Apparently, “auto-tune” is this week’s magic word on The Critical Condition. Yesterday, I dropped the auto-tuned news. Today, I’m writing about Jay-Z’s new single, “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)”

And you know the rule for the magic word…

Me: Auto-tune.
You: AAAAAAAAH!

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this song for several days. In case you don’t know Jay-Z’s rebuke of auto-tuned music, you can hear and discuss it after the jump…

[Read more →]

Hey everyone,

Tonight, I had a great time as a guest commentator on True Blood in Dallas, a live internet radio show dedicated to all things True Blood. Dallas, the host, asked me about everything from my take on the series to how I started writing for the Huffington Post.

To check it out–or listen it out—just go here.

Six kinds of love to Roommate Joe for calling my attention to the latest installment of the Auto-Tune News, a regular series of wicked awesome videos that turn nightly news broadcasts into auto-tuned jams worthy of T-Pain and Lady GaGa.

The weirdest thing about these, and about this installment especially, is that they’re appealing as songs. They’re at least as musical as “Boom Boom Pow,” and they teach me more about what’s going on in the world.

Update: Apparently, Perez Hilton did call the cops before he started Tweeting. Still, was Tweeting necessary?

If you had just been the victim of a crime, would you call the police before or after you Twittered about it? And if someone had accused you of a crime—of a crime that could result in jail time—would you respond via your attorney or via internet video?

I ask because Perez Hilton claims he was assaulted by will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas, and will.i.am denies it… and both of them have taken to the internet to hash it out.

After allegedly being assaulted at an after-party in Canada, Hilton tweeted to his readers to call the cops. Since then, will.i.am has posted multiple videos claiming innocence.

And look… if I had just been attacked by someone famous, I might feel the impulse to instantly to make it public, as a way of getting revenge via bad publicity. And as Chris Brown and others have shown, for celebs accused of something illegal, homemade “innocence videos” are becoming this year’s defensive talk show tour.

Furthermore, I know this incident is just the latest in a century-long string of “court of public opinion” flare-ups.

And yet despite all the precedent, this is still unsettling.

For one thing, if a purported victim asks his Twitter followers to call the cops for him, isn’t it harder to take his assault claim seriously? No matter what happened, Hilton has already worked the incident to his own advantage, which suggests he’s more interested in getting attention than telling the truth.

And as for will.i.am… why should he lower himself to Hilton’s level of exploitation? If the charges are serious, then they need to be addressed through proper legal channels. If they aren’t, then they shouldn’t be honored with quickie online videos. 

I don’t have all the facts. I wasn’t there. But based on what’s being presented about this alleged kerfuffle, it seems like two people who are desperate for publicity have tacitly agreed to turn the idea of assault into a viral internet sensation. Once again, real crime has been transformed into cheap entertainment. 

What do you guys think?  

(photo via Towleroad)

Welcome to Sucker Punch, the only blog post that ranks the gaudiest moments on this week’s episode of “True Blood.” Once again, things are getting freaky in Bon Temps, and if you want to know who got the freakiest, just read my breakdown of the episode at The Huffington Post. 

 

By Holly Cara Price

This week, the recent War of the Words between Sarah Palin and David Letterman is the subject of my ire. I mean, seriously, Sarah! As far as I’m concerned, as to the matter of her family being fair game for pundits and late night talk show hosts, the Thrilla from Wasilla gave up all rights to the universe for all time when she stepped out into the national spotlight at last year’s Republic National Convention.  

I’m sure you’ll recall that night when we first saw Alaska’s Chief Executive on the RNC stage. She was all tricked out in her nicey-nice vice-president-elect outfit and her fire engine red high heels (see above), with cute husband and family in tow. Yes, family in tow, in their entirety – including unmarried, pregnant teenage daughter Bristol and infant son Trig, a Down Syndrome baby.  

To my mind, the moment Palin dragged that baby out into the bright lights and loud noises and germfest free-for-all of the RNC—making him a political football that she could parlay in her so-called crusade for special needs children—all bets were off. If he had been a healthy baby boy, then he would have been sleeping in the hotel with a babysitter watching over him, not getting paraded in front of the world. N’est-ce pas? 
 
To recap: two weeks ago, Letterman cracked a joke about Palin attending a baseball game. “One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game: During the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” The shitstorm began shortly thereafter, as the Palinator accused Letterman of promoting the rape of underage girls. He had, of course, been referring to Bristol, the unwed young mother, now of legal age. But Palin had been at the game with her younger daughter, Willow, now 14, so she chose to believe Letterman was referring to Willow in his joke. 

Media madness ensued. Showbiz Tonight called it the Sarah Palin-David Letterman Smackdown. Even the National Organization for Women backed Palin in her outrage, which is pretty amazing considering she is the opposite of everything they stand for. And Letterman apologized on-air. Not once. Twice. There was even a “Fire David Letterman” rally outside his studio at the Ed Sullivan Theatre. Fully forty people showed up. 

The last time I checked, there was a First Amendment that guarantees our rights to freedom of speech, and that seems to cover nutjobs like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly (who have been accused of everything from encouraging people to vote across party lines to sway elections in their favor, to encouraging right-wing violent actions like the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller). But somehow, Sarah Palin believes it does not cover late night talk show hosts like David Letterman, and she’s willing to try to raise a national debate about how he hates women and young girls. 

The Price Point’s final word on the matter: Pot. Calls. Kettle. Black.

One of my most vivid moviegoing memories comes from seeing Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. It was 1991. I was 12. I was at the movie with my dad and my uncle, and we were all enjoying the swashbuckling good times. Apparently, though, the rest of the audience was enjoying them even more than we were, because when the film ended, a large portion of the crowd burst into applause.

Sidebar: Isn’t it strange to remember that Kevin Costner was once the kind of movie star who could get people not only to see his pictures, but also to applaud when they were over? Oh Ozymandias! Your once-mighty visage is now buried in the sand!

But I digress. My point is not that glory fades. My point is that way back in 1991, I was shocked that folks were applauding for artists who couldn’t possibly hear them. As a twelve year-old, I judged those clappers, and I judged them hard.

It wasn’t until I saw the Dreamgirls movie in 2006 that I understood their response. When Jennifer Hudson finished singing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” it didn’t matter  that I was in a movie theater in a Michigan shopping mall, or that J-Hud was probably thousands of miles away. Her performance moved me so much that I had to express myself. So I clapped for the woman on screen.

We applaud so much in Western culture that we can forget why it’s a meaningful act. When we do it sincerely, we’re not just telling artists (or athletes or politicians) that we appreciate them. Our applause is not just about them. It’s also about us… about the rush we feel when we encounter something exceptional. A truly exhilarating experience builds up in us like pressure, and that energy demands to be pushed forward and shared with those around us. 

I’m describing a religious experience, you know? If we get moved in church, we can shout or raise our hands or speak in tongues. If we get moved in a secular space, at the altar of an artwork, we can cry or laugh… or we can applaud. We can pound our hands together until the wildness in our bodies has calmed.

As I’m describing it, I’m aware of how few experiences have demanded this applause, this true applause from me. Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls. Hairspray  and Mary Stuart and August: Osage County on Broadway. The reunion episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, when RuPaul goes kabuki on those bitches and tells them to love themselves more.

For me, those were big experiences. (Yes, including the Drag Race reunion.) They manifested passions I often feel but can rarely express. I was grateful to Jennifer Hudson for belting out her wild heartbreak. I was grateful to RuPaul for defending self-respect with so much fury. I was grateful to all those artists for allowing me to witness a major emotion… to see it in front of me and so comprehend it more fully than I can when it’s swirling around in my chest.

True, I didn’t feel that passion during Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but now I respect the people who did.

For over a decade, a lot of country music has been indistinguishable from rock and pop, but as discombobulating as it can be, the genre splicing produces a lot of fun songs. 

Here are some country tunes that I’m digging right now, though I wouldn’t blame you if you thought I was teasing about the radio stations that are playing them…

[Read more →]

It’s the rare plot description that makes me laugh with simultaneous joy and disbelief, but damn if that wasn’t my response to this summary of Lifetime Movie Network”s Killer Hair, which premieres on Sunday at 8:00 PM:

When an up-and-coming stylist is found dead with a drastic haircut, a friend must search for the truth behind her mysterious passing.

You see, it’s not just that the stylist is dead. It’s that she’s dead with a drastic haircut. Murdered is one thing. Murdered and ugly is unforgivable.

I’m anxious to know what qualifies as a “drastic haircut.”  Did someone give this poor corpse the Vanilla Ice dye-and-fade?

The camp potential in this movie is compounded by the fact that Killer Hair is but one part of novelist Ellen Byerrum’s Crime of Fashion series.  Lifetime already has Hostile Makeover in production, and lord knows I’m interested to see Raiders of the Lost Corset. Just think: We could be receiving an entire series of deliciously disastrous classics!

Or maybe we’ll just be enjoying some legitimately entertaining movies. After all, Entertainment Weekly gave KH a good review. I can’t really fathom how that could be merited, but now I’m doubly guaranteed to tune in.

If you find me on Monday morning with a drastic haircut, please send the police.

Look: I’ll admit that I’m feeling touchy about America’s cultural bias against women right now. In Monday’s New York Times, I read that some Asian-American families are actively choosing to have boys instead of girls, and then just a few pages later, I read that girls are still notoriously underrepresented in school sports. Add the impact of Linda Holmes’ excellent recent essay about the lack of female characters in Pixar films, and you can see why Hallmark’s new Father’s Day spot is pushing me over the edge.

I mean, I know that misogyny and bias swirl around us all the time, and that they were just as pervasive two weeks or two centuries ago as they were this morning, but this is the morning I hit my limit. This is the morning when this commercial, forwarded to me by recent guest critic Laura McMaster, landed like a bamboo shoot under my fingernail:

My reaction follows…
[Read more →]