CIAA — which officially ended Sunday — is a thing of the past, but thanks to the World Wide Web, the memory lives on. Here’s a clip of the world famous hip-hop artist Nelly and R&B vocalist/dance-man Ginuwine hanging out in the Queen City last week:
For even more stuff about this year’s CIAA — hundreds of photos, reviews and more — visit our CIAA 2010 page.
Creative Loafing’s own funky photographer Jasiatic is the subject of an art show coming to Crave Dessert Bar (500 W. 5th Street) on March 14. She’ll be showing off portraits from her blog, Who Shot Ya?, and — for a small fee — she’ll also be shooting “headshots” on the spot at the event. Bring your a$$.
In case you’re wondering, Diddy actually did make it to town this past weekend. Here’s the footage to prove it:
Johnson C. Smith didn’t look great in their effort to three-peat as CIAA champions against upstart Chowan University. But inside the arena, the bad ball by JCSU in the first half wasn’t the only god-awful things seen at the Cable Box.
Here’s a new CIAA rule that you should keep in mind when you’re attending the games: Five inch heels are not your friend walking around the hard floors of the arena. Countless women slow-walked though the crowd trying to get to the concessions at half time with JCSU losing to Chowan 25 to 33.
In the second half, Chowan proved that being the new kid didn’t mean they were going to lose in their first CIAA tournament appearance. The two-time defending champions came out in the second half playing as if they’d been walking around all day in five-inch heels. With 2:53 left in the game, Chowan was up 63 to 44, making it painfully obvious that the Golden Bulls wouldn’t be repeating as champions.
Final score: Chowan: 74 JCSU: 46
“Ray-Ray, where are you?” (Quote of the night.)
Looks like Matthews native Brooklyn Decker made it. Congrats! Check out our interview with her here.
Today would have been the 75th birthday of Elvis Presley. The human being behind the icon has long been relegated to the sidelines, which is how mega-celebrity works. It’s the icon, for better or worse (in other words, slim Vegas Elvis or fat druggie Elvis), that first comes to most people’s mind when they hear his name today. But it’s the young, startling Presley that really matters, the sneering, joking smartass who played a major role in liberating American culture; that’s the guy who should be celebrated.
Presley’s thrilling early brazenness is part of his legacy that’s usually buried under the wave of commercial exploitation, and worn down by his own history of long decline. But at his most important, his most daring and his most dangerous — in those three or four years before commercial pressures, the Army, and the long tentacles of his manager, Col. Tom Parker, squeezed the spark from him — Presley was the raw flame, America’s own funhouse mirror that, depending on your outlook, either reflected a scary, vulgar delinquency or a completely unexpected excitement and sense of liberation. It was his toppling of the status quo, and his recognition of black and white interdependency, that lay at the heart of his initial appeal, and were what ignited rock & roll’s Big Bang and the cultural roller coaster ride it’s provided ever since.
Yes, in the end, he blew it, victimized by his celebrity, insecurities, and horrendous management. Presley certainly wasn’t the first entertainer to suffer a similar fate (Jean Harlow or Michael Jackson, anyone?); come to think of it, it’s hard to think of any artist in any field who could keep the raw flame burning for an entire career. But at one time, Presley set the world on fire, he felt like an earthquake rumbling through the land, he opened white eyes to black music, and he brought Americans the gut feeling that everything had changed.
We’ve written about Presley before, and you can read a longer piece about him here. Meanwhile, here’s a verse from singer Gillian Welch’s “Elvis Presley Blues,” celebrating the man’s effect on the nation’s racial/cultural divide, and the young king himself, doing a shortened version of “Hound Dog” in 1956.
Now he took hold of Black and White,
Grabbed it in one, then the other hand, and he held on tight.
And he shook it like a hurricane,
he shook it like to make it break.
He shook it like a holy roller, baby, with his soul at stake,
his soul at stake.
Well it seems that Vanity Fair has decided to put embattled Tiger Woods on the cover, only with photos taken four years ago by Annie Leibovitz. Surprise, surprise — he looks like he’s on a prison yard, bare chested and all. Like me, he looks better with his clothes on. At any rate, Leibovitz has done what she always does — take the black man back to his most primitive and primal image. Yet another plantation fantasy reminiscent of O.J.’s Time Magazine cover where he was actually darkened. Tiger is looking more “bl” than “cau” and “asian” in this one. He definitely looks darker in complexion and posture. Perhaps Leibovitz should focus less on perpetuating stereotypical images of EVERYONE and more on managing her money.
Maybe we’re too hard on reality stars.
Sure, they’re generally narcissistic and walk around with a pseudo-importance during, and even years after, their 15 minutes of fame are up. But how many of us would turn down the opportunity to spend a summer in an LA mansion, being VIP at every club, and of course, drinking from a seemingly unlimited supply of alcohol provided by the show’s producers. I’d say, “Fuck my internship,” too.
Everyone you see partying, fighting, crying, bitching and ultimately building alliances to “survive” on reality TV has their own reason for auditioning — and Charlotte native Kendra James’ was a whim.
She decided to road trip from Greensboro, where she was in college, with her girls to attend an open casting call in Charlotte, and after months of calls backs she found herself on season four of Oxygen’s Bad Girls Club. Sounds way hotter than the Biggest Loser.
We recently caught up with the Queen City resident turned reality show hottie and talked about her TV experience.
Creative Loafing: How long was the audition process for the Bad Girls Club?
Kendra: I started doing The Real World. I did seven interviews with Real World, and then they called me and said you didn’t make the Real World but do you want to try the Bad Girls Club and then I had three or four interviews with the Bad Girls Club.
As the Baltimore Ravens scored to time the game at versus Minnesota Vikings with 3 minutes 37 seconds left in the fourth quarter, a tune — familiar and fierce — began to rise above the cheers and whistles … until, before long, the entire stadium was engulfed in a hearty rendition of legendary rock band Journey’s signature song, “Don’t Stop Believin’.” From Broadway to cable to sports, the nearly 30-year-old hit just keeps on swinging.
The 1981 power balled is a soaring, hard rockin’ anthem for those who refuse to let a little thing like doubt keep them from what they want. The song reached No. 8 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart and No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
That was back then. Now, the tune has taken on a life of its own due to repeated appearances on some of TV’s hottest shows.
In 2008, it was the 72nd most downloaded song in the iTunes store and is its “most downloaded song not released in the 21st century” of all time. Arguably, the most recognizable and most referenced song in popular culture right now, but it received a jolt of new life by the finale of HBO’s addictive series The Sopranos in 2007. In fact, sales of the song on iTunes rose 482 percent over following days. It has shown up on Family Guy, Scrubs, and MTV’s Laguna Beach.
Earlier this year, contestants from American Idol sang “Don’t Stop Believin’” as a group at the beginning of the results show, and if you caught them when they rolled through Time Warner Cable Arena in August, the song was used as the closing group song for the Season 8 tour. It was ranked as the 11th greatest song on VH-1’s Greatest Songs of the 80’s countdown. Most recently, the cast from one of my favorite new shows Glee performed a cover of the song.
So, what is it about the song that seems to transcend generations and genres? Sure, much of its resiliency is due to its own purely musical kick-ass nature. But it’s one of those rare creations with a message that speaks to a feeling to which most anyone can relate. “Don’t Stop Believin’” brings us to a place we have all been at least once — a point where with a dream in our hearts, we throw caution to the wind and, even when the odds seemed stacked against us, we soldier on and … well, at the risk of stringing together any more motivational clichés, it’s a damn good song from the lyrics to the instrumentation to frontman Steve Perry’s powerful delivery and is, thankfully, not at all like much of the unintelligible and incomprehensible “music” in heavy rotation on the radio today.
If you are currently living under a rock and have no idea what this song is, the band is perpetually in tour mode, albeit without the golden-piped Perry.
A few months ago, the popular Atlanta-based nightclub event Sol-Fusion popped into Charlotte in an attempt to bring the party to North Cack. Well, it was so successful — with a packed house full of great music and dancing ladies and guys — the promoters behind the first event (Charlotte’s Mike Kitchen and Atlanta’s J. Carter) have decided to bring it back for a sequel.
It all goes down tonight as Sol-Fusion sets up shop at the night-spot KISS for an extravaganza that’s titled “NY vs. the South.” It’s a music/cultural war that’s free before 11:30 p.m.
For more info, click right here.
