Kanye’s Power leaks
Rumoured to be taken from Kanye’s forthcoming album titled charmingly Good Ass Job, Power sees the rapper break away from the 808s & Heartbreak autotune era with a track set to soul choir sample.
Listen at the Hype Machine

CEO
Eric Berglund of electronica duo The Tough Alliance makes a solo run under the CEO name and produces Balearic pop in the process. Another great release from Swedish label Sincerely Yours, who recently released JJ and Kendal Johansson.
Check out CEO at The Culture of Me
 
Klaxons’ Flashover
The first new sliver of material from Klaxons’ forthcoming album sounds like first album highlight Atlantis to Interzone without the “nu-rave” bleeps and with more distortion.
http://klaxons.net

“Hello Mr Hudson, we are popular ‘urban’ group- N-Dubz. We wish to appeal to a niche MOR market. Your agent tells our agent that we could cross-polinate our appeal with yours. We’re advised that it will all end up well.”

Actually, no. Nobody would wish for that ridiculous hybrid. Yet, here it is.

What bigger heroine has 2009 offered us than Susan Boyle? She started the year a dowdy spinster. An appearance on Britain’s Got Talent and over 100 million Youtube views later and she ends the year as one of the biggest selling album artists of 2009 worldwide. Let us not forget the performance that started it all.

Other people became known for very different reasons this year. Tom O’ C (aka T O’ Pain) became an accidental rap sensation overnight, Christian Bale was caught on tape freaking out at a film crew member and Kanye had a bad year all round. Firstly, with the South Park Gay Fish parody and secondly with his interruption of Taylor Swift’s MTV award speech, an event which became an internet meme albeit an ephemeral one.

The year’s longest lasting internet meme was Play him off Keyboard Cat which spawned hundreds of video remixes and mashups like this Hall and Oates version while close behind was anything involving autotune including autotuned news reports and ads.

For once-off viral videos, nothing beats David, a young boy whose dazed state after a visit to the dentist was captured by his dad and uploaded to the web. For those looking to get their dance craze on, you should watch the wedding video entrance to end them all and those who can’t get enough of cute kids should check out the floppy-haired five year old playing Folsom Prison Blues or the less innocent but equally impressive redhead kid dancing to dirty rap songs.

Microsoft took one step forward but two steps back in their video campaigns this year. While the waterslide viral video had people guessing if it was real or fake, the subsequent Windows 7 launch party cringefest and the Songsmith ad did nothing to convince us that Microsoft have a clue.

My own personal favourite web bits of the year though are Zander Bleck and the Tuts My Barreh karaoke fail. The former, an over-earnest model turned douchebag singer and the latter, a Mariah Carey fan with poor yet hilarious English translation skills. My vote for cover of the year goes to the Ukrainian band covering Katy Perry’s Hot and Cold in a Balkan style.

Mr. West has a prior history of doing things like this. At 2006′s European VMAs he pulled a similar stunt to protest Justice vs Simian’s Video of the Year win. We all remember his infamous “George Bush hates black people” outburst on live TV or how about his “ I’m typing so hard I might break my fucking Macbook Air!” reply to fans’ disgruntlement at a delayed show.

While Kanye has already issued an apology and appeared on Leno to apologise, naturally the internet is doing what it does best responding and creating video memes of the incident.

Many of the musicians and celebs present at the awards took to Twitter to react with Katy Perry tweeting “F**k you Kanye. It’s like you stepped on a kitten.” Popular Twitter user Graham Linehan and his followers rechristened him Kant and generally people called him self-centered and childish as expected.

The best thing to come out of this though, is the start of an internet meme beginning with the brilliant short video of Obama’s recent healthcare speech being interrupted by the same Kanye diatribe. Something tells me by the time you read this, “Kanye interrupts” could be the next Keyboard Cat viral sensation.

The best of the Kanye interrupts virals after the jump:

Sites that have sprung up featuring loads of images etc based on this:
http://kanyegate.tumblr.com/
http://immaletyoufinish.net/
The Kanye interrupts your website tool.
NME’s best of Kanye interrupts photo gallery
Kanye Apology Generator.

I’ve left out the obviously bad jobs but if you have any good ones, pop them in the comments.

The Horrors remix Memory Cassette
It’s been a good week for the former panto-goth rockers. A Mercury nomination for the excellent album Primary Colours and this uncharacteristic spacey dance remix for good measure.
http://short.ie/horrorsremix

New Beastie Boys track
On the same day that the Beasties’ Adam Yauch announced he will undergo cancer treatment, Too Many Rappers from the forthcoming Hot Sauce Committee Pt.1 with Nas as a guest appeared. Still as good as ever.
http://short.ie/beastienas

Jay-Z with Kanye and Rihanna
The Hova’s upcoming Blueprint 3 album has started to leak material – this time by The Roots’ talisman Questlove via Twitter. ‘Run This Town’ is as pop as Jay-Z gets.
http://short.ie/jayz3

What is the main film review this week?

To enter, find the answer in the magazine then turn to page 17 for details on how to enter by text.

Devo return
The oddball ’80s rockers return with a ninth album and a really rather catchy single called ‘Don’t Shoot’ complete with this excellent video.


Moon trailer
This 2001: A Space Odyssey-indebted lunar psychological drama even has its own HAL called GERTY. Sam Rockwell stars as an astronaut who suffers a mental breakdown in the final days of his three year stint on the moon.

Eminem returns, world yawns
The world has moved on but Eminem’s new video proves he’s missed the zeitgeist with the usual jabs at celebrities like Britney and Jessica Simpson along with politicians like Sarah Palin. Irrelevancy approaches Mr. Mathers.
http://tinyurl.com/eminemade

Last week, tracks from the album started appearing online in various places. Not unusual these days of course. What is notable though is that Kanye himself posted three songs from the record ‘Love Lockdown’, ‘Heartless’ (url.ie/wif) and ‘Amazing’ (url.ie/wie) as downloadable mp3s on his own blog, a site filled with pictures of models and art that Kanye digs. These self-perpetuating links were demoed on his site and later tweaked depending on reactions from fans (url.ie/wig). The effect (no doubt intended) has spread his work all over the blogosphere with bloggers and traditional media reposting and linking to the (auto)tunes, as well as posting other leaked album tracks in the process. At the time of writing, 8 of the 11 songs on the album have already leaked. In doing so, Kanye has heightened the buzz for a record that was already demanding huge attention. You couldn’t buy publicity like that with a budget from a marketing department.