(Actually, this is also about the AEC, really... but interesting.)
Pierre Cossette and Prince's Lawyer to the Rescue

I'm still thinking about Sunday night's Grammy show, the best ever, maybe, and certainly one of the classiest. I think we owe producer Pierre Cossette a group thank-you.

He did what no one record company executive has done in the last five years — he used his own sense of good taste and edited the presentations. The result was no celebration of the violent hip-hop life — no bling-bling, no gang members thanking God for their awards, no illiterate blather coming over microphones.

And still the show featured all kinds of music, presented in a classy and exciting way.

There is no record company innocent of using the worst aspects of hip-hop to make money in the last decade. The result was a complete decline of the business as it was kidnapped and tortured by wanna-be thugs on a joyride.

Is it any surprise that the stealing of music gained in favor as the gangsta life was celebrated on disc, videos, and movies? Awards shows had become Halloween parties. Cossette and company finally put an end to it. That's OK by me.

And still, the rise of "free music" came at an interesting point in music history. Pop artists from the last 40 years have awakened to the fact that they, by and large, are not going to get any pension money from record companies.

The artists have been abused and exploited by record company executives who live in mansions beyond their wildest imaginations. In this week's New York magazine, writer Phoebe Eaton describes the self-indulgent gluttony of former Sony head Tommy Mottola, who fiddled like Nero while Rome burned.

"Mottola ... had a Monopoly-board hunger for real estate," Eaton writes.

"A Balinese-style villa Mottola built in Miami ... [is a] $4 million property on Star Island, a private enclave with a guarded gate, has indoor and outdoor pools, horses, and a library," Eaton writes. "Mottola's luxe townhouse on the Upper East Side was purchased for $13.3 million from David Geffen in 1999 and was tricked out with such niceties as a perfume refrigerator for his wife."

Eaton reports that the now-unemployed dictator recently put the townhouse on the market for $27 million.

"He has already lined up its successor, a more modest $9.25 million, 5,000-square-foot condo in an unspectacular building whose redeeming feature seems to be its great views," she adds.

Who pays for all this? The consumer. And the artists.

On Sunday, record-business attorney Lundell McMillan, who represents Prince and others, had a lunch at the New York Hilton for a new group, Artists Empowerment Coalition.

A leading member of the African-American entertainment world here in New York, McMillan attracted a huge number of black artists, each of whom had the same question in mind: "Where is our money?"

Roberta Flack, Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, Isaac Hayes and articulate rapper Doug E. Fresh all spoke, while Prince marinated in the audience. (He's shy.)

"Soul Man" Sam

Link: http://www.foxnews.com/st...37,00.html

wizard said:

"articulate rapper"? you don't imply that rappers, in general, are not articulate, do you, soul man? if in the unlikely event you do imply as such, then i'd suggest you check out De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers, Boogie Down Productions, Talib Kweli, Common, Mos Def and The Roots. There are still other rappers who are intelligent yet profess and celebrate ignorance to sell records. I am just as much a critic of today's hip-hop culture as anyone, but as a black man, i have seen the term "articulate" to express a "non-black" person's surprise that a black perrson can speak in complete sentences.

I wish people who have no clue about Hip Hop would stop generalizing!!

namepeace said:

namepeace said:

Man, now I have to call MYSELF out . . . "perrson?" geesh.