its first week of release, debuting at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, and went on to sell 2,000,000 copies world wide. The lead single, "Fireman," became a hit in the US, peaking at 32 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Other singles included "Grown Man", "Hustler Muzik", and "Shooter" (featuring R&B singer Robin Thicke). Lil Wayne also appeared on a remix of Bobby Valentino's "Tell Me", which rose to No. 13 on the U.S. R&B Charts. In 2005, Lil Wayne was named president of Cash Money, and in the same year he founded Young Money Entertainment as an imprint of Cash Money.[22] However, as of late 2007, Lil Wayne reported that he has stepped down from the management of both labels and has handed management of Young Money over to Cortez Bryant.[23]
In 2006, Lil Wayne collaborated with rapper Birdman for the album Like Father, Like Son, whose first single "Stuntin' Like My Daddy", reached No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Instead of a follow-up solo album, Lil Wayne reached his audience through a plethora of mixtapes and guest appearances on a variety of pop and hip-hop singles.[3] Of his many mixtapes, Dedication 2 and Da Drought 3 received the most media exposure and critical review. Dedication 2, released in 2006, paired Lil Wayne with DJ Drama and contained the acclaimed socially conscious track "Georgia Bush," in which Lil Wayne critiqued former US president George W. Bush's response to the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans. Da Drought 3 was released the following year and was available for free legal download. It contained Lil Wayne rapping over a variety of beats from recent hits by other musicians. Numerous of features in prominent hip-hop magazines such as XXL[24] and Vibe[9] covered the mixtape. Christian Hoard of Rolling Stone magazine considered the mixtapes Da Drought 3 and The Drought Is Over 2 "among the best albums of 2007."[4]
Despite no album release for two years, Lil Wayne appeared in numerous singles as a featured performer, including "Gimme That" by Chris Brown, "Make It Rain" by Fat Joe, "You" by Lloyd, and "We Takin' Over" by DJ Khaled (also featuring Akon, T.I., Rick Ross, Fat Joe, and Birdman), "Duffle Bag Boy" by Playaz Circle, "Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)" by Wyclef Jean (also featuring Akon), and the remix to "I'm So Hood" by DJ Khaled (also featuring T-Pain, Young Jeezy, Ludacris, Busta Rhymes, Big Boi, Fat Joe, Birdman, and Rick Ross). All these singles charted within the top 20 spots on the Billboard Hot 100, Hot Rap Tracks, and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts. On Birdman's 2007 album 5 * Stunna, Lil Wayne appeared on the singles "100 Million" and "I Run This" among several other tracks. Wayne also appeared on tracks from albums Getback by Little Brother, American Gangster by Jay-Z, and Graduation by Kanye West and Insomniac by Enrique Iglesias. "Make it Rain", a Scott Storch production that peaked at number 13 on the Hot 100 and number two on the Hot Rap Tracks chart,[25] was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group for 2008.[26]
Vibe magazine ranked a list of 77 of Lil Wayne's songs from 2007 and ranked his verse in DJ Khaled's "We Takin Over" as his best of 2007, with "Dough Is What I Got" (a freestyle over the beat of Jay-Z's "Show Me What You Got") from Da Drought 3 the second song.[9] At the end of 2007, an MTV poll selected Lil Wayne as "Hottest MC in the Game",[27] The New Yorker magazine ranked him "Rapper of the Year",[6] and GQ magazine named him "Workaholic of the Year".[28] In 2008 he was named "Best MC" by Rolling Stone.[4] Another article, built around Lil Wayne's 2007 mixtape work, cites his creative practice as an example of post performance creative practice.[29]
Initially planned to be released in 2007, Tha Carter III's largest delay came after the majority of the tracks were leaked and distributed on mixtapes, such as "The Drought Is Over Pt. 2" and "The Drought Is Over Pt. 4". Lil Wayne initially decided to use the leaked tracks, plus four new tracks, to make a separate album, titled The Leak. The Leak was to be released December 18, 2007, with the actual album being delayed until March 18, 2008,[30] The release of The Leak in this format never came to fruition, but an official EP titled The Leak and containing five tracks was released digitally on December 25, 2007.[31] Tha Carter III was released on June 10, 2008, selling more than a million copies in its first week of release, the first to do so since 50 Cent's The Massacre in 2005.[32] The first single "Lollipop", featuring Static Major became the rapper's most commercially successful song at that point, topping the Billboard Hot 100, making it the first Top 10 single for Lil Wayne as a solo artist, as well as his first No. 1 on the chart. His third single from Tha Carter III, "Got Money" featuring T-Pain, peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard 100. Tha Carter III also won four Grammy Awards, including best rap album and best rap song, which he won for "Lollipop".[33] Along with his album singles, Lil Wayne appeared on R&B singles "Girls Around the World" by Lloyd, "Love In This Club, Part II" by Usher, "Official Girl" by Cassie, "I'm So Paid" by Akon, "Turnin' Me On" by Keri Hilson, and "Can't Believe It" by T-Pain; rap singles "My Life" by The Game, "Shawty Say" by David Banner, "Swagga Like Us" by T.I., "Cutty Buddy" by Mike Jones, All My Life (In the Ghetto) by Jay Rock and the remix to "Certified" by Glasses Malone; and pop single "Let It Rock" by new Cash Money artist Kevin Rudolf. On July 14, 2008, the Recording Industry Association of America certified Tha Carter III two times platinum.[34] In an October 2008 interview with MTV News, Lil Wayne announced plans to re-release this album with all new tracks, including a duet with Ludacris and remixes of "A Milli".[35]
The lineup for New Orleans' 2008 Voodoo Experience concert, held in October, featured Lil Wayne. Jonathan Cohen of Billboard magazine reported that the event would mark his biggest hometown headlining set of his career.[36] Lil Wayne stated that he would reunite with Hot Boys alongside Juvenile, Turk, and B.G. They plan to release an album after B.G.'s solo album Too Hood to Be Hollywood was completed.[37] Wayne also performed as the 2008 Virgin Mobile Music Fest with Kanye West, performing the remix of "Lollipop" with West and also lip-syncing to Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You".[38] Lil Wayne also performed at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards with Kid Rock ("All Summer Long"), Leona Lewis ("DontGetIt (Misunderstood)") and T-Pain ("Got Money"). On the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, he performed "Lollipop" and "Got Money".[39] He later performed at the homecoming rally at Vanderbilt University[40] and the 2008 BET Hip Hop Awards with 12 nominations.[41] He won the "MVP" title at the BET Hip Hop Awards and seven others.[42] It was revealed that M.I.A. dropped out of performing on the tour due to her pregnancy, however Jay-Z is expected to perform with Wayne on the song "Mr. Carter" at select shows.[43] On November 11, 2008, Wayne became the first hip-hop act to ever perform at the Country Music Association Awards. He played alongside Kid Rock for the song, "All Summer Long", in which Wayne did not rap but instead inaudibly strummed guitar strings alongside the guitarist in Kid Rock's band.[44] Shortly after, Wayne was nominated for eight Grammys – the most for any artist nominated that year.[45] Wayne was then named the first ever MTV Man of the Year at the end of 2008.[46] He won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo Performance for "A Milli", Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group for his appearance in T.I.'s single "Swagga Like Us", and Best Rap Song for "Lollipop". Tha Carter III won the award for Best Rap Album.[33] MTV News listed Lil Wayne number two on their 2009 list of the Hottest MCs In The Game.[47]
On December 23, 2009, Wayne released a collaboration album with Young Money, with the first single confirmed as "Every Girl".[48] The second single is "BedRock", featuring Lloyd. The third single is "Roger That". On May 24, 2010, the album was certified gold by the RIAA with over 500,000 copies sold.[49] Wayne is featured on the song, "Revolver", with Madonna for her 2009 greatest hits album, Celebration. He was also featured on a Weezer song, "Can't Stop Partying", on their 2009 album, Raditude.[50] In late 2008, Wayne stated that he would re-release The Carter III with leftover tracks and call it Rebirth, several months later, however, he announced Rebirth would instead release as his debut rock album, maintaining its title as Rebirth.[51] To support the release of Rebirth and a collaboration album with Young Money Entertainment, Wayne headlined the 'Young Money Presents: America's Most Wanted Music Festival'... a United States and Canada–only concert tour which started on July 29, 2009. The Rebirth album was originally scheduled for a April 7, 2009 release, however after numerous delays, the album was released on February 2, 2010. For the anticipation of Rebirth, Wayne was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone.[52] "Prom Queen", the first official single, debuted on January 27, 2009 immediately after a live Internet broadcast on Ustream[53] of his concert in San Diego.[54] "Prom Queen" peaked at number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. On December 3, 2009, Lil Wayne's second single from the album, "On Fire", was released on iTunes. "On Fire" was produced by Cool & Dre.[55] "On Fire" peaked at number 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. "Drop the World", which features Eminem, is the third single from the album.[55]
Lil Wayne was thought to be releasing an EP entitled I Am Not a Human Being, but it was confirmed that would be a full length LP. The album was released on September 27, 2010 which was his birthday. The album has sold over 953,000 copies in the U.S.[56] and has spawned a successful single in "Right Above It" which peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.
In an interview on MTV's Mixtape Monday, Wayne asserted the possibility of the album Tha Carter IV.[57] Following Tha Carter III's achievement of selling over 3 million copies, becoming 2008's best-selling record, Wayne re-signed with Cash Money Records for a multi-album deal.[58] Wayne said Tha Carter IV will be released in 2009 just before the holidays.[59] Birdman had previously stated that Tha Carter IV would be packaged with Rebirth as a double disc album.[60] However, Wayne denied this idea saying that "Tha Carter IV deserves Tha Carter IV". He went on to say that We Are Young Money may be packaged with Rebirth.[61][62] However, it was later confirmed that Rebirth and We Are Young Money will be released separately and that Tha Carter IV will be released during 2011. He started from scratch on Tha Carter IV since getting released from prison.[63] He recorded his first track since being released from prison and it was described as being "a 2010 version of A Milli on steroids." The album is set to feature multiple guests, including Tech N9ne.[64] The first single "6 Foot 7 Foot" featuring Cory Gunz was released on December 15, 2010. It was available for digital download on iTunes December 16, 2010. The song is produced by Bangladesh, who also produced Lil Wayne's single "A Milli" in 2008.[65] On March 8, 2011, Lil Wayne released another song called "We Back Soon." The song is produced by StreetRunner; It is more relaxed than "6 Foot 7 Foot" is, but will not be a track on Tha Carter IV.[66] He also released a second single to Tha Carter IV called "John" on March 24, 2011, which features Rick Ross and is produced by Polow Da Don.[67] On April 20, 2011, the official cover of Tha Carter IV was released. Tha Carter IV was scheduled to be released on May 16, 2011,[68] but Mack Maine had confirmed that the forthcoming ninth studio album will be released in June 21, 2011 instead of May 16, 2011, because they need more time to make the album perfect and they'll have a "monster" single coming soon that will possibly be titled "Blows My Brains" or "She's Always In My Head".[citation needed] On May 26, the 3rd single, "How to Love" was released. Tha Carter IV was eventually pushed back to August 29, 2011. A song called "Dear Anne (Stan Part 2)" was released in June, when the snippet was released back in April. Lil Wayne said the song was throw away track for Tha Carter III. He said it was originally suppose to be on Tha Carter IV when it leaked, but decided not to put it one there. He said he's not a fan of the song since it was so old. Lil Wayne said that he that liked the beat, but not the lyrics, and was thinking about redoing "Dear Anne."
For preparation for Tha Carter IV, Lil Wayne released a mixtape titled, Sorry 4 the Wait. He named the mixtape so as an apology to his fans for the delay of the album. It consists of 13 with all the beats on the mixtape coming from other artists song, like his "No Ceilings" mixtape.
In July 2011, Lil Wayne confirmed in an interview with MTV that Tha Carter IV is finished.
The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 964,000 copies sold in its first week, making it Lil Wayne's third chart topping album of his career. On January 8, 2012, According to Nielsen SoundScan was elected the seventh artist (second male artist) all-time best-selling tracks digital with 36,788,000 million to the end of 2011.[69]
Lil Wayne has announced several possible upcoming projects, including a collaboration album entitled I Can't Feel My Face with rapper Juelz Santana that has been in production for several years. And also working on Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins' album Still Cool in late 2011.[70][71] He has discussed a possible R&B album titled Luv Sawngz, for which he will heavily rely on a vocoder.[72] He has also talked with singer Lloyd about doing a collaboration album in the future.[73] On June 19, 2008, Lil Wayne and T-Pain formed a duo called T-Wayne[74] and planned to release an album.[75] According to an interview with Drake in the December 2011 issue of XXL, plans for an upcoming album with Lil Wayne have been scrapped for the time being because of the Jay-Z and Kanye West collaboration Watch the Throne.[76] Lil Wayne and Baby will release a second Like Father, Like Son.[77][78] It was announced by Mack Maine that Lil Wayne and Juelz Santana have gone back to working on their collaboration album I Can't Feel My Face which had been delayed for a few years due to "label politics".[79]
In October 2011 it was reported that Lil Wayne is working on sequels to I Am Not a Human Being and Rebirth.[80] A couple months later, Birdman announced that I Am Not A Human Being 2 will be released before the summer of 2012 and that him and Lil Wayne have finished recording Like Father, Like Son 2.[81]
On March 29, 2011, in an interview with Hot 97's Angie Martinez, Lil Wayne announced that he would retire at age 35; saying "I have four kids," and that "I would feel selfish still going to the studio when it's such a vital point in their lives."[82]
Lil Wayne was a guest debater going up against Skip Bayless on the "1st & 10" segment on the January 6, 2009 edition of ESPN First Take.[83] On February 10, 2009 he also appeared on ESPN's Around the Horn and beat out veterans Woody Paige, Jay Mariotti and fellow New Orleanian Michael Smith to win that show's episode.[84] Prior to the 2009 Grammy Awards, Wayne was featured in an interview with Katie Couric.[85] On February 7, 2009, he presented the Top Ten List on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman.[86] He then appeared on the April 24, 2009 episode of The View, talking about his GED and addictions.[87] In September 2009, Wayne was profiled in an episode of VH1's Behind the Music[88] and was a presenter of the 2009 MTV Movie Awards.[89]
In film, Wayne produced and composed music for and starred in the direct-to-video film Hurricane Season. A documentary of Lil Wayne titled The Carter was released at the Sundance Film Festival.[90]
Lil Wayne has four children. His first child, daughter Reginae, was born when he was 15,[5] to his high school sweetheart Antonia "Toya" Carter (née Johnson). Wayne and Johnson married on Valentine's Day of 2004 and divorced in 2006.[91] Internet rumours started circulating in August 2008 that Wayne's daughter had died in a car crash, which however he quickly cleared up as false saying "Please allow me to dispel any rumors or speculations and report that my daughter is alive, healthy and surrounded by family who care and love her dearly. The rumors are completely false and unfounded; neither Reginae nor any other member of my family has been involved in any car accident."[92] His second child, Dwayne III, was then born on October 22, 2008 at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati.[93] His third child, Cameron Carter, was born to actress Lauren London on September 9, 2009.[94] He had his fourth child, Neal, on November 30, 2009 with singer Nivea.[95]
In a CBS interview with Katie Couric, Wayne described why he goes by the name of "Wayne" instead of his given name, Dwayne. Carter explained, "I dropped the D because I'm a junior and my father is living and he's not in my life and he's never been in my life. So I don't want to be Dwayne, I'd rather be Wayne". Couric asked Wayne if his father knew of this and Wayne replied with a smile, "He knows now".[85]
After earning his GED, Wayne enrolled at the University of Houston in January 2005. He dropped out in the same year due to his conflicting schedule.[96] He also revealed on The View that he switched to the University of Phoenix and majored in psychology taking online courses.[87] An article in Urb magazine in March 2007 asserted that Wayne had been earning high grades at Houston.[97]
In an interview with Blender magazine, Lil Wayne revealed one of his favorite bands from childhood to be rock group Nirvana, and cites them as a major influence in his music.[98]
On September 24, 2008, Lil Wayne published his first blog for ESPN in their issue, ESPN The Magazine. Wayne revealed he was a fan of tennis, the Green Bay Packers, the Boston Bruins, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Red Sox. To commemorate the Packers' making it to Super Bowl XLV, he spoofed Wiz Khalifa's hit song "Black and Yellow" (which were the colors of the Packers' opponents, the Pittsburgh Steelers) in a song titled "Green and Yellow".[99] Wayne has continued writing for ESPN, notably reporting at the ESPN Super Bowl party.[100]
Lil Wayne made his debut on ESPN's daily sports round table show Around The Horn on February 10, 2009.[101]
At E3 2011, Lil Wayne, along with Young Money member Drake, appeared on the trailer of FIFA 12.[citation needed]
Lil Wayne is a Christian and reads the Bible regularly.[102][103] While playing in Newark Symphony Hall, Lil Wayne professed his belief "in God and His son, Jesus."[102] During his 2011 tour in Australia with Eminem, before beginning his bracket he proclaimed his belief in God.[104]
On February 19, 2008, Lil Wayne and Cortez Bryant revisited their alma mater McMain Secondary School to get students to design an invitation to the gala introducing Lil Wayne's nonprofit One Family Foundation.[105] The website Change.org states: "The mission of One Family Foundation, Inc. is to empower urban youth by engaging them in opportunities to cultivate their talents and skills, educating them to become productive and economically self-sufficient, and motivating them to dream beyond their circumstances."[106]
Lil Wayne has been referenced in public speeches by President Barack Obama on at least two occasions, in mixed contexts. Speaking to a largely African-American audience during a general election campaign town hall speech in Georgia, then-U.S. Senator Obama exhorted children to stay in school and achieve their dreams through education and perseverance instead of hoping for shortcuts to fame and riches, stating: "You are probably not that good a rapper. Maybe you are the next Lil Wayne, but probably not, in which case you need to stay in school."[107]
After assuming the Presidency, Obama later echoed this theme of personal and familial responsibility and the difficulty of achieving Lil Wayne's lyrical skills or success—during an address to a meeting commemorating the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, telling the audience:
They might think they've got a pretty jump shot or a pretty good flow, but our kids can’t all aspire to be LeBron or Lil Wayne. I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers, not just ballers and rappers. I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court justice. I want them aspiring to be President of the United States of America.[108]
Obama has also noted that the music on his iPod includes Lil Wayne:
On July 22, 2007, Lil Wayne was arrested in New York City following a performance at the Beacon Theatre; the New York City Police Department discovered Lil Wayne and another man smoking marijuana near a tour bus. After taking Lil Wayne into custody, police discovered a .40 caliber pistol on his person. The gun, which was registered to his manager, was in a bag located near the rapper.[110] He was charged with criminal possession of a weapon and marijuana.[111][112] On October 22, 2009, Lil Wayne pleaded guilty to attempted criminal possession of a weapon. He was due for sentencing in February 2010 and was expected to receive a one-year county jail sentence,[113] but on February 9, 2010, Lil Wayne's attorney announced that the sentencing was delayed until March 2 due to dental surgery,[114] which was performed on February 16. The surgery included eight root canals, the replacement of several tooth implants, as well as the addition of a few new implants and work on his remaining original teeth.[115] On March 2, 2010, sentencing was postponed again when the courthouse reported a fire in the basement.[116] On March 8, 2010, Lil Wayne was sentenced to a year in prison, which he served in Rikers Island. His lawyer said the rapper expected to be held in protective custody, separated from other prisoners.[117] In May 2010 Wayne was found by Rikers Island correctional staff to be in possession of contraband (an MP3 player, charger, and headphones).[118] In April 2010, Lil Wayne's friends created a website called Weezy Thanx You, which publishes letters written by Wayne in prison.[103][119] In the first letter, titled "Gone 'til November", the rapper described his daily routine, saying he works out a lot, and reads the Bible every day.[103] Wayne was released from Rikers Island prison facility on November 4, 2010 after serving eight months of his year-long sentence.[120]
Following a performance at Qwest Arena in Boise, Idaho, Lil Wayne was arrested October 5, 2007 on felony fugitive charges after Georgia authorities accused the rapper of possessing a controlled substance.[121] The incident was later described as a "mix-up" and the fugitive charges were dropped.[122]
On January 23, 2008, Lil Wayne was arrested alongside two others. His tour bus was stopped by Border Patrol agents near Yuma, Arizona. A K-9 Unit recovered 105 grams (3.7 oz) of marijuana, almost 29 grams (1.0 oz) of cocaine, 41 grams (1.4 oz) of MDMA, and $22,000 in cash. Lil Wayne was charged with four felonies: possession of narcotic drug for sale, possession of dangerous drugs, misconduct involving weapons and possession of drug paraphernalia. He was granted permission to travel outside of the state and remain out of custody on the $10,185 bond he posted.[123] On May 6, 2008, Wayne returned to court in Arizona to plead not guilty to the charges.[124] A bench warrant was issued on March 17, 2010 when Lil Wayne did not show for a final trial management conference.[125][126] However, the rapper was already in prison, serving a year-long sentence in Rikers on weapons charges. On June 22, 2010 Wayne pleaded guilty to the charges. As part of the plea deal he may serve 36 months of probation.[127] On June 30, 2010, he was sentenced to 3 years probation.[128]
On December 18, 2009, Wayne and 11 others were detained at the Falfurrias, Texas border patrol checkpoint after an unknown amount of marijuana was found on two of his tour buses.[129]
On July 24, 2008, Abkco Music Inc filed a lawsuit against Lil Wayne for copyright infringement and unfair competition, specifically referring to Tha Carter III's track "Playing with Fire".[130] In the lawsuit, Abkco claims that the song was obviously derived from The Rolling Stones' "Play with Fire", to which Abkco owns the rights.[130][131] Subsequently, "Playing with Fire" was removed from the tracklist of Tha Carter III on all online music stores and replaced with the David Banner produced track, "Pussy Monster".[132][133][134]
In February 2009, production company RMF Productions filed a $1.3 million lawsuit against Wayne, following a $100,000 advance payment for three shows, all of which were cancelled by the artist.[135]
On October 2009, Lil Wayne, Birdman, Cash Money Records, and various music distribution outlets were sued for copyright infringement by Thomas Marasciullo, who claims his voice was used without permission. The rappers asked him to record some "Italian-styled spoken word recordings" in 2006. The lyrics were allegedly used on "Respect" and other tracks from the rappers' collaboration album Like Father, Like Son and Birdman's 5 * Stunna.[136]
In March 2011, producer Deezle (Darius Harrison) sued Wayne and his parent labels Cash Money Records over unpaid royalties from Tha Carter III.[137]
In May 2011, producer Bangladesh also filed a lawsuit against Weezy & Co. over unpaid royalties as well.[138]
In early June 2011, another producer named David Kirkwood filed a lawsuit against Young Money Entertainment and Cash Money Records on claims that the labels have failed to pay him over $1.5 million in royalties and production services for his work on the album, also including his songwriting on "Love Me or Hate Me", a bonus song featured only on the deluxe edition of the album.[139]
Also in June 2011, Dallas producers Play-N-Skillz filed a lawsuit against him claiming Wayne owes them at least $1 million in unpaid royalties for "Got Money" from his album Tha Carter III. The single has sold over 2 million copies since being released.[140]
In July 2011, Done Deal Enterprises, a production company based in Georgia, filed suit against Wayne, Universal Music Group, Cash Money Records and Young Money Entertainment, claiming copyright infringement. The lawsuit alleges Wayne stole the song "BedRock", featured on the compilation album We Are Young Money, and seeks damages of $15 million.[141]
After hearing word that Lil Wayne had written a diss song for him after 50 Cent made some unkind remarks, 50 lashed out at Wayne first on August 17, 2007 with the song "Part Time Lover".[142] Wayne never really responded to the song, although a 50 Cent diss track called "Louisianimal" did leak much later on November 17, 2008.[143] 50 responded to Lil Wayne in January 2009 in a song entitled "Play This On The Radio".[144] As of August 14, 2009, the controversy between 50 Cent and Lil Wayne seems to have ended after 50 Cent appeared and performed at Lil Wayne's America's Most Wanted Musical Festival stop in Anaheim, California.[145]
In early 2011, when Jay-Z & Kanye West's single "H•A•M" was released, Jay-Z took shots at Lil Wayne's mentor Birdman, saying "Really, you got Baby money" and "[you] ain't got my lady's money!".[146] On August 24, 2011, a song called "It's Good" by Lil Wayne (featuring Drake and Jadakiss) was leaked online and included Lil Wayne responding "Talkin’ ‘bout baby money? I gotcha baby money. Kidnap your bitch, get that, How much you love your lady? money".[147][148] Rapper Jadakiss later absolved himself of involvement in any brewing beef on his official Twitter feed.[149][150]
Film | |||
---|---|---|---|
Year | Film | Role | Notes |
2000 | Baller Blockin'' | Iceberg Shorty | Main Role |
2007 | Who's Your Caddy? | Himself | Small Role |
2009 | The Carter | Himself | Documentary DVD, Main Role |
2010 | Hurricane Season | Lamont Johnson | Small Role |
Television | |||
Year | Title | Role | Notes |
2007 | Access Granted | Himself | |
The Boondocks | |||
2009 | Nike Zoom VI LeBron James "Chalk" | Himself | Minor appearance |
Gatorade | Himself | Narrator | |
1st and 10 | |||
Around the Horn | |||
Behind The Music | Himself | ||
All Access With Katie Couric | Himself | ||
The Mo'Nique Show | Himself | ||
2010 | Freaknik: The Musical | Trap Jesus | |
2010 | Saturday Night Live | Himself | Performed alongside Eminem a medley of songs including "No Love" |
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Aretha Franklin | |
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Franklin performing at President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009 |
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Background information | |
Birth name | Aretha Louise Franklin |
Born | Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. |
March 25, 1942
Origin | Detroit, Michigan, U.S. |
Genres | Soul, jazz, blues, R&B, gospel, funk, rock |
Occupations | Singer, songwriter, pianist |
Instruments | Vocals, piano |
Years active | 1956–present |
Labels | Columbia (1960–1966) Atlantic (1967–1979) Arista (1980–2003) Aretha Records (2004–) |
Associated acts | Sweet Inspirations, Carolyn Franklin, Erma Franklin, Cissy Houston, Whitney Houston, George Benson, George Michael, Michael McDonald, Eurythmics, Luther Vandross |
Aretha Louise Franklin (born March 25, 1942) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and pianist. In a recording career that has spanned over half a century, Franklin's repertoire has included gospel, jazz, blues, R&B, pop, rock and funk. Franklin is known as one of the most important popularizers of the soul music genre and is referred to as the Queen of Soul, a title she was given early in her career. Franklin, the daughter of prominent Baptist minister and activist C. L. Franklin, began her singing career singing in her father's church at the age of ten and started recording four years later. After several years in the gospel circuit and with her father's blessing, she formed a secular pop music career at the age of eighteen, signing with Columbia Records, where she was branded by its CEO John Hammond as his most important act since Billie Holiday. Franklin's Columbia period wasn't as successful as hoped and in late 1966, Franklin switched over to Atlantic Records, where she began recording a string of popular hits including "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)", "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman", "Think", "Chain of Fools" and what later became her signature song, "Respect".
After a brief lull in 1969, Franklin continued to record a string of popular singles throughout the early 1970s, reaching her peak as an albums artist with 1970's Spirit in the Dark, 1971's Young, Gifted & Black and the 1972 gospel record, Amazing Grace, which later became one of the best-selling gospel albums of all time and was the biggest-selling album in gospel music for over 25 years. Franklin's success in Atlantic peaked after the release of the singles, "Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)", "I'm in Love" and "Giving Him Something He Can Feel" and the 1976 soundtrack to the movie, Sparkle and Franklin left the label in 1980 to sign with Clive Davis' Arista Records label where she switched over from soul and funk music to a more conservative urban adult contemporary sound in the albums, Aretha and Love All the Hurt Away, before regaining commercial success with the 1982 album, Jump to It, produced by R&B hitmaker Luther Vandross. In 1984, Franklin added modern day pop rock and dance elements to her sound, which was integral to the success of her 1985 album, Who's Zoomin' Who?, which spawned the hits "Freeway of Love", "Who's Zoomin' Who" and the Eurythmics featured "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves". The 1986 release of Aretha featured her last number-one hit single with the George Michael duet "I Knew You Were Waiting for Me". Afterwards Franklin returned to a lull in her career until the release of 1998's A Rose Is Still a Rose, which incorporated modern day contemporary R&B and which the title track returned Franklin to the top 40 of the pop charts.
Rolling Stone magazine ranked her atop its "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" list,[1] as well as the ninth greatest artist of all time.[2] She has won 18 Grammys and received two honorary Grammys. In 1987, Franklin became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Franklin is planned to be inducted to the GMA Gospel Music Hall of Fame in August 2012.
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Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee to Barbara (née Siggers) and Clarence LaVaughn Franklin. Franklin's father, Clarence, otherwise known as "C. L." Franklin, was a rising itinerant preacher, who moved to Memphis from Shelby, Mississippi. Within two years after Aretha's birth, however, Franklin's father again moved, this time up north to Buffalo, New York. The initial reasoning behind Franklin's move to Buffalo was because Franklin sought to find better opportunities and reach a bigger church audience as compared to the South. However, it was debated Franklin moved after word reached about him impregnating a teenage member of his Memphis church and he moved north to avoid the scandal and a possible court case.
Franklin wasn't six yet when her father moved to and eventually settled in Detroit where he built his own church, the New Bethel Baptist Church. Following the move, Franklin's parents separated after a contentious marriage, with Barbara Franklin settling in Buffalo, New York where she became a nurse. Aretha would later recall spending time with her mother at her house in Buffalo during summertime visits though it had been debated Franklin's mother had abandoned her, a charge Franklin has constantly denied. Franklin wasn't yet ten when her mother died suddenly in Buffalo. While she and her siblings attended her funeral, it was said their father either couldn't or refuse to attend. Shortly after her mother was buried, Aretha started singing solos at her father's church.[4] Her father's local celebrity in Detroit helped to attract attention to Franklin's home. Franklin remembered seeing several celebrities and prominent public figures at her house. Among those that would later influenced her music and vocal style included gospel musicians Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward and The Caravans founder Albertina Walker, while other musicians such as Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson and fellow preacher Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also became prominent visitors. Franklin began playing the piano at a young age and knew much of how to play by ear. Franklin recalled that when it came to musical taste, her father wasn't strict, allowing Franklin to listen to a variety of genres including blues, jazz and R&B.
By the mid-fifties, Franklin's father was recording for JVB Records, becoming one of the few preachers to record an album full of sermons, which also included musical performances by the minister along with his choir. In 1956, Franklin started bringing his daughter with him to perform on the gospel circuit. That year, Franklin's father recorded his 14-year-old daughter's gospel performances at a local church and helped Franklin reach a deal with JVB Records where she recorded the album, Songs of Faith, and also released her first single, "Never Grow Old", which would later be reissued by Checker Records numerous times. Franklin's performances on the gospel circuit continued until she reached 17, by then Franklin had a desire to record pop music, something always frowned upon in the ministry. However, her father C. L. approved of her decision, and did the same with his eldest daughter Erma, and helped both daughters reach deals with several record labels outside of Detroit. Prior to signing her first deal, Motown CEO Berry Gordy pursued both Erma and Aretha to sign with Motown. C. L. Franklin, however, passed on the offer thinking the label was too local to promote their talents. Eventually, Aretha settled for Columbia Records.
Franklin's first Columbia single, "Today I Sung the Blues", was released in September 1960, becoming her first charted success, it eventually reached #10 on Billboard's R&B chart. Her debut album Aretha followed in January of the following year, recorded with the Ray Bryant Combo. Franklin's second single, "Operation Heartbreak", repeated the R&B chart success of Franklin's debut single, reaching #7, followed by another R&B top ten single, "Won't Be Long". Franklin's recordings were often compared to that of Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday, singers Franklin admired. Columbia CEO and founder John Hammond, upon hearing Franklin, felt she had what it took to be the next Billie Holiday and recorded Franklin strictly in jazz-influenced pop.
Later Hammond acknowledged that he felt the label didn't understand Franklin's background in gospel music and failed to bring that aspect out in her first secular recordings.[5] Later in 1961, Franklin had her first top 40 single on the pop chart with a ballad rendition of "Rock-A-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody". While Franklin would later say she enjoyed her tenure on Columbia Records, most of the records were considered to be not artistically satisfying to Aretha's style and would later be forgotten about following Franklin's rise to stardom with her earthier R&B recordings with Atlantic. Franklin was placed on the list of jazz magazine Downbeat's top ten best jazz vocalists in 1961, 1962 and 1963. One of her most significant recordings during her early Columbia period was the ballad, "Skylark", recorded in 1962. The song previewed what was to come of Franklin as parts of her gospel singing was showcased in the song.
After a well received tribute album to Dinah Washington, Columbia Records switched paths from their early hopes of jazz stardom to more commercial pop music for Franklin as well as some blues music. The latter music showed up in Franklin's 1964 hit, "Runnin' Out of Fools". Afterwards, Franklin was given covers of Motown hits and other girl group sounding hit singles to record as well as original songs such as "One Step Ahead" and "Cry Like a Baby", which was a top 30 R&B recording and was one of the first hits written by the team of Ashford & Simpson. Following this, Franklin and Columbia opted not to renew their contract. Under the advice of her then-husband and manager, Ted White, Franklin decided to sign with top R&B label, Atlantic Records, signing with them in December 1966. Following her success with Atlantic, Columbia began reissuing Franklin's Columbia material and releasing Columbia recordings that Franklin hadn't released before she left the label in an attempt to capitalize on her success.
After signing with Atlantic, Franklin was sent to the FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama to record her first songs with the label alongside the respected Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. It was in Muscle Shoals that Franklin cut her first Atlantic recording, the blues ballad "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)".[5] While busy recording another song at the studio, Franklin's husband and one of the musicians got into a drunken argument over Franklin, leading to the couple returning to their house in New York, where they hid for several weeks. Eventually, Franklin returned to record at New York's Atlantic Studios to finish her vocals on the song, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man". "I Never Loved a Man" would be released in February 1967 and become Franklin's first significant hit single, reaching #9 on the pop chart and #1 on the R&B chart. The b-side, "Do Right Woman", helped Aretha's first Atlantic single to become a double-sided hit on the R&B chart, where it peaked at #37.
In April, Atlantic issued her second single, the Otis Redding song, "Respect"[5], which was re-arranged by the song's producers Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin and Aretha into a gospel-sounding shouter with Franklin later incorporating call and response vocals with her two sisters, Erma and Carolyn present. With Wexler's allowance, Franklin added in the ad-lib, "r-e-s-p-e-c-t, find out what it means to me, r-e-s-p-e-c-t, take care, TCB", which led to her sisters afterwards shouting out, "sock it to me" repeatedly. Franklin would later insist the song's alleged sexual overtones were not what people insisted saying it was simply a female's response to her lover to show her respect. The song became a simultaneous #1 hit on the pop and R&B charts. Both songs helped its parent album, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, to reach the top ten of the pop albums chart. Franklin's version of "Respect" later was hailed as a 1960s anthem. Franklin's hit streak continued throughout 1967 and 1968 with songs such as "Baby I Love You", "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" and "Chain of Fools".[5] "Respect" later won Franklin her first two Grammys. She eventually won eight consecutive Grammys under the Best Female R&B Vocal Performance category.[6]
During a 1967 performance in a Chicago dance, deejay Pervis Spann crowned Franklin a tiara and announced her as "Lady Soul". Franklin's hit streak continued with songs such as "Think" (also referred sometimes as "Freedom" due to Franklin's repeats of the word), "Ain't No Way", "(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone", "The House That Jack Built" and "I Say a Little Prayer". Due to Franklin's earthier hits, her rendition of the latter song generated mild controversy due to her recording what had been strictly a sweet pop song recorded by Franklin's friend Dionne Warwick, however, the song turned out to be a huge success, eventually becoming a bigger hit in the UK where it reached #4. Franklin's albums such as Lady Soul (taken from the title she was given to in 1967) and Aretha Now became successful albums with Lady Soul boasting three top ten singles. Though she wouldn't take part in the civil rights movement of that time period, Franklin's songs, including "Respect" and "Think", were often used as a means of protest. Franklin insists however that she recorded the songs for fun as she was allowed to freely experiment with vocal styles in the studio. Around this time, Franklin used other background singers, including New Jersey backing group The Sweet Inspirations, to help her on recordings.
Franklin's hit streak was more modest throughout 1969 while Aretha battled personal problems including her filing for divorce from Ted White after eight years of an acrimonious marriage. After a break from the studio, she returned in mid-1969 and recorded "Share Your Love with Me" and the self-penned composition "Call Me", which was released in late 1969 and early 1970 respectively and returned Franklin to #1 on the R&B chart. Franklin also reinvented her style of dress and, as was the trend at the time, she wore an Afro hairstyle and adapted traditional African garb, influenced by the black nationalist movement that had started in the late 1960s. Franklin's success continued with her hit renditions of rock songs such as "The Weight", "Let It Be" and "Eleanor Rigby". Franklin's next album, Spirit in the Dark, included the hits "Spirit in the Dark" and "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)", which became a hit in the UK where Franklin promoted the single. The following year, Franklin became the first black artist to perform at Bill Graham's Fillmore West[7] where she later released a live album from the performance. Following these triumphs, Franklin was beginning to be referred to as "The Queen of Soul", a title which she's kept since.
Following the release of the 1971 hits, "Spanish Harlem" and the self-penned number "Rock Steady", Franklin issued the acclaimed Young, Gifted and Black album in early 1972 and had a follow-up hit with the ballad, "Day Dreaming". The album was also noted for Franklin recording the first cover of an Elton John song with Elton's song, "Border Song". Later in 1972, Franklin released her first gospel album in sixteen years with the Amazing Grace album, which became her most successful album in Atlantic Records, later reportedly selling over two million copies making it at that time the best-selling gospel album of all time. That record has since passed but Franklin's album still remains a huge seller. Franklin's success continued the following year with the release of the ballad, "Angel", which was co-penned by her sister Carolyn. The song was co-produced by Franklin and Quincy Jones, who together produced the concept album, Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky), which had initially started off as a jazz album. Though some noted the album for its risky experimentation of different styles, it wasn't totally received well by the Atlantic staff and some fans didn't know what to make of its direction. Following its release, Franklin began producing her own Atlantic albums after a renegotiation of her contract with the label. One of the first albums she released following her new deal was Let Me In Your Life, in 1974. The album returned Franklin, who was now adapting a more glamorous figure, to the top 40 thanks to the hits, "Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)" and "I'm in Love" and a sensual cover of the Marvin Gaye single, "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing".
By the release of 1974's With Everything I Feel in Me and 1975's You, however, Franklin's success had started to peak. Having relocated to Los Angeles, Franklin's recordings suffered from dismal promotion and changing musical tastes as soul music started to lose its popularity with pop fans in the emergence of different genres such as hard rock, heavy metal, funk and disco. The albums weren't hits and no song from any of those albums were huge hits, leading to a fallout between Franklin and Atlantic Records, which had started with the label's embrace of British hard rock group Led Zeppelin and softer R&B vocalist Roberta Flack, no longer making Franklin the top priority artist she had been since signing with the label. To make matters worse, in 1976, her eight-year streak of winning a Grammy for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, was broken by Natalie Cole. However, that year, Franklin found renewed success with the Curtis Mayfield production, Sparkle, which spawned the #1 R&B hit, "Giving Him Something He Can Feel" and going gold.
However, the success wouldn't last long. Franklin's next three albums, the Lamont Dozier and Carole Bayer Sager-produced Sweet Passion, the Mayfield produced Almighty Fire and the Van McCoy-produced La Diva tanked on the charts and no single released from those albums charted on the Hot 100 during this tumultuous period. Franklin continued performing in the US and worldwide but was now building a reputation on living comfortably off royalties so that she only performed on occasion rather than as normal procedure. Aretha would later win the masters off her post-1974 Atlantic recordings. Following the release of La Diva in 1979, Atlantic decided not to renew her contract.
In 1980, Franklin gained something of a new audience after a cameo appearance in The Blues Brothers film where she appeared as the wife of Matt "Guitar" Murphy and engages in a brief war of words with Dan Aykroyd's and John Belushi's characters Elwood and Jake Blues, over Murphy leaving his restaurant to perform with them again in which Franklin afterwards performed "Think". Afterwards, Franklin signed a contract with Clive Davis' Arista Records label. Later in 1980, she issued the Aretha album, which featured a minor hit, "United Together", which became a #3 R&B hit. The music on Aretha and its 1981 follow-up, Love All the Hurt Away, furthered Franklin away from earthy soul and into a more glossier and conservative form of R&B music labeled as urban contemporary. The title track off her 1981 album produced another R&B hit with duet vocals provided by George Benson.
In 1982, Franklin returned to the top of the R&B charts with the Jump to It album boasted by the success of the title track, which became her first number-one R&B single in five years. The album also became her first to go gold after her first two Arista albums had failed to reach that position. The album was produced by then R&B hitmaker Luther Vandross, who was then called in to produce Franklin's follow-up, 1983's Get It Right. However, that record failed, selling less than 200,000 copies, despite the title track becoming another number-one R&B hit for Franklin.
Following its release and the subsequent death of her minister father, C. L., in 1984, Franklin laid low for a few months before returning to the studio in her native Detroit to record her next Arista album which was later titled, Who's Zoomin' Who? The inspiration behind the making of the album was due to Aretha listening to the radio and liking what she heard and opted for "a younger sound".[8] This album was produced by rising producer Narada Michael Walden. The album included dance, pop and modern rock elements and would return Franklin to the top ten of the pop charts. "Freeway of Love" became her biggest hit in years reaching #3 on the pop chart and #1 R&B while the follow-up, "Who's Zoomin' Who" reached #7 pop and #2 R&B and was co-penned by Franklin, partly because she inspired the song title. A third single, "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves", featuring the Eurythmics, peaked at #18 on the pop charts. The videos for "Freeway of Love" and "Sisters" made Franklin popular with music video audiences and her success was compared to another sixties R&B contemporary, Tina Turner's own groundbreaking success years after leaving Ike Turner.
Franklin followed up this success with the Aretha album in 1986. The album spawned another series of hits including "Jimmy Lee", a cover of the Rolling Stones hit "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and the #1 George Michael duet, "I Knew You Were Waiting for Me" later going gold. To help promote the album, Franklin filmed a Showtime concert TV special. Around this time, Franklin also contributed her voice to several TV networks including a theme song for ABC TV titled "Together" in 1986[9] and the hit series, "A Different World", where her rendition of the theme song remained part of the show from its second season in 1988 through its fifth season in 1992. However, Franklin's success was not as long lasting. Due to an accident in a plane she suffered in 1983, Franklin missed schedule for performances overseas which caused a pain for Arista promoters overseas. Also a problem was Franklin's vocals, which was starting to hamper after years of cigarette smoking. Franklin started adapting to a raspier, low tone starting with performances in 1982 and 1983. In spite of this, she remained a popular concert draw. In 1987, Franklin recorded her first gospel album in fifteen years, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, in hopes of having similar success with that record as she had had with Amazing Grace. However, the album failed to find an audience. Franklin returned to the pop charts in 1989 with the release of the Elton John duet, "Through the Storm" and the subsequent release of the album of the same name. However, the album failed to become a success and a much publicized duet with fellow label mate and chart-topping singer Whitney Houston titled "It Isn't, It Wasn't, It Ain't Never Gonna Be" failed to bring much notice peaking below the top 40.
Franklin's attempt at revamping her sound with new jack swing productions in the 1991 album, What You See Is What You Sweat was badly received and was another commercial failure. Following this, Franklin quit chain smoking and spent the next several years reviving parts of her vocal style. In 1994, she contributed to the Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit soundtrack recording the dance song, "A Deeper Love", which became Franklin's biggest single in years reaching #5 in the UK. Later that year, following the release of an Arista best-of, Franklin recorded the Babyface compositions, "Honey" and "Willing to Forgive", with the latter single becoming her first top 40 single in five years. Franklin later contributed vocals to the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack recording the song "It Hurts Like Hell" and following a couple years on the road, recorded the hit album, A Rose Is Still a Rose, which success was mainly due to the success of its title track, which became her last top 40 single on the Billboard Hot 100 nearly 40 years after recording her first one. Throughout 1998, Franklin had success with TV performances including the 1998 Grammys when she performed Luciano Pavarotti's rendition of the opera ballad, "Nessun Dorma", generating a standing ovation at the end of her performance, and a show-stopping performance at VH-1's Divas Live.
In 1999, Franklin issued her autobiography, Aretha: From These Roots. Franklin would not release her next album until 2003 when she issued the album, So Damn Happy. In between then, she contributed to albums and songs by several artists including K-Ci and JoJo on a song titled "Angel", and Mary J. Blige on the song, "Don't Waste Your Time", featured on Blige's 1999 album, Mary. The So Damn Happy album featured a minor R&B hit with "Wonderful", which later nabbed Franklin another Grammy. After the release of So Damn Happy, Franklin decided to not renew her contract with Arista after 23 years with the label. In 2004, she began work on her album, A Woman Falling Out of Love, due to be the first release off her dormant Aretha's Records, in 2005. In the meantime, Arista released a duets compilation, 2007's Jewels in the Crown: All-Star Duets with the Queen, which featured another minor R&B hit with the Fantasia duet, "Put You Up on Game". That same year, Franklin issued her first Christmas album, This Christmas, Aretha, which was initially released as a Borders Group exclusive and was later issued on the DMI label.
In 2008, she won her 18th career Grammy in the gospel category on the song "Never Break My Faith" with Mary J. Blige. A year after, she received news for performing at the inauguration for then newly elected President Barack Obama performing the song "My Country 'Tis of Thee", with her attire, including her church hat, becoming a popular item online and the subject of several internet memes. The following year, Franklin received an honorary music degree from Yale.[10] By 2010, Franklin announced that she had sold her rights to movie producers to produce a biopic on her in which would be loosely based off Franklin's 1999 memoirs, Aretha: From These Roots. Franklin had initially planned for Halle Berry to play her in the featured role but Berry turned down her offer in January 2011. Franklin has since picked singer Audra McDonald to play her.
In May 2011, commemorating on her 50th anniversary since the release of her first non-gospel recording, Franklin issued her 38th studio release, A Woman Falling Out of Love through WalMart. Franklin recorded two duets with longtime friend, Ronald Isley of The Isley Brothers, recording "The Way We Were" on Aretha's album, while recording "You've Got a Friend" on Isley's record, Mr. I. Later in September, Franklin contributed duet vocals to the Tony Bennett rendition of "How Do You Keep The Music Playing" off his Duets II album.
Aretha, by her own admission grew up fast as a child and discovered boys at the age of thirteen, getting pregnant just three months after becoming a teenager. A relationship with one boy led to the birth of her first son, Clarence, named after her father, on March 28, 1956, just three days after she turned 14. In January 1957, before reaching 15, Franklin had another son, Edward, with another boy.[11] She never identified by name the father of either child. Her grandmother, Rachel, raised the boys while Aretha pursued her singing career. Rachel lived in a guest house behind C.L. Franklin's LaSalle Street home. (The Franklin family moved from their home on Boston Street in Detroit's North End section to LaSalle Street during the late 1950s.)
Franklin had a third son, Ted White, Jr. (sometimes referred to as Teddy Richards), with her manager and former family friend Ted White, Sr., born in 1964. Teddy is the musical director and guitarist of his mother's touring band.[12] A relationship with road manager Ken Cunningham produced a fourth son, Kecalf, who was named after the first initials of their parents' names.[13] Kecalf, her youngest-born child, was born three days after his mother's 28th birthday. In 2010, Aretha's son Edward was attacked by three people at a Detroit gas station near Plymouth Road and Evergreen.[14][15] Kecalf Franklin, Aretha's youngest son, is currently a rapper and produces gospel recordings.[16]
Against her father's wishes, Aretha married her first husband, Ted White, in front of a justice of the peace in Ohio in 1961 when she was nineteen. White later replaced Aretha's father as her manager in 1967. According to close friends, White was physically abusive and it's suggested White's physical abuse and philandering were the cause of Franklin's heart-wrenching vocals on her best-known recordings during the Atlantic years. Her producer, Jerry Wexler once called Franklin "the lady of mysterious sorrows" since Aretha didn't tell anyone her personal story. Following a 1968 cover article in Time magazine in which her abusive marriage and a claim that her mother abandoned her at a young age led Franklin to not give any interviews to media groups and increasing her privacy.
After ending her affair with Ken Cunningham after a seven-year on-again, off-again relationship, Franklin married actor Glynn Turman on April 11, 1978 at her father's New Bethel Baptist Church with her father presiding over the ceremony. Aretha became a surrogate stepmother to Turman's three children from a previous marriage. Due to their schedules, however, it wasn't long before their marriage fell apart despite living together in Franklin's mansion in Encino. In late 1982, Franklin and Turman separated after only four years, eventually divorcing in early 1984. In early 2012, it was reported that Franklin was set to walk down the aisle a third time with her longtime companion Willie Wilkerson.[17][18] Franklin and Wilkerson had plans to marry in 1987 but later nixed those plans. Within a month after Aretha had announced the wedding this year, she nixed the plans again.
Franklin's sisters Erma Franklin and Carolyn Franklin were professional singers and sang as backup for Aretha during her initial success at Atlantic. Her brother, the Reverend Cecil Franklin, took over as her manager after her divorce from Ted White was finalized. Cecil remained her manager until his death from cancer on December 26, 1989. Younger sister Carolyn preceded Cecil in death in early 1988 from breast cancer while Erma Franklin later died from throat cancer in 2002. Franklin's eldest half-brother, Vaughn (born December 24, 1934) and elder half-sister Carl Kelley (née Jennings; born 1940) are still alive. Kelley is C.L. Franklin's daughter by Mildred Jennings, a then 12-year-old congregant of New Salem Baptist Church of Memphis, Tennessee, where C.L. was pastor in the late 1930s and early 1940s.[19] Franklin was close to her minister father, C. L. Franklin. C. L. served as Franklin's first manager, a position he gave up to Ted White around 1967. Aretha was performing in Las Vegas on June 10, 1979 when her father was shot by attempted robbers at his LaSalle Street home in Detroit. Aretha and her family returned their father back to his home six months after the shooting left him in a coma. Aretha moved back to Detroit at the end of 1982 to assist with the care of her father, who died in a nursing home on July 27, 1984.
Aretha's relationship with road manager Ken Cunningham was on and off from 1969 until a final breakup in 1976. During one breakup in 1971, Franklin, living back in northwest Detroit, had a brief liaison with Temptations star Dennis Edwards. The relationship inspired Franklin's hit, "Day Dreaming". Franklin and Edwards' romance cooled quickly but they've remained friends. Aretha is also friendly with many of her Detroit peers that went on to be music superstars including Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder. She was friendly with members of the Four Tops as well, later singing with them on several records in the 1980s. Franklin also had a close friendship with Sam Cooke after meeting as gospel performers. Following Cooke's death, Franklin recorded his songs "A Change Is Gonna Come" and "You Send Me".
Franklin grew close with Sweet Inspirations founder Cissy Houston, who sang background on Franklin's "Ain't No Way".[20] Due to this friendship, she was later made honorary aunt of Cissy's daughter, Whitney Houston, who often referred to Franklin as "Auntie Ree".[21] Franklin recalled meeting Whitney at either 8 or 9 years old when Whitney's mother brought her to a recording studio.[22] Sometime in the 1980s, a PR mistake listed Franklin as Houston's godmother. On February 11, 2012, Whitney Houston died in Beverly Hills from unknown causes.[23] Aretha was devastated by her death and said it was "so stunning and unbelievable".[23] She planned to perform at the memorial service on February 18, but her representative claimed that Aretha was "ill" and was "not performing at the memorial service", though she later performed at New York's Radio City Music Hall on the same night.[24][25]
Franklin acknowledged her issues with her weight in the past even telling an interviewer from Jet magazine that she was always trying to lose weight. Before undergoing surgery for an undisclosed ailment that halted her schedule in 2010, Franklin had begun losing weight. According to the singer in 2011, she said she had lost up to 85 lbs in weight following her surgery. In the past, Franklin had went through periods of yo-yo dieting, at one time, losing over 100 pounds showing off her weight loss on the cover of Ebony magazine in 1974. Franklin managed to keep the weight off until after 1982. After another slim period in the early '90s, and after quitting cigarettes cold turkey in 1991, Franklin's weight started to balloon up. In 2010, Franklin suffered a pain in her side which she said, "was so hard it almost brought me to my knees." After continuing a concert tour, the pain recurred, and she subsequently underwent surgery for an undisclosed ailment in October 2010, ending several engagements with Condoleeza Rice. At this time, rumors surfaced that she was suffering from pancreatic cancer. In discussing the events in 2011, she has said that this was not the case and that her doctor told her, "the surgery that you just had is going to add 15 to 20 more years to your life."[26]
Franklin’s music and civil rights involvement cannot be separated for it was through music, which Franklin was able to reach out to so many and empower those who had felt so long oppressed.
Aretha Franklin first became connected with the civil rights movement through her father, Reverend C.L. Franklin. Rev. Franklin was an influential preacher who traveled the country as well as recorded a weekly sermon for the radio station, WLAC, which reached 65 percent of the African-American population. It was these same tours that Aretha would begin her singing career.[27] Rev. Franklin would also introduce Aretha to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. starting a life long friendship between the two.
It was Franklin's soulful sound, which would become the driving anthem of the civil rights movement or as poet Nikki Giovanni put it “the voice of the civil rights movement, the voice of the black America”.[28]
Through Franklin’s album ‘I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You’, hit ‘Respect’ rose to the top. Her strong voice asking for something as simple as respect reflects the cries of the civil rights movement. Her lyrics mirror that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech. Most notably the lines “Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children”.[29] While the civil rights movement was already in motion before Franklin became a prominent figure she had now lent it a soundtrack.
Franklin did not have to do much to help propel the civil rights movement. “Her own sense of pride and her dignified stance, she represented the new black woman of the late 1960s”.[13] Franklin’s own sound and presence were enough to reflect the ideas of the movement and were what caused her to become a notable figure in the cause.
Franklin was not actively heading demonstrations or participating in sit-ins, but she was able to do her part and use her talent to help the movement. She would numerous times perform at rallies with King, lending her voice and fame to pull in crowds. Franklin is a registered Democrat.[30]
Franklin has won 18[40] performance Grammy Awards,[41] and two honorary Grammys: the Grammy Legend Award (1991) and the Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award (1994).[42]
She holds the record[citation needed] for most Best Female R&B Vocal Performance awards, with eleven to her name (including eight consecutive awards from 1968 to 1975 – the first eight awarded in that category).
Aretha Franklin's 18 Grammy Award Wins | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
# | Year | Category | Genre | Title |
1 | 1968 | Best Rhythm & Blues Recording | R&B | Respect |
2 | 1968 | Best Female R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | Respect |
3 | 1969 | Best Female R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | Chain Of Fools |
4 | 1970 | Best Female R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | Share Your Love With Me |
5 | 1971 | Best Female R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | Don't Play That Song For Me |
6 | 1972 | Best Female R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | Bridge Over Troubled Water |
7 | 1973 | Best Female R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | Young, Gifted and Black (album) |
8 | 1973 | Best Soul Gospel Performance | Gospel | Amazing Grace (album) |
9 | 1974 | Best Female R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | Master Of Eyes |
10 | 1975 | Best Female R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing |
11 | 1982 | Best Female R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | Hold On...I'm Comin' (album track) |
12 | 1986 | Best Female R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | Freeway Of Love |
13 | 1988 | Best Female R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | Aretha (album) |
14 | 1988 | Best R&B Performance – Duo Or Group with Vocals | R&B | I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me) (with George Michael) |
15 | 1989 | Best Soul Gospel Performance – Female | Gospel | One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism (album) |
* | 1991 | Living Legend Award | Special | |
* | 1994 | Lifetime Achievement Award | Special | |
16 | 2004 | Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | Wonderful |
17 | 2006 | Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance | R&B | A House Is Not A Home |
18 | 2008 | Best Gospel-Soul Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group | Gospel | Never Gonna Break My Faith (with Mary J. Blige) |
Year | Title | Peak |
---|---|---|
1967 | "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)" | 9 |
1967 | "Respect" | 1 |
1967 | "Baby I Love You" | 4 |
1967 | "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" | 8 |
1967 | "Chain of Fools" | 2 |
1968 | "(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone" | 5 |
1968 | "Think" | 7 |
1968 | "The House That Jack Built" | 6 |
1968 | "I Say a Little Prayer" | 10 |
1971 | "Bridge Over Troubled Water" / "Brand New Me" | 6 |
1971 | "Spanish Harlem" | 2 |
1971 | "Rock Steady" | 9 |
1972 | "Day Dreaming" | 5 |
1973 | "Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)" | 3 |
1985 | "Freeway of Love" | 3 |
1985 | "Who's Zoomin' Who" | 7 |
1987 | "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)" (with George Michael) | 1 |
Source:[43]
Year | Title |
---|---|
1967 | "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)" |
1967 | "Respect" |
1967 | "Baby I Love You" |
1967 | "Chain of Fools" |
1968 | "(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone" |
1968 | "Think" |
1969 | "Share Your Love with Me" |
1970 | "Call Me" |
1970 | "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)" |
1971 | "Bridge Over Troubled Water" / "Brand New Me" |
1971 | "Spanish Harlem" |
1972 | "Day Dreaming" |
1973 | "Angel" |
1973 | "Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)" |
1974 | "I'm in Love" |
1976 | "Something He Can Feel" |
1977 | "Break It to Me Gently" |
1982 | "Jump to It" |
1983 | "Get It Right" |
1985 | "Freeway of Love" |
Source:[43]
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Book: Aretha Franklin | |
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Mariah Carey | |
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Carey at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival |
|
Background information | |
Born | Huntington, New York, United States |
March 27, 1970
Genres | R&B, pop, hip hop, soul, dance |
Occupations | Singer-songwriter, record producer, actress |
Years active | 1988–present |
Labels | Columbia (1990—2000) Virgin (2001) Island (2002—present) |
Website | mariahcarey.com |
Mariah Carey[1] (born March 27, 1970) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress. She made her recording debut in 1990 under the guidance of Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola, and released her self-titled debut studio album, Mariah Carey. The album went multi-platinum and spawned four consecutive number one singles, on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart. Following her marriage to Mottola in 1993, a series of hit records, including Emotions (1991), Music Box (1993) and Merry Christmas (1994), established her position as Columbia's highest-selling act. Daydream (1995), made music history when the second single, "One Sweet Day" a duet with Boyz II Men, spent a record sixteen weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100, and remains the longest running number one song in US chart history. During the recording of the album Carey began to deviate from her pop background, and slowly traversed into R&B and Hip-hop. After her separation from Mottola, this musical change was evident with the release of Butterfly (1997).
Carey left Columbia in 2000, and signed a record-breaking $100 million recording contract with Virgin Records. In 2001, Carey ventured into film with Glitter (2001). Before the film's release she suffered a physical and emotional breakdown and was hospitalized for severe exhaustion. Following the film's poor reception, she was bought out of her recording contract for $50 million, which led to a decline in her career. She signed a multi-million dollar contract deal with Island Records in 2002, and after an unsuccessful period, returned to the top of music charts with The Emancipation of Mimi (2005). Its second single "We Belong Together", which became her most successful single of the 2000's, and was later named "Song of the Decade" by Billboard. Carey once again ventured into film, and starred in Precious (2009). Her role in the film was well-received, and she was awarded the "Breakthrough Performance Award" at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, and a NAACP Image Award nomination.
In a career spanning over two decades, Carey has sold more than 200 million records worldwide, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time. In 1998, she was honored as the world's best-selling recording artist of the 1990s at the World Music Awards. Carey was also named the best-selling female artist of the millennium in 2000. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), she is the third best-selling female artist in the United States, with 63 million certified albums. With the release of "Touch My Body" (2008), Carey gained her eighteenth number one single in the United States, more than any other solo artist. Aside from her commercial accomplishments, Carey has won five Grammy Awards, and is famed for her five-octave vocal range, power, melismatic style and signature use of the whistle register.
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Mariah Carey was born in Huntington, New York, on March 27, 1970.[2] The singer's father, Alfred Roy, was of African American and Venezuelan descent, while her mother, Patricia (née Hickey), is an Irish American.[3] Patricia's father had died while she was young; however, she inherited his passion for music.[3] She developed a career as an occasional opera singer and vocal coach, and met Alfred in 1960.[2] As he began earning a living as an aeronautical engineer, the couple wed later that year, and moved into a small suburb in New York.[3] After the pair's elopement, Patricia's family disowned her, due to marrying a man of color. Carey later explained that growing up, she felt a notion of neglect from her maternal family, a mark that affected her greatly: "So later I was like, 'Well, where does this leave me? Am I a bad person?' You know. It's still not that common to be a multi-racial person, but I'm happy with the combination of things that I am."[3] During the interval of years in between Carey's older sister Allison and the singer's birth, the Carey family experienced personal struggles within the community due to their ethnicity.[3] Carey's name was derived from the song "They Call the Wind Mariah", originally from the 1951 Broadway musical Paint Your Wagon.[4][5] When Carey was three years old, her parents divorced due to the increasingly strenuous nature of their marriage.[6]
"It's been difficult for me, moving around so much, having to grow up by myself... my parents divorced. And I always felt kind of different from everybody else in my neighborhoods. I was a different person ethnically. And sometimes, that can be a problem. If you look a certain way, everybody goes 'White girl', and I'd go, 'No, that's not what I am'."
After their separation, Allison moved in with her father, while the other two children remained with Patricia.[6] As the years passed, Carey would grow apart from her father, and would later stop seeing him altogether.[6][8] By the age of four, Carey recalled that she had begun to sneak the radio under her covers at night, and just sing from her heart, and try and find peace within the music.[8] During elementary school, she would excel in subjects that she enjoyed, such as literature, art and music, while not finding interest in others.[9] After several years of financial struggling, Patricia earned enough money to move her family into a stable and more affluent sector in New York.[9] Carey had begun writing poems and adding melodies to them, thus starting as a singer-songwriter while attending Harborfields High School in Greenlawn, New York.[10][10] Even from a young age, Carey excelled in her music, and demonstrated usage of the whistle register, though only beginning to master and control it through her training with her mother.[10] Though opening her daughter to the world of classical opera, Patricia never pressured Carey to pursue a career in that type of genre, as she never seemed interested in that world of music.[10] Carey recalled that she kept her singer-songwriter works a secret and noted that Patricia had "never been a pushy mom. She never said, 'Give it more of an operatic feel'. I respect opera like crazy, but it didn't influence me."[10][11]
Towards the end of her high school Carey developed a relationship with Gavin Christopher, with whom she shared musical aspirations. The song-writing duo, however, needed an assistant who could play the keyboard; "We called someone and he couldn't come, so by accident we stumbled upon Ben [Margulies]. Ben came to the studio, and he really couldn't play the keyboards very well - her was really more of a drummer - but after that day, we kept in touch, and we sort of clicked as writers."[11] The two began writing and composing songs in his father's store basement, during Carey's senior year. After composing their first song together, "Here We Go Round Again", which Carey described as having a Motown-vibe, they continued writing material for a full length demo.[12] After Carey's graduation her mother wed once more, which ultimately prompted her to move out from Patricia's apartment, and into a one bedroom studio in Manhattan, which she shared with four other female students.[13][14] During this period, Carey worked several jobs as a waitress, usually getting fired after two week intervals.[15] While requiring work to pay for her rent, Carey's mind and effort still remained with her musical ambitions, as she continued working late into the night with Margulies, in hopes of completing a demo take that could be passed on to record executives.[15] After completing her four song demo tape, Carey tried to pass it to music labels, but was met with failure each time.[16] It was then she was introduced to rising pop singer of Puerto Rican descent, Brenda K. Starr.[16][17]
As Carey's friendship with Starr grew, so did her interest in helping Carey succeed in the industry.[18] On a Friday night in November 1987, Carey accompanied Starr to a record executives gala, where she handed her demo tape to Tommy Mottola, head of Columbia Records, who listened to it on his way back home.[18][19] After the first two songs, he became so enamored at the sound and quality of Carey's voice that he turned around returned to the event, only to find that she had left.[19] In what has been widely described by critics as a modern day Cinderella-like tale,[20][21] after searching Carey for two weeks, and eventually contacting her through Starr's management, he immediately signed her and began mapping out her debut into mainstream music.[18] While she maintained that she wanted to continue working with Margulies, Mottola enlisted top producers of the time, including Ric Wake, Narada Michael Walden and Rhett Lawrence.[18] Mottola and the staff at Columbia had planned to market Carey as the main female pop artist on their roster, competing with the likes of Whitney Houston and Madonna, who were signed to Arista and Sire Records respectively.[22] After the completion of the album, titled Mariah Carey, Columbia spent an upward of $1 million to promote it.[23] Though opening with weak sales, the album eventually reached the top of the Billboard 200, after Carey's exposure at the 33rd annual Grammy Awards.[24] Mariah Carey stayed atop the charts for eleven consecutive weeks,[25] and she won the Best New Artist, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance trophies for her single "Vision of Love".[26] The album yielded an additional three number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, following the four week number-one run of "Vision of Love". Carey became the first artist since The Jackson 5 to have their first four singles reach number one.[27] Mariah Carey finished as the best-selling album in the United States of 1991,[28] while totaling sales of over 15 million copies.[29]
Only months after the Mariah Carey began its descent on the charts, Carey already began working on her second studio effort, eventually titled Emotions (1991).[30][31] The album, as Carey described it, paid homage to Motown soul music, as she felt the need to pay tribute to the type of music and genre that truly influenced her as a struggling child.[31] For the project, Carey worked with Walter Afanasieff, who only had a small role on her debut, as well as Clivillés and Cole, from the dance group C+C Music Factory.[32] However, Carey's relationship with Margulies deteriorated[31] over a contract Carey had signed prior to her signing with Columbia, agreeing to split not only the songwriting royalties from the songs, but half of her earnings as well.[31] However, when the time came to write music for Emotions, Sony officials made it clear he would only be paid the fair amount given to co-writers on an album.[31] Subsequently, Margulies filed a lawsuit against Sony which ultimately led to their parting of ways.[31] On September 17, 1991, Emotions was released around the world, and was accepted by critics as a more mature album than its predecessor.[33] While praised for Carey's improved songwriting, production and new sound, the album was criticized for its material, which many felt was noticeably weaker than her debut.[34] Though the album managed sales of over eight million copies globally, Emotions failed to reach the commercial and critical heights of its predecessor.[35]
As they had done after the release of her debut, critics once again questioned whether Carey would embark on a world tour, in promotion for her material.[36] Although Carey explained that due to her stage fright, and the general strenuous nature of her songs, a tour sounded very daunting, speculation grew that Carey was a "studio worm", and that she wasn't capable of producing the perfect pitch and 5-octave vocal range for which she was known.[20][37] In hopes of putting any claims of her being a manufactured artist to rest, Carey and Walter Afanasieff decided to book an appearance on MTV Unplugged, a television program aired by MTV.[38] The show's purpose was to present name artists, and feature them "unplugged" or stripped of studio equipment.[38][39] While Carey felt strongly of her more soulful and powerful songs, it was decided that her most popular content to that point would be included.[39] Days prior to the show's taping, Carey and Afanasieff thought of adding a cover version of an older song, in order to provide something different and unexpected.[39] They chose "I'll Be There", a song made popular by The Jackson 5 in 1970, rehearsing it few times before the night of the show. On March 16, 1992, Carey recorded a seven-piece set-list at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, New York.[40] The revue was met with critical acclaim, leading to it being aired over three times as often as an average episode would.[41] The revue's success tempted Sony officials to use it as some form of an album.[42] Sony decided to release it as an EP, selling for a reduced price due to its shorter length.[43] The EP proved to be a success, shunning critics and speculations that Carey was just a studio artist,[43] and was given a triple-Platinum certification by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA),[44] and managed Gold and Platinum certifications in several European markets.[42]
"The writing partnership that her and I had and I can't speak for her other songwriting partners, but if you could see us in the room I would hit a chord and play a little melody on the piano and she would say, 'Oh, that's nice,' and she would sing that melody and then she adds a little bit to it. I would then play it back and then she would say, 'Yea, that's good' so it instantly becomes this partnership where eventually she'll have a melody and then the melody would prompt her to start thinking about this feeling she wants to put into words. This would eventually become the theme of the song."
During early 1993, Carey began working on her third studio album, Music Box.[46] After Emotions failed to achieve the commercial heights of her debut album, Carey and Columbia came to the agreement that the next album would contain a more pop influenced sound, in order to appeal to a wider audience.[46] During Carey's writing sessions, she began working mostly with Afanasieff, with whom she co-wrote and produced most of Music Box.[45] During the album's recording, Carey and Mottola became romantically involved.[47] They wed in a lavish ceremony on June 5, 1993, with several high profile guests including Barbra Streisand, Billy Joel, Gloria Estefan and Ozzy Osbourne.[48] One month later, on August 31, Music Box was released around the world, debuting at number-one on the Billboard 200.[49] The album was met with mixed reception from music critics; while many praised the album's pop influence and strong content, others felt that Carey made less usage of her acclaimed vocal range.[50] Ron Wynn from Allmusic described Carey's different form of singing on the album: "It was wise for Carey to display other elements of her approach, but sometimes excessive spirit is preferable to an absence of passion."[51] The album's second single, "Hero", would eventually come to be one of Carey's most popular and inspirational songs of her career.[52] The song became Carey's eighth chart topper in the United States,[52] and began expanding Carey's popularity throughout Europe. With the release of the album's third single, Carey achieved several career milestones. Her cover of Badfinger's "Without You" became her first number one single in several European countries, including Austria, Germany,[53] the Netherlands, Ireland,[54] Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.[55] Due to the song's success, Music Box spent prolonged periods at number one on the album charts of several countries,[56] and eventually became one of the best-selling albums of all time, with worldwide sales of over 32 million copies.[45] After declining to tour for her past two albums, Carey agreed to embark on a short stateside string of concerts, titled the Music Box Tour.[57] Spanning only six dates across North America,[57] the short but successful tour was a large step for Carey, who dreaded the hassle of touring.[58]
Following Music Box, Carey took a relatively large period of time away from the public eye, and began working on an unknown project throughout 1994.[59] The project was kept very secretive until Billboard announced on their October issue, that Carey would release a holiday album later that year.[59] In late 1994, Carey recorded a duet with Luther Vandross; a cover of Lionel Richie and Diana Ross's "Endless Love".[60] By that point, Columbia felt Carey had already established herself as a pop singer, and vocalist, but wanted to try and feature her as more of an entertainer.[61] Through the release of Merry Christmas, Columbia hoped that audiences would buy Carey's material solely for her name and reputation, and squash fears of her being a typical pop singer.[61] The album was released on November 1, 1994, on the same day that the album's first single, "All I Want for Christmas Is You", was released.[61] The album eventually became the best-selling Christmas album of all time, with global sales reaching over 15 million copies.[62][63][64] Additionally, "All I Want for Christmas Is You" was critically lauded, and is considered "one of the few worthy modern additions to the holiday canon."[62] Rolling Stone described it as a "holiday standard", and ranked it fourth on its Greatest Rock and Roll Christmas Songs list.[65] Commercially, it became the best-selling holiday ringtone of all time,[66] and the best-selling single by a non-Asian artist in Japan,[67] selling over 2.1 million units (both ringtone and digital download).[68][69] By the end of the holiday season of 1994, Carey and Afanasieff had already begun writing material for her next studio album, which would be released in the fall of the following year.[70]
Released on October 3, 1995, Daydream combined the pop sensibilities of Music Box with downbeat R&B and hip hop influences.[71] The album's second single, "One Sweet Day" was inspired by the death of Cole, as well as her sister Allison, who had contracted AIDS.[72] The song remained atop the Hot 100 for a record-breaking sixteen weeks, and became the longest running number one song in history.[73] Daydream became her biggest-selling album in the United States,[74] and became her second album to be certified Diamond by the RIAA, following Music Box.[44] The album again was the best-seller by an international artist in Japan, shifting over 2.2 million copies,[75] and eventually reaching global sales of over 25 million units.[29] Critically, the album was heralded as Carey's best to date; The New York Times named it as one of 1995's best albums, and wrote, "best cuts bring R&B candy-making to a new peak of textural refinement [...] Carey's songwriting has taken a leap forward and become more relaxed, sexier and less reliant on thudding clichés."[76] Carey once again opted to embark on a short world tour titled Daydream World Tour. It had seven dates, three in Japan and four throughout Europe.[77] When tickets went on sale, Carey set records when all 150,000 tickets for her three shows at Japan's largest stadium, Tokyo Dome sold out in under three hours, breaking the previous record help by The Rolling Stones.[77] Due to the album's success, Carey won two awards at the American Music Awards for her solo efforts: Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist and Favorite Soul/R&B Female Artist.[78] Daydream and its singles were respectively nominated in six categories at the 38th Grammy Awards.[79] Carey, along with Boyz II Men, opened the event with a performance of "One Sweet Day".[80] However, Carey did not receive any award, prompting her to comment "What can you do? I will never be disappointed again. After I sat through the whole show and didn't win once, I can handle anything."[80] In 1995, due to Daydream's enormous Japanese sales, Billboard declared Carey the "Overseas Artist of the Year" in Japan.[81]
"It was '97 and I was leaving my marriage [to Tommy Mottola], which encompassed my life. I was writing the song 'Butterfly' wishing that that's what he would say to me. There's a part that goes, 'I have learned that beauty/has to flourish in the light/wild horses run unbridled/or their spirit dies/you have given me the courage/to be all that I can/and I truly feel ...[sings] and I truly feel your heart will lead you back to me when you're ready to land.' At that point I really believed that I was going to go back to the marriage – I didn't think I was going to leave forever. But then the things that happened to me during that time caused me to not go back. Had it been, 'Go be yourself, you've been with me since you were a kid, let's separate for a while,' I probably would've."
After the release of Daydream and the success that followed, Carey began focusing on her personal life, which was a constant struggle at the time.[83] Carey's relationship with Mottola began to deteriorate, due to their growing creative differences in terms of her albums, as well as his controlling nature.[83] With each following album, and her continual established fame and popularity, Carey began to take more initiative and control with her music, and started infusing more genres into her work.[84] During mid-1997, Carey was well underway, writing and recording material for her next album, Butterfly (1997).[85] She sought to work with other producers and writers other than Afansieff, such as Sean Combs, Kamaal Fareed, Missy Elliott and Jean Claude Oliver and Samuel Barnes from Trackmasters.[85] During the album's recording, Carey and Mottola separated, with Carey citing is as her way of achieving freedom, and a new lease on life.[86] Aside from the album's different approach, critics took notice of Carey's altered style of singing, which she describe as breathy vocals.[87] Her new-found style of singing was met with mixed reception; some critics felt is was a sign of maturity, that she didn't feel the need to always show off her upper range,[88] while others felt it was a sign of her weakening and waning voice.[89][90] The album's lead single, "Honey", and its accompanying music video, introduced a more overtly sexual image than Carey had ever demonstrated, and furthered reports of her freedom from Mottola.[91] Carey stated that Butterfly marked the point when she attained full creative control over her music.[92] However, she added, "I don't think that it's that much of a departure from what I've done in the past [...] It's not like I went psycho and thought I would be a rapper. Personally, this album is about doing whatever the hell I wanted to do."[91] Growing creative differences with producer Afanasieff continued, and eventually ended their working relationship, after collaborating on most of Carey's material.[93] Reviews for Butterfly were generally positive: Rolling Stone wrote, "It's not as if Carey has totally dispensed with her old saccharine, Houston-style balladry [...] but the predominant mood of 'Butterfly' is one of coolly erotic reverie. [... Except "Outside" the album sounds] very 1997. [...] Carey has spread her wings and she's ready to fly",[94] Allmusic editor, Stephen Thomas Erlewine described Carey's vocals as "sultrier and more controlled than ever", and heralded Butterfly as her "best record and illustrates that Carey continues to improve and refine her music, which makes her a rarity among her '90s peers."[95] The album was a commercial success, although not to the degree of her previous three albums.[93]
Toward the turn of the millennium, Carey began developing other projects, many of which she wasn't able to during her marriage.[96] On April 14, 1998, Carey partook in the VH1 Divas benefit concert, where she sang alongside Aretha Franklin, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Gloria Estefan and Carole King.[97] Carey had begun developing a film project All That Glitters, later re-titled to simply Glitter,[98] and intended her songwriting to other projects, such as Men in Black (1997) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000).[96] After Glitter fell into developmental hell, Carey postponed the project, and began writing material for a new album.[96] The executives at Sony Music, the parent company of Carey's label Columbia, wanted her to prepare a greatest hits collection in time for the commercially favorable holiday season.[99] However, they disagreed as to what content and singles should constitute the album.[100] Sony wanted to release an album that featured her number one singles in the United States, and her international chart toppers on the European versions, void of any new material, while Carey felt that a compilation album should reflect on her most personal songs, not just her most commercial.[100] She felt that not including any new material would result in cheating her fans, therefore including four new songs that she had recorded.[100] While compromised, Carey often expressed distaste towards the album's song selection, expressing her disappointment in the omission of her "favorite songs".[101] The album titled, #1's (1998), featured a duet with Whitney Houston, "When You Believe", and was included on the soundtrack for The Prince of Egypt (1998).[100] During the development of All That Glitters, Carey had been introduced to DreamWorks producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, who asked her if she would record the song "When You Believe" for the soundtrack to the animated film The Prince of Egypt.[102] In an interview with Ebony, Houston described working with Carey, as well as their growing friendship: "Mariah and I got along very great. We had never talked and never sang together before. We just had a chance for camaraderie, singer-to-singer, artist-to-artist, that kind of thing. We just laughed and talked and laughed and talked and sang in between that ... It's good to know that two ladies of soul and music can still be friends."[103] #1's became a phenomenon in Japan, selling over one million copies in its opening week, and placing as the only international artist to accomplish this feat.[104] When describing Carey's popularity in Japan throughout the 1990s, author Chris Nickson compared it to Beatlemania in the 1960s.[77] The album sold over 3.25 million copies in Japan after only the first three months, and holds the record as the best-selling album by a non-Asian artist,[104] while amassing global sales of over 17 million copies.[105]
During the spring of 1999, Carey began working on the final album of her record contract with Sony, her ex-husband's label.[106] During this time, Carey's strained relationship with Sony affected her work with writing partner Afanasieff, who had worked extensively with Carey throughout the first half of her career.[106] She felt Mottola was trying to separate her from Afanasieff, in hopes of keeping their relationship permanently strained.[107] Due to the pressure and the awkward relationship Carey had now developed with Sony, she completed the album in a period of three months in the summer of 1999, quicker than any of her other albums.[48] The album, titled Rainbow (1999), found Carey once again working with a new array of music producers and songwriters, such as Jay-Z and DJ Clue.[108] Carey also wrote two ballads with David Foster and Diane Warren, whom she seemingly used to replace Afanasieff.[108] Rainbow was released on November 2, 1999, to the highest first week sales of her career at the time, however debuting at number two on the Billboard 200.[109] Throughout early-2000, Carey's troubled relationship with Columbia grew, as they halted promotion after the album's first two singles.[109] They felt Rainbow didn't have any strong single to be released, whereas Carey wanted a ballad regarding personal and inner strength released.[109] The difference in opinion led to a very public feud, as Carey began posting messages on her webpage in early and mid-2000, telling fans inside information on the dispute, as well as instructing them to request "Can't Take That Away (Mariah's Theme)" on radio stations.[110] One of the messages Carey left on her page read: "Basically, a lot of you know the political situation in my professional career is not positive. It's been really, really hard. I don't even know if this message is going to get to you because I don't know if they want you to hear this. I'm getting a lot of negative feedback from certain corporate people. But I am not willing to give up."[111] Fearing to lose their label's highest seller, Sony chose to release the song.[111] Carey, initially content with the agreement, soon found out that the song had only been given a very limited and low-promotion release, which made charting extremely difficult and unlikely.[111] Critical reception of Rainbow was generally enthusiastic, with the Sunday Herald saying that the album "sees her impressively tottering between soul ballads and collaborations with R&B heavyweights like Snoop Doggy Dogg and Usher [...] It's a polished collection of pop-soul."[112] Vibe magazine expressed similar sentiments, writing, "She pulls out all stops [...] Rainbow will garner even more adoration".[113] Though a commercial success, Rainbow became Carey's lowest selling album to that point in her career.[92]
After she received Billboard's Artist of the Decade Award and the World Music Award for Best-Selling Female Artist of the Millennium,[114] Carey parted from Columbia and signed a record-breaking $100 million five-album recording contract with Virgin Records (EMI Records), Carey was given full conceptual and creative control over the project.[115] She opted to record an album partly mixed with 1980s influenced disco and other similar genres, in order to go hand-in-hand with the film's setting.[116] She often stated that Columbia had regarded her as a commodity, with her separation from Mottola exacerbating her relations with label executives. Just a few months later, in July 2001, it was widely reported that Carey had suffered a physical and emotional breakdown. She had left messages on her website that complained of being overworked,[117] and her relationship with the Latin icon Luis Miguel ended.[118] In an interview the following year, she said, "I was with people who didn't really know me and I had no personal assistant. I'd do interviews all day long and get two hours of sleep a night, if that."[119] Due to the pressure from the media, her heavy work schedule and the split from Miguel, Carey began posting a series of disturbing messages on her official website, and displayed erratic behavior on several live promotional outings.[120] On July 19, 2001, Carey made a surprise appearance on the MTV program Total Request Live (TRL).[121] As the show's host Carson Daly began taping following a commercial break, Carey came out pushing an ice cream cart while wearing a large men's shirt, and began a striptease, in which she shed her shirt to reveal a tight yellow and green ensemble.[121] While she later revealed that Daly was aware of her presence in the building prior to her appearance, Carey's appearance on TRL garnered strong media attention.[120] Only days later, Carey began posting irregular voice notes and messages on her official website: "I'm trying to understand things in life right now and so I really don't feel that I should be doing music right now. What I'd like to do is just a take a little break or at least get one night of sleep without someone popping up about a video. All I really want is [to] just be me and that's what I should have done in the first place ... I don't say this much but guess what, I don't take care of myself."[121] Following the quick removal of the messages, Berger commented that Carey had been "obviously exhausted and not thinking clearly" when she posted the letters.[122]
On July 26, she was suddenly hospitalized, citing "extreme exhaustion" and a "physical and emotional breakdown".[123] Carey was inducted at an un-disclosed hospital in Connecticut, and remained hospitalized and under doctor's care for two weeks, followed by an extended absence from the public.[123] Following the heavy media coverage surrounding Carey's publicized breakdown and hospitalization, Virgin Records and 20th Century Fox delayed the release of both Glitter, as well as its soundtrack of the same name.[124] Consequently, critics suggested that in delaying Glitter, hype for the project would have largely subsided, and would possibly hurt both ticket and album sales.[125] When discussing the project's weak commercial reaction, Carey blamed both her frame of mind during the time of its release, its postponement, as well as the soundtrack having been released on September 11.[126] Critics panned Glitter, as well as its accompanying soundtrack; both were unsuccessful commercially.[127] The accompanying soundtrack album, Glitter, became Carey's lowest-selling album to that point. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch dismissed it as "an absolute mess that'll go down as an annoying blemish on a career that, while not always critically heralded, was at least nearly consistently successful."[128] Following the negative cloud that was ensuing Carey's personal life at the time, as well as the project's poor reception, her unprecedented $100 million five-album record deal with Virgin Records (EMI Records) was bought out for $50 million.[115][129] Soon after, Carey flew to Capri, Italy for a period of five months, in which she began writing material for her new album, stemming from all the personal experiences she had endured throughout the past year.[120] Carey later said that her time at Virgin was "a complete and total stress-fest [...] I made a total snap decision which was based on money and I never make decisions based on money. I learned a big lesson from that."[130] Later that year, she signed a contract with Island Records, valued at more than $24 million,[131] and launched the record label MonarC. To add further to Carey's emotional burdens, her father, with whom she had little contact since childhood, died of cancer that year.[132]
In 2002, Carey was cast in the independent film, WiseGirls, alongside Mira Sorvino and Melora Walters, who co-starred as waitresses at a mobster-operated restaurant. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and received generally negative critical response, though Carey's portrayal of the character was praised; Roger Friedman of Fox News referred to her as "a Thelma Ritter for the new millennium", and wrote, "Her line delivery is sharp and she manages to get the right laughs".[133] Later that year, Carey performed the American national anthem to rave reviews at the Super Bowl XXXVI at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana.[134] Towards the end of 2002, Carey released her next studio album Charmbracelet, which she said marked "a new lease on life" for her.[119] Though released in the wake of Glitter and Carey's return to the music scene, sales of Charmbracelet were moderate and the quality of Carey's vocals came under criticism. Joan Anderson from The Boston Globe declared the album "the worst of her career, and revealed a voice [that is] no longer capable of either gravity-defying gymnastics or soft coos",[135] while Allmusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine expressed similar sentiments and wrote, "What is a greater problem is that Mariah's voice is shot, sounding in tatters throughout the record. She can no longer coo or softly croon nor can she perform her trademark gravity-defying vocal runs."[136] In an attempt to "relaunch" her career following the poor reception to Glitter, as well as her breakdown, Carey announced a world tour in April 2003.[137] Lasting over eight months, the Charmbracelet World Tour: An Intimate Evening with Mariah Carey, became her most extensive tour to date, spanning sixty-nine shows around the world.[138] Throughout the United States, the shows were done in smaller theaters, and something more Broadway-influenced, "It's much more intimate so you'll feel like you had an experience. You experience a night with me."[137] However, while smaller productions were booked throughout the tour's stateside leg, Carey performed at stadiums in Asia and Europe, performing for a crowd of over 35,000 in Manila, 50,000 in Malaysia, and to over 70,000 people in China.[139] In the United Kingdom, it became Carey's first tour to feature shows outside of London, booking arena stops in Glasgow, Birmingham and Manchester.[140] Charmbracelet World Tour: An Intimate Evening with Mariah Carey garnered generally positive reviews from music critics and concert goers, with many complimenting the quality of Carey's live vocals, as well as the production as a whole.[141]
Throughout 2004, Carey focused on composing material for her tenth studio album, The Emancipation of Mimi (2005). The album found Carey working predominantly with Jermaine Dupri, as well as Bryan-Michael Cox, Manuel Seal, The Neptunes, Kanye West and Carey's longtime collaborator, Jermaine Dupri.[142] The album debuted atop the charts in several countries, and was warmly accepted by critics. Caroline Sullivan of The Guardian defined it as "cool, focused and urban [... some of] the first Mariah Carey tunes in years which I wouldn't have to be paid to listen to again",[143] while USA Today's Elysa Gardner wrote, "The ballads and midtempo numbers that truly reflect the renewed confidence of a songbird who has taken her shots and kept on flying."[144] The album's second single, "We Belong Together", became a "career re-defining"[145] song for Carey, at a point when many critics had considered her career over.[146] music critics heralded the song as her "return to form",[147] as well as the "return of The Voice",[147] while many felt it would revive "faith" in Carey's potential as a balladeer.[142] "We Belong Together" broke several records in the United States and became Carey's sixteenth chart topper on the Billboard Hot 100.[148] After staying at number one for fourteen non-consecutive weeks, the song became the second longest running number one song in US chart history, behind Carey's 1996 collaboration with Boyz II Men, "One Sweet Day".[148] Billboard listed it as the "song of the decade" and the ninth most popular song of all time.[149] Besides its chart success, the song broke several airplay records, and according to Nielsen BDS, gathered both the largest one-day and one-week audiences in history.[150]
During the week of September 25, 2005, Carey set another record, becoming the first female to occupy the first two spots atop the Hot 100, as "We Belong Together" remained at number one, and her next single, "Shake It Off" moved into the number two spot.[148] (Ashanti had topped the chart in 2002 while being a "featured" signer on the #2 single.) On the Billboard Hot 100 Year-end Chart of 2005, the song was declared the number one song, a career first for Carey.[151] Billboard listed "We Belong Together" ninth on The Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Songs and was declared the most popular song of the 2000s decade by Billboard.[152] The album earned ten Grammy Award nominations in 2006–07: eight in 2006 for the original release (the most received by Carey in a single year),[153] and two in 2007 for the Ultra Platinum Edition. In 2006 Carey won Best Contemporary R&B Album for The Emancipation of Mimi, as well as Best Female R&B Vocal Performance and Best R&B Song for "We Belong Together".[153] The Emancipation of Mimi was the best-selling album in the United States in 2005, with nearly five million units sold. It was the first album by a solo female artist to become the year's best-selling album since Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill in 1996.[154] At the end of 2005, the IFPI reported that The Emancipation of Mimi had sold more than 7.7 million copies globally, and was the second best-selling album of the year after Coldplay's X&Y. It was the best-selling album worldwide by a solo and female artist.[155][156][157] To date, The Emancipation of Mimi has sold over 12 million copies worldwide.[158] At the 48th Grammy Awards, Carey performed a medley of "We Belong Together" and "Fly Like a Bird".[159] The performance earned the night's only standing ovation, prompting Teri Hatcher, who was presenting the next award, to exclaim, "It's like we've all just been saved!"[159]
In support of the album, Carey embarked on her first headlining tour in three years, named The Adventures of Mimi: The Voice, The Hits, The Tour after a "Carey-centric fan's" music diary.[160] The tour spanned forty stops, with thirty-two in the United States and Canada, two in Africa, and six in Japan.[161] Tickets for the tour went on sale on June 2, 2006, with prices ranging from $95 to $150 USD, and featured Carey's long-time friend Randy Jackson as the tour's musical director.[162][163] Carey's performances consisted of old songs from her catalog as well as her newest singles.[164] The tour received warm critical reaction from music critics and concert goers, many of which celebrated the quality of Carey's live vocals, as well as the show as a whole.[165][166] However, critics felt the show's excesses, such as Carey's often costume changes and pre-filmed clips, were unnecessary distractions.[165] The tour proved successful, with Carey playing to over 60,000 fans in the two stop in Tunis alone.[167] Midway through the tour, Carey booked a two-night concert engagement in Hong Kong, which was scheduled to take place following her Japanese shows.[168] The shows were cancelled, however, after tickets went on sale. According to Carey's then-manager Benny Medina, the cancellation was due to the concert promoter's refusal to pay Carey her agreed-upon compensation.[168] The promoter instead blamed poor ticket sales (allegedly, only 4,000 tickets had sold) and "Carey's outrageous demands".[169] Carey ultimately sued the promoter, claiming $1 million in damages due to the concert's abrupt cancellation.[170]
By spring 2007, Carey had begun to work on her eleventh studio album, E=MC², in a private villa in Anguilla.[171] When asked regarding the album title's meaning, Carey said "Einstein's theory? Physics? Me? Hello! ...Of course I'm poking fun."[172] She characterized it as "Emancipation of Mimi to the second power", and said that she was "freer" on this album than any other.[172] Although E=MC² was well received by most critics,[173] some of them criticized it for being very similar to the formula used on The Emancipation of Mimi.[174] Two weeks before the album's release, "Touch My Body", the record's lead single reached the top position on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Carey's eighteenth number one and making her the solo artist with the most number one singles in United States history, pushing her past Elvis Presley into second place according to the magazine's revised methodology.[175] Carey is now second only to The Beatles, who have twenty number-one singles. Additionally, it gave Carey her 79th week atop the Hot 100, tying her with Presley as the artist with the most weeks at number one in the Billboard chart history."[176] Carey has also had notable success on international charts, though not to the same degree as in the United States. Thus far, she has had two #1 singles in Britain, two in Australia, and six in Canada. Her highest-charting single in Japan peaked at number two.
E=MC² debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 463,000 copies sold, the biggest opening week sales of her career.[177] With six number one albums, Carey is now tied with Britney Spears and Janet Jackson in the United States for the third most number one albums for a female artist, behind Madonna with seven and Barbra Streisand's nine chart toppers.[35] In 2008, Billboard magazine ranked her at number six on the "Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists", making Carey the second most successful female artist in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.[178] Carey and actor/comedian Nick Cannon met while they shot her music video for her second single, "Bye Bye", on an island off the coast of Antigua.[179] On April 30, 2008, Carey married Cannon at her private estate on Windermere Island in The Bahamas.[180][181] Carey had a cameo appearance in Adam Sandler's 2008 film You Don't Mess with the Zohan, playing herself.[182] On January 20, 2009, Carey performed "Hero" at the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball after Barack Obama was sworn as America's first African-American president.[183] On July 7, 2009, Carey – alongside Trey Lorenz – performed her version of The Jackson 5 song "I'll Be There" at the memorial service for Michael Jackson.[184] At the sight of Jackson's casket, Carey's voice, overwhelmed with emotion, cracked in the opening line of the song.[185] She later apologized on The Today Show, explaining how she did her best effort despite the circumstances.[185]
In 2009, she appeared as a social worker in Precious, the movie adaptation of the 1996 novel Push by Sapphire. The film garnered mostly positive reviews from critics, as has Carey's performance.[186] Variety described her acting as "pitch-perfect".[187] Precious won awards at both the Sundance Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival, receiving top honors there.[188][189] In January 2010, Carey won the Breakthrough Actress Performance Award for her role in Precious at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.[190] September 25, 2009, Carey's twelfth studio album, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, was released. Reception for the album was generally positive, but mixed in certain aspects; Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic called it "her most interesting album in a decade",[191] while Jon Caramanica from The New York Times criticized Carey's vocal performances, decrying her overuse of her softer vocal registers at the expense of her more powerful lower and upper registers.[192] Commercially, the album debuted at number three on the Billboard 200, and became the lowest-selling studio album of her career.[193] The album's lead single, "Obsessed", became her 40th entry on the Billboard Hot 100 and her highest debut on the chart since "My All" in 1998.[194] The song debuted at number eleven and peaked at number seven on the chart, and became Carey's 27th US top-ten hit, tying her with Elton John and Janet Jackson as the fifth most top-ten hits.[194] Within hours after the song's release, various outlets speculated that its target was rapper Eminem, in response to his song "Bagpipes from Baghdad", in which he taunted Carey's husband, Nick Cannon.[195] According to MTV, Carey alludes to drug problems in "Obsessed", which Eminem opened up about on his sixth studio album, Relapse.[196] The album's follow-up single, a cover of Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is", failed to achieve any significant chart success in the United States, or much throughout Europe, but managed to break airplay records in Brazil. The song spent 27 weeks atop the Brasil Hot 100 Airplay, making it the longest running song in the chart's history.[197] On December 31, 2009, Carey embarked her seventh concert tour, Angels Advocate Tour, which visited the United States and Canada.[198] Though stateside, the tour spanned few international dates, such as in Brazil and Singapore, where Carey played to over 100,000 spectators.[199] On January 30, 2010, it was announced that Carey would release a remix album of Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel; titled Angels Advocate (an R&B remix album featuring a collection of newly remixed duets with some of Carey's favorite artists).[200] The album was slated for a March 30, 2010 release, but was eventually cancelled.[201]
Following the cancellation of the Angels Advocate, it was announced that Carey would return to the studio to start work on her thirteenth studio album.[202] It was later revealed that it would be her second Christmas album, the follow-up to Merry Christmas (1994), which became the best-selling Holiday album of all time.[63] Long time collaborators for the project include Jermaine Dupri, Johntá Austin, Bryan-Michael Cox and Randy Jackson, as well as new collaborators such as Marc Shaiman.[203] Dupri stated that a single would be released alongside the album before the year's end.[203] During a press conference in Seoul, South Korea, in August 2010, Island Def Jam executive Matt Voss announced that the album would be out on November 2, 2010.[204] and would include six new songs and a remix of her classic hit "All I Want for Christmas Is You".[205] The album, titled Merry Christmas II You, was released alongside an accompanying DVD, and was sent to retailers on November 2, 2010.[206] Merry Christmas II You debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 with sales of 56,000 copies, surpassing the opening week sales of Carey's previous holiday album of 45,000 copies 16 years prior.[207] It also became Carey's 16th top ten album in the United States.[207] The album debuted at number one on the R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, making it only the second Christmas album to top this chart.[208]
In May 2010, Carey dropped out of her planned appearance in For Colored Girls, the film adaptation of the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, citing medical reasons.[209] After much media speculation, Carey confirmed on October 28, 2010, that she and Cannon were expecting their first child.[210] Carey also revealed that she had been pregnant shortly after her wedding with Cannon, but she miscarried.[211] On April 30, 2011, the couple's third wedding anniversary, Carey gave birth to fraternal twins via C-section.[212] The twins were named Monroe, after Marilyn Monroe, and Moroccan Scott, after Cannon proposed to Carey in her Moroccan-style room; Scott is Cannon's middle name and his grandmother's maiden name.[213] On February 11, 2011, Carey announced on HSN, that she recorded a duet with Tony Bennett for his upcoming "Duets" album, titled "When Do The Bells Ring For Me".[214] Following the birth of their children, Cannon revealed during an interview with Billboard that Carey had already begun working on a new record.[215] Cannon said "She's been working away, and we have a studio in the crib, and [the pregnancy] has totally inspired her on so many different levels. You're definitely gonna see some new phenomenal music from Mariah" and assured Carey would plan on releasing it by the end of the year.[216] In October 2011, Carey announced that she re-recorded her song "All I Want for Christmas Is You" with Justin Bieber as a duet for his Christmas album, Under the Mistletoe.[217][218] On November 5, 2011, Carey and Bieber filmed a music video for the duet at the Macy's in New York City.[219] On October 21, 2011, a pre-taped interview with Barbara Walters aired on ABC's 20/20, during the interview Carey and Cannon allowed the cameras to photograph/film twins Moroccan and Monroe for the first time ever.[220] In November 2011, Carey was included in the remix to the mixtape single "Warning" by Uncle Murda, the remix also features 50 Cent and Young Jeezy.[221] That same month, Carey announced that she and John Legend collaborated on a duet, "When Christmas Comes", which was originally part of Carey's 2010 holiday album Merry Christmas II You.[222] On March 1, 2012, Carey took the stage at New York City's Gotham Hall for a show, where only 50 tickets were made available to the public, as part of the Plot Your Escape concert series.[223] The 40-minute set included many of Carey's hits such as "Always Be My Baby", "Hero", "Obsessed", "We Belong Together", and a cover of Michael Jackson's "I'll Be There".[224]
Love is the subject of the majority of Carey's lyrics, although she has written about themes such as racism, social alienation, death, world hunger, and spirituality. She has said that much of her work is partly autobiographical, but Time magazine wrote: "If only Mariah Carey's music had the drama of her life. Her songs are often sugary and artificial—NutraSweet soul. But her life has passion and conflict," applying it to the first stages of her career. He commented that as her album's progressed, so too her songwriting and music blossomed into more mature and meaningful material.[225] Jim Faber of the New York Daily News, made similar comments, "For Carey, vocalizing is all about the performance, not the emotions that inspired it. Singing, to her, represents a physical challenge, not an emotional unburdening."[226] While reviewing Music Box, Stephen Holden from Rolling Stone commented that Carey sang with "sustained passion", while Entertainment Weekly's Arion Berger wrote that during some vocal moments, Carey becomes "too overwhelmed to put her passion into words."[227] In 2001, The Village Voice wrote in regards to what they considered Carey's "centerless ballads", writing, "Carey's Strawberry Shortcake soul still provides the template with which teen-pop cuties draw curlicues around those centerless [Diane] Warren ballads [...] it's largely because of [Blige] that the new R&B demands a greater range of emotional expression, smarter poetry, more from-the-gut testifying, and less unnecessary notes than the squeaky-clean and just plain squeaky Mariah era. Nowadays it's the Christina Aguileras and Jessica Simpsons who awkwardly oversing, while the women with roof-raising lung power keep it in check when tune or lyric demands."[228]
Carey's output makes use of electronic instruments such as drum machines,[142] keyboards and synthesizers.[229] Many of her songs contain piano-driven melodies,[230] as she was given piano lessons when she was six years old.[6] Carey said that she cannot read sheet music and prefers to collaborate with a pianist when composing her material, but feels that it is easier to experiment with faster and less conventional melodies and chord progressions using this technique.[6] While Carey learned to play the piano at a young age, and incorporates several ranges of production and instrumentation into her music, she has maintained that her voice has always been her most important asset: "My voice is my instrument; it always has been."[93] Carey began commissioning remixes of her material early in her career and helped to spearhead the practice of recording entirely new vocals for remixes.[231] Disc jockey David Morales has collaborated with Carey on several occasions, starting with "Dreamlover" (1993), which popularized the tradition of remixing R&B songs into house records, and which Slant magazine named one of the greatest dance songs of all time.[232] From "Fantasy" (1995) onward, Carey enlisted both hip-hop and house producers to re-structure her album compositions.[80] Entertainment Weekly included two remixes of "Fantasy" on a list of Carey's greatest recordings compiled in 2005: a National Dance Music Award-winning remix produced by Morales, and a Sean Combs production featuring rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard.[233] The latter has been credited with popularizing the R&B/hip-hop collaboration trend that has continued into the 2000s, through artists such as Ashanti and Beyoncé.[231] Combs said that Carey "knows the importance of mixes, so you feel like you're with an artist who appreciates your work—an artist who wants to come up with something with you".[234]
"I have nodules on my vocal cords. My mother says I've had them since I was a kid. That's why I have the high register and the belting register and I can still be husky. A lot of people couldn't sing through the nodules the way I do; I've learned to sing through my vocal cords. The only thing that really affects my voice is sleep. Sometimes if I'm exhausted, I can't hit the really high notes. My doctors showed me my vocal cords and why I can hit those high notes. It's a certain part of the cord that not many people use—the very top. My natural voice is low. I have a raspy voice. I'm really more of an alto. But my airy voice can be high if I'm rested. [...] When I was little, I'd talk in this really high whisper, and my mom would be like, 'You're being ridiculous'. I thought if I can talk like that I can sing like that. So I started [she goes higher and higher and higher] just messing around with it. I'd practice and practice, and she'd be like, "You're gonna hurt yourself." I'd tell her, It doesn't hurt. If I were to try and belt two octaves lower than that, that would be a strain."
Mariah Carey possesses a five-octave vocal range,[236][237][238] and has the ability to reach notes beyond the 7th octave.[239][240] She was ranked first in a 2003 MTV and Blender magazine countdown of the 22 Greatest Voices in Music, as voted by fans and readers in an online poll. Carey said of the poll, "What it really means is voice of the MTV generation. Of course, it's an enormous compliment, but I don't feel that way about myself."[241] She also placed second in Cove magazine's list of "The 100 Outstanding Pop Vocalists".[242]
Regarding her voice type, Carey said that she is an alto. However, within contemporary forms of music, singers are classified by the style of music they sing. There is currently no authoritative voice classification system within non-classical music.[243] Attempts have been made to adopt classical voice type terms to other forms of singing, but they are controversial,[243] because the development of classic voice categorizations were made with the understanding that the singer would amplify his or her voice with their natural resonators, without a microphone.[244]
Jon Pareles of The New York Times describes Carey's lower register as a "rich, husky alto" that extends to "dog-whistle high notes"[245]. Carey also possesses a "whisper register". In an interview with the singer, Ron Givens of Entertainment Weekly described it this way, "In one brief swoop, she seems to squeal and roar at the same time: whisper register."[246] Additionally, towards the late 1990s, Carey began incorporating breathy vocals into her material, usually beginning the song and then building up to a "full throated" climax.[247] Tim Levell from the BBC News described her vocals as "sultry close-to-the-mic breathiness",[247] while USA Today's Elysa Gardner wrote "it's impossible to deny the impact her vocal style, a florid blend of breathy riffing and resonant belting, has had on today's young pop and R&B stars."[248]
Her sense of pitch is admired[245] and Jon Pareles adds "she can linger over sensual turns, growl with playful confidence, syncopate like a scat singer... with startlingly exact pitch."[245]
Carey has said that from childhood she has been influenced by R&B and soul musicians such as Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan.[249] Her music contains strong influences of gospel music, and she credits The Clark Sisters, Shirley Caesar and Edwin Hawkins as the most influential in her early years.[249] When Carey incorporated hip-hop into her sound, speculation arose that she was making an attempt to take advantage of the genre's popularity, but she told Newsweek, "People just don't understand. I grew up with this music".[250] She has expressed appreciation for rappers such as The Sugarhill Gang, Eric B. & Rakim, the Wu-Tang Clan, The Notorious B.I.G. and Mobb Deep, with whom she collaborated on the single "The Roof (Back in Time)" (1998).[101] Carey was heavily influenced by Minnie Riperton, and began experimenting with the whistle register due to her original practice of the range.[101]
During Carey's career, her vocal and musical style, along with her level of success, has been compared to Whitney Houston, who she has also cited as an influence,[251] and Celine Dion. Carey and her peers, according to Garry Mulholland, are "the princesses of wails [...] virtuoso vocalists who blend chart-oriented pop with mature MOR torch song".[252] Author and writer Lucy O'Brien attributed the comeback of Barbra Streisand's "old-fashioned showgirl" to Carey and Dion, and described them and Houston as "groomed, airbrushed and overblown to perfection".[252] Carey's musical transition and use of more revealing clothing during the late 1990s were, in part, initiated to distance herself from this image, and she subsequently said that most of her early work was "schmaltzy MOR".[252] Some have noted that unlike Houston and Dion, Carey co-writes her own songs, and the Guinness Rockopedia (1998) classified her as the "songbird supreme".[253]
Carey's vocal style and singing ability have significantly impacted popular and contemporary music. As music critic G. Brown from The Denver Post wrote, "For better or worse, Mariah Carey's five-octave range and melismatic style have influenced a generation of pop singers."[254] According to Rolling Stone, "Her mastery of melisma, the fluttering strings of notes that decorate songs like "Vision of Love", inspired the entire American Idol vocal school, for better or worse, and virtually every other female R&B singer since the Nineties."[255] Jody Rosen of Slate Magazine wrote of Carey's influence in modern music, calling her the most influential vocal stylist of the last two decades, the person who made rococo melismatic singing.[256] Rosen further exemplified Carey's influence by drawing parallel with American Idol, which to her, "often played out as a clash of melisma-mad Mariah wannabes. And, today, nearly 20 years after Carey's debut, major labels continue to bet the farm on young stars such as the winner of Britain's X Factor show, Leona Lewis, with her Generation Next gloss on Mariah's big voice and big hair."[256] Sean Daly of St. Petersburg Times wrote, "Depending on how you feel about public humiliation, the best/worst parts of American Idol are the audition shows, which normally break down into three distinct parts:(1) The Talented Kids.(2) The Weird Kids.(3) The Mariahs." Daly further commented, "The Mariahs are the hardest ones to watch, mainly because most of them think they're reeeaaally good. The poor, disillusioned hopefuls plant themselves in front of judges Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson – then proceed to stretch, break and mutilate every note of a song, often Mariah's Hero, a tune that has ruined more throats than smoker's cough."[257] New York Magazine's editor Roger Deckker said that in regarding Carey as an influential artist in music, he commented that "Whitney Houston may have introduced melisma (the vocally acrobatic style of lending a word an extra syllable or twenty) to the charts, but it was Mariah—with her jaw-dropping range—who made it into America's default sound."[258] Deckker also added that "Every time you turn on American Idol, you are watching her children".[258] Despite her vocal prowess, Carey's vocal technique particularly with the use of melisma and belting, has been subject to public scrutiny mainly because of young singers such as from talent shows have been overly imitating her singing technique in which critics commented "Mariah Carey is, without a doubt, the worst thing to happen to amateur singing since the karaoke machine".[257] As Professor Katherine L. Meizel noted in her book, The Mediation of Identity Politics in American Idol, "Carey's influence not just stops in the emulation of melisma or her singing amongst the wannabe's, it's also her persona, her diva, her stardom which inspires them.... a pre-fame conic look."[259]
The problem, however, is that for all her talent, the 36-year-old is first and foremost a STAR, the very epitome of pop opulence in today's celebrity-dependent culture. And thus, millions of young women and men wake up every morning and figure that, simply by imitating Carey's vocal derring-do, they too can wind up on the cover of People or on MTV Cribs or on the arm of record mogul Tommy Mottola.
Carey's influence is notable in numerous hip hop, pop and R&B artists, including Beyoncé,[62] Christina Aguilera,[261] Jessica Simpson,[248] Rihanna,[262] Kelly Clarkson,[263] Nelly Furtado,[264] Leona Lewis,[265] Brandy Norwood,[255] Pink,[266] Mary J. Blige,[267] and Missy Elliott, among others.[62] Knowles credits Carey's singing and her song "Vision of Love" as influencing her to begin practicing vocal "runs" as a child, as well as helping her pursue a career as a musician.[62] Rihanna has stated that Carey is one of her major influences and idol.[262] Christina Aguilera has cited in her early stages of her career that Carey is a big influence in her singing career and being one of her idols.[261] According to Pier Dominguez, author of Christina Aguilera: a star is made : the unauthorized biography, Aguilera has stated how she loved listening to Whitney Houston, but it was Carey who had the biggest influence on her vocal styling. Carey's carefully choreographed image of a grown woman struck a chord on Aguilera. Her influence on Aguilera also grew from the fact that both were of mixed heritage.[268] Philip Brasor, editor of The Japan Times, expressed how Carey's vocal and melismatic style even influenced Asian singers. He wrote regarding Japanese superstar Utada Hikaru, "Utada sang what she heard, from the diaphragm and with her own take on the kind of melisma that became de rigueur in American pop after the ascendance of Mariah Carey."[269] In an article called "Out With Mariah's Melisma, In With Kesha's Kick", writer David Browne of The New York Times discusses how the ubiquitous melisma pop style has suddenly fallen down from pop culture in favor of young stars who uses the now ubiquitous autotune in which the first mentioned was heavily popularized into mainstream pop culture with the likes of Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston.[270] Browne had commented "But beginning two decades ago, melisma overtook pop in a way it hadn't before. Mariah Carey's debut hit from 1990, "Vision of Love," followed two years later by Whitney Houston's version of "I Will Always Love You," set the bar insanely high for notes stretched louder, longer and knottier than most pop fans had ever heard."[270] Browne further added "A subsequent generation of singers, including Ms. Aguilera, Jennifer Hudson and Beyoncé, built their careers around melisma. (Men like Brian McKnight and Tyrese also indulged in it, but women tended to dominate the form.)"[270]
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Carey's usage of Melisma throughout the song was credited with inspiring several vocalists and performers throughout the turn or the century, and is considered to have brought the usage of the vocal technique to modern day singers and talent competitions around the world to date.
Since its release in 1994, the song has re-entered the charts around the world, and is the best-selling holiday ringtone and song in the United States. Additionally, it was listed as the number one Christmas standard in the United Kingdom, while being branded the "last addition to the holiday collection of classics." The song has been covered by several artists, attesting to its continued popularity.[271][272]
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Carey is also credited for introducing R&B and hip hop into mainstream pop culture, and for popularizing rap as a featuring act through her post-1995 songs.[62] Sasha Frere-Jones, editor of The New Yorker commented, "It became standard for R&B/hip-hop stars like Missy Elliott and Beyoncé, to combine melodies with rapped verses. And young white pop stars—including Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Christina Aguilera, and 'N Sync—have spent much of the past ten years making pop music that is unmistakably R&B."[62] Moreover Jones concludes that "[Carey's] idea of pairing a female songbird with the leading male MCs of hip-hop changed R&B and, eventually, all of pop. Although now anyone is free to use this idea, the success of "The Emancipation of Mimi" suggests that it still belongs to Carey."[62] Judnick Mayard, writer of The Fader, wrote that in regarding of R&B and hip hop collaboration, "The champion of this movement is Mariah Carey."[273] Mayard also expressed that "To this day ODB and Mariah may still be the best and most random hip hop collaboration of all time", citing that due to the record "Fantasy", "R&B and Hip Hop were the best of step siblings."[273] Kelfa Sanneh of The New York Times wrote, "In the mid-1990s Ms. Carey pioneered a subgenre that some people call the thug-love duet. Nowadays clean-cut pop stars are expected to collaborate with roughneck rappers, but when Ms. Carey teamed up with Ol' Dirty Bastard, of the Wu-Tang Clan, for the 1995 hit "Fantasy (Remix)", it was a surprise, and a smash."[274] Aside from her pop culture and musical influence, Carey is credited for releasing a classic Christmas song called "All I Want For Christmas Is You".[272] In a retrospective look at Carey's career, Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker said, the "charming" song was one of Carey's biggest accomplishments, calling it "one of the few worthy modern additions to the holiday canon".[62] Rolling Stone ranked "All I Want for Christmas Is You" fourth on its Greatest Rock and Roll Christmas Songs list, calling it a "holiday standard."[275] Following the release of her Greatest Hits album, Devon Powers of Popmatters has said in his review that "She has influenced countless female vocalists after her. At 32, she is already a living legend—even if she never sings another note."[276] Carey's business ventures include the launch of her perfumes, her clothing line, and books.[277] She has portrayed the true nature of being a superstar, according to sociologist Naomi Hirahara, and is a classic example of the word "diva". Carey is never seen without her large entourage, whether it be award shows, performances or as guests on late night specials. Hirahara says, "her demands are sporadic, her looks are glamorous, she is hardly of her age, but she is still ruling. Nowadays people emulate the idea of being a diva, but Carey was the original one in true sense of the term."[277]
Throughout Carey's career, she has collected many honors and awards, including the World Music Awards' Best Selling Female Artist of the Millennium, the Grammy's Best New Artist in 1991, Billboard's Special Achievement Award for the Artist of the Decade during the 1990s.[278] In a career spanning over 20 years, Carey has sold over 200 million albums, singles, and videos worldwide, making her one of the biggest-selling artists in music history. Carey is ranked as the best-selling female artist of the Nielsen SoundScan era, with over 52 million copies sold.[279][280][281][282] Possessing a five-octave vocal range, Carey was ranked first in MTV and Blender magazine's 2003 countdown of the 22 Greatest Voices in Music, and was placed second in Cove magazine's list of "The 100 Outstanding Pop Vocalists".[242][283] Aside from her voice, she has become known for her songwriting. Yahoo Music editor Jason Ankeny wrote, "She earned frequent comparison to rivals Whitney Houston and Celine Dion, but did them both one better by composing all of her own material."[284] According to Billboard magazine, she was the most successful artist of the 1990s in the United States.[285] At the 2000 World Music Awards, Carey was given a Legend Award for being the "best-selling female pop artist of the millennium", as well as the "Best-selling artist of the 90s" in the United States, after releasing a series of albums of multi-platinum status in Asia and Europe, such as Music Box and Number 1's.[283][286] She is also a recipient of the Chopard Diamond Award in 2003, recognizing sales of over 100 million albums worldwide.[287] Additionally, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) lists Carey as the third-best-selling female artist, with shipments of over 63 million units in the US.[288][289] In Japan, Carey has the top four highest-selling albums of all time by a non-Asian artist.[290][291]
Carey has spent a record 79 weeks at the number-one position on Billboard Hot 100, becoming the artist with the most weeks at number-one in US chart history.[292] On that same chart, she has accumulated 18 number-one singles, which ties her with Elvis Presley for the second most number-one singles in the chart's history (after only The Beatles).[293] In 1994, Carey released her holiday album Merry Christmas has sold over 15 million copies worldwide, and is the best-selling Christmas album of all time.[63][64][294][295] It also produced the successful single "All I Want for Christmas Is You", which became the only holiday song and ringtone to reach multi-platinum status in the US.[296] In Japan, Number 1's has sold over 3,250,000 copies and is the best-selling album of all time in Japan by a non-Asian artist.[297] Her hit single "One Sweet Day", which featured Boyz II Men, spent sixteen consecutive weeks at the top of Billboard's Hot 100 chart in 1996, setting the record for the most weeks atop the Hot 100 chart in history.[282] After Carey's success in Asia with Merry Christmas, Billboard estimated Carey as the all-time best-selling international artist in Japan.[298] In 2008, Billboard listed "We Belong Together" ninth on The Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Songs[299] and second on Top Billboard Hot 100 R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.[300] The song was also declared the most popular song of the 2000s decade by Billboard.[152] In 2009, Carey's cover of Foreigner's song "I Want to Know What Love Is" became the longest-running number-one song in Brazilian singles chart history, spending 27 consecutive weeks at number-one.[301] Additionally, Carey has had three songs debut at number-one on the Billboard Hot 100: "Fantasy", "One Sweet Day" and "Honey", making her the artist with the most number-one debuts in the chart's 52-year history.[302] Also, she is the first female artist to debut at number 1 in the U.S. with "Fantasy".[283] In 2010, Carey's 13th album and second Christmas album, Merry Christmas II You, debuted at No.1 on the R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, making it only the second Christmas album to top that chart. On November 19, 2010, Billboard magazine named Carey in their "Top 50 R&B/Hip-Hop Artists of the Past 25 Years" chart at number four.[303]
Carey is a philanthropist who has donated time and money to organizations such as the Fresh Air Fund.[304] She became associated with the Fund in the early 1990s, and is the co-founder of a camp located in Fishkill, New York, that enables inner-city youth to embrace the arts and introduces them to career opportunities.[304] The camp was called Camp Mariah "for her generous support and dedication to Fresh Air children", and she received a Congressional Horizon Award for her youth-related charity work.[305] She is well-known nationally for her work with the Make-A-Wish Foundation in granting the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses, and in November 2006 she was awarded the Foundation's Wish Idol for her "extraordinary generosity and her many wish granting achievements".[306][307] Carey has volunteered for the New York City Police Athletic League and contributed to the obstetrics department of New York Presbyterian Hospital Cornell Medical Center.[308] A percentage of the sales of MTV Unplugged was donated to various other charities.[308] In 2008, Carey was named Hunger Ambassador of the World Hunger Relief Movement.[309] In February 2010, the song, "100%", which was originally written and recorded for the film, Precious,[310] was used as one of the theme songs for the 2010 Winter Olympics, with all money proceeds going to Team USA.[311]
One of Carey's most high-profile benefit concert appearances was on VH1's 1998 Divas Live special, during which she performed alongside other female singers in support of the Save the Music Foundation.[97] The concert was a ratings success, and Carey participated in the Divas 2000 special.[97] In 2007, the Save the Music Foundation honored Carey at their tenth gala event for her support towards the foundation since its inception.[312][313] She appeared at the America: A Tribute to Heroes nationally televised fundraiser in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and in December 2001, she performed before peacekeeping troops in Kosovo.[314] Carey hosted the CBS television special At Home for the Holidays, which documented real-life stories of adopted children and foster families, from the Wayback Machine on October 22, 2001.[315] In 2005, Carey performed for Live 8 in London[316] and at the Hurricane Katrina relief telethon "Shelter from the Storm".[317] In August 2008, Carey and other singers recorded the charity single, "Just Stand Up" produced by Babyface and L. A. Reid, to support "Stand Up to Cancer".[318]
Declining offers to appear in commercials in the United States during her early career, Carey was not involved in brand marketing initiatives until 2006, when she participated in endorsements for Intel Centrino personal computers and launched a jewelry and accessories line for teenagers, Glamorized, in American Claire's and Icing stores.[319] During this period, as part of a partnership with Pepsi and Motorola, Carey recorded and promoted a series of exclusive ringtones, including "Time of Your Life".[320] She signed a licensing deal with the cosmetics company Elizabeth Arden, and in 2007, she released her own fragrance, "M".[321] In 2007, Forbes named her as the fifth richest woman in entertainment, with an estimated net worth of US $270 million.[322][323] In November 2011, it was reported that Carey's net worth was valued at more than $500 million.[324] On November 29, 2010, she debuted a collection on HSN, the collection range included jewelry, shoes and fragrances.[325] In November 2011, Carey was announced as the new global ambassador for Jenny Craig, following her weight loss with the program after giving birth to fraternal twins in April. Carey claims she lost 70-pound (32 kg) on the program.[326]
Year | Title | Role | Notes |
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1999 | The Bachelor | Ilana | |
2001 | Glitter | Billie Frank | 2001 Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress |
2002 | WiseGirls | Raychel | |
2003 | Death of a Dynasty | Herself | Cameo appearance |
2005 | State Property 2 | Dame's Wifey | |
2008 | You Don't Mess with the Zohan | Herself | Cameo appearance |
2009 | Tennessee | Krystal | |
2009 | Precious | Mrs. Weiss |
Palm Springs International Film Festival Breakthrough Performance Award |
Year | Title | Role | Notes |
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2002 | Ally McBeal | Candy Cushnip | "Playing with Matches" (Season 5, episode 8) |
2003 | The Proud Family | Herself | Voice role |
Book: Mariah Carey | |
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print. |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Mariah Carey |
Media related to Mariah Carey at Wikimedia Commons
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