Pop Shots - Going Places

Welcome to your weekly dose of pop world musings. Covering all things pop culture, this week Pop Shots is hitting you with thoughts on everything from Billboard going young for their woman of the year, to Rick Ross going down, to Sonic Youth going their separate ways. There’s also a music video that’s going to make you cry, and since it’s Pop Shots you know everything is seasoned with a little bit of attitude.

* Billboard has a new woman of the year - Taylor Swift. She is the youngest artist to receive the honor as Billboard begins to stretch the definition of “woman.” Don’t get me wrong, we love Taylor Swift over here at Pop Shots, she’s America’s perfect little sister, but the emphasis should be on “little.” With this year’s woman of the year being only 21 years old I can only imagine who will be up for the award ten years from now. Pop Shots’ prediction - just picture the Miss Bayside pageant on Saved by the Bell that also included Slater and Screech.

* Rick Ross, who most people wouldn’t want to be stuck sitting next to on a flight because he’s the size of a small zeppelin, gave passengers another reason to want to switch their seat - he took down not one, but TWO flights on Friday when he suffered seizures that required immediate medical attention. Of course, if this story is anything like the those from his rap career we’ll eventually find out the seizures happened to another passenger, but he thought the story was so good he wanted to take it for his own.

* The X-Factor lived up to the X in its name this past week when L.A. Reid had Rihanna mentoring contestants on the singing competition show. The auto-tuned princess who is more known for dressing provocatively and rubbing her crotch during every performance than singing doesn’t exactly seem like a great prospective mentor, but you know what Pink said “L.A. told me, you’ll be a pop star / all you have to change, is everything you are.”

* Apparently the old song is wrong, breaking up looks pretty easy to do. Just look at Sonic Youth. The band’s co-founders, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon are separating after 27 years of marriage and 31 years of making music together. This comes on the heels of the breakup of R.E.M., which happened just a few weeks ago. In a related story, that sound you just heard was of every college radio station music director from the 1980s jumping off of a bridge.

* Artists are known for making some strange requests when they go out on tour. Some want to eat specific foods, drink specific drinks, or smell specific scents. Janet Jackson doesn’t want to hear specific things - jokes about her or her family. For some God unknown reason Jackson is touring with comedians, and part of her contract states those comedians can’t make mention of the Jackson family. Bear in mind Jackson is making somewhere in their neighborhood of half a million dollars per show while America is having nationwide protests regarding wealth distribution (perhaps the joke’s on the paying public), and she once let the kid from N*Sync pop her boob out in front of a national TV audience at the Super Bowl. Here’s an idea, if you don’t want comedians to make jokes about you, don’t do things that make you a punchline. And with that I just sacrificed my chance to open for Janet. I’m sure she won’t miss me much.

* If you took everything that was cliched about boy bands in the 90s and mixed it with a Jersey Shore amount of bronzer and hair gel, and a current internet craze, you’d get Heart 2 Heart’s “Facebook Official.” At first I thought this was a parody, but it turns out it’s real, and they’re being mentored by N*Sync alum Lance Bass (two N*Sync mentions in this week’s Pop Shots? What year is this?). I’m not sure what’s worse, the “rap” that imitates the flow of the The Lonely Island’s “Jizz In My Pants,” which was a parody, or the fact that somewhere there’s a 14 year old thinking posting this on his girlfriend’s Facebook wall is a good way to show he likes her.


And with that, my time is up for the week, but I'll be back next week with more shots on all things pop.