Dispatches 20 October 2000

Most random bit of music "news" last week: apparently Mel C a.k.a. Sporty Spice has a problem--she can't stop farting. To quote her, "I have a problem with farting, full stop. I'm always farting. Everybody's gotta know I'm a right farty-pants." Guess that's a side effect of those Spices.

BABY BABY

Yup, the music page has gone all analytic this week, discussing the process of recording an album and the rise of the preteen-pop movement. Speaking of preteen pop, does anyone remember "Dur Dur D'Etre Bebe," that silly song by Jordy, the baby who sang in French?

STARS IN THEIR EYES

Singlehood being what it is, my current guilty pleasure on a late Saturday night is settling in front on my TV and watching the terminally kitsch show "Your Big Break," another game-show import from Britain, which comes on after "Saturday Night Live." People come on the show in ordinary clothes, go behind a screen of smoke, and emerge dressed as the singer they're about to try to sing like – Patsy Cline, Elvis, Janet Jackson, you get the idea. To top off the cheesiness, the show's hosted by Alfonso Ribiero, a.ka. Carlton from "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air." It's quite sad, really, to see him host – I half expect him to break into that Tom Jones routine he used to do on "Fresh Prince." And yet despite all that, I still keep singing. Crazy… I'm crazy for feeling so blue…

AENEAS WAS WRONG

Speaking of late Saturday night entertainment, Entertainment Weekly this week features Dido as the "breakout" star to watch, even though "Thank You" – the song sampled on Eminem's "Stan" – has been around for about two years. So apparently no one realized how good a song "Thank You" was until Eminem? Obviously I was the only one listening to the Sliding Doors soundtrack. It's strange how celebrity works. One day you're nobody, the next day Eminem samples you. Maybe one day Labi Siffre will get famous.

What's creepy, though, is I got the EW issue on Friday, the newsstand release date, and then I popped into Tower Records on Saturday and the quote from the magazine was already on a sticker on the Dido album. Either they're really efficient, or the quote was released in advance.

FRAUD

Continuing from last week's list of musical annoyances, musical annoyance #3 (collect them all!) for me is when people attribute songs to the wrong artist. I'm talking about people thinking "Ain't No Sunshine" was sung by Al Green instead of Bill Withers. (Try searching for it on Napster – it's not illegal to search, only to download.) I wonder what song most people misattribute?

Speaking of Napster annoyances, people have been putting up songs claiming to be tracks from advance copies of upcoming albums. Songs claiming to be from the upcoming U2 album "All That You Can't Leave Behind" or from Fatboy Slim's "Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars" have appeared on people's servers, but a quick listen shows them to be nothing but songs by random groups trying to get more people to listen to their own work. Which only goes to show, you really should buy the album.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks though that maybe the bands or the recording companies themselves might be releasing these songs to convince people that Napster is a useless tool though…

ALL THE NEWS YOU CAN USE

Album release news: yes, the Christina Aguilera Christmas album comes out on Tuesday, as does Scattered, Smothered and Covered, the Hootie and the Blowfish covers and B-sides album. P.J. Harvey releases Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, which features a duet with Thom Yorke of Radiohead.

Finally, the ever-useful concert news. One of my favorite bands, the Beautiful South, are in town this upcoming week! They're playing Avalon on October 22, to be precise. It's always a source of mystery to me that the Housemartins broke up and spawned such disparate sounds as the Beautiful South's masterful ironic pop and Fatboy Slim's. More famous bands coming into town are: Hootie and the Blowfish (October 25, Avalon), Ani DiFranco (October 26-27, Orpheum), and, inevitably, the Squirrel Nut Zippers (October 27, the Roxy).

All this music and I have to be studying for midterms. Farty-pants.