Live Music: Brit Awards '08 Recap

Being from America and all, I didn't see the Brit awards last night, but I absorbed all the Youtubes from the show, and I'm officially ready to talk about them. This is gonna take a while, so let's hurry up and get started:

Kaiser Chiefs. "Ruby". It's fine. I like them, but to completely honest, I think they need to stretch their boundaries a little more. They're starting to play it way too safe.



Rihanna... FEATURING THE KLAXONS! The Klaxons are 98% of the reason why I care about this video, and they delivered. The performance plays like a really surreal mashup of "Umbrella" and the "Golden Skans" video, with the lasers and all. They play really well together, and the Klaxon's arrangement of the song makes it feel like a really cool studio remix. I just wish Rihanna had enough of a voice to really belt out the song.



Amy Winehouse. "Love Is A Losing Game". Kinda a letdown-- some of her best live performances have been of this song, but she just didn't bring it for this. She sounds nervous as hell the whole time. It'll be interesting to see how much her live performances improve after she's done rehabbing.



Second-best performance of the night: Mika. I'm not gonna lie, I didn't really like the way this performance of "Love Today" started, but everything was forgiven as soon as Beth Ditto popped onto the stage OUT OF NOWHERE. Together, the two of them put on probably the absolute best rendition of "Standing In The Way of Control" that I've ever seen. Really, it even kicks the ass of the original studio version.

Mika [live at The Brit awards 2008]
Uploaded by cocomoor

And for the best night, Mark Ronson featuring Adele AND Daniel Merriweather AND Amy Winehouse. Dan and Amy nicely perform their usual Ronson covers, but Adele's the real highlight here. The idea to have Adele do the missing vocals for Ronson's cover of "God Put A Smile On Your Face" was brilliant, and I actually clapped a little when I realized what was happening.

Live Music: West, Winehouse, Keys, and Underwood @ the Grammys

First of all: Yayz to Amy Winehouse for taking home the most-deserved 5-win haul since Alicia Keys. Now let's get to the important part: the live performances.

I don't really care about country. Actually, I'm pretty sure we have post labels for every mainstream genre except country. But even I can't deny how amazing Carrie Underwood performed last night. I don't care if country's not your thing, you WILL cheer on the inside when she says "The next time he CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEATS... you know it won't be on me..."


Online Videos by Veoh.com

Amy Winehouse took home some much-deserved awards, but her performance was really disappointing. It was probably the most talked-about thing of the night though, so we're posting it so you can judge for yourself if you missed it last night:

Amy Winehouse 2008 Grammys Rehab
Uploaded by guitarvillian

Kanye West's performances completely owned, and we tried to post "Stronger", but for whatever reason the videos keep getting taken down from streaming video sites for Copyright claims. We'll post a working link as soon as one comes in.

And now, for the best performance of the night, at least in our opinion: Alicia Keys (with some help from John Mayer), singing the hell out of "No One". "Back to Black" was a better album than "As I Am", but Alicia Keys has always been able to do something that Winehouse probably will never be able to: Keys performs so much better live than she does on her album. She really pumped some new life into this song, and gave it an epic sound that I never heard in the original.

Alicia Keys et John Mayer - No one
Uploaded by Rubyowen

Covers: Kaiser Chiefs, Dan Merriweather, Stephanie Kennedy cover Klaxons

The Klaxons' "Golden Skans" was one of last years most addictive singles that too many people haven't heard of. A ton of people have covered it recently, so here's a best-of post to brief you on the highlights.

I know this is my second post in a row to feature both Daniel Merriweather and Mark Ronson, but oh well. It's a damn good cover. I actually have no idea where this came from, all I know is that it showed up on iMeem somehow. Their version is a little more understated, a little more soulful, and of course, includes Ronson's signature trumpets.



Next up is Kaiser Chiefs, who bring the expected acoustic-indie dynamic to the song when they covered it on Radio One.



Finally, we got Stephanie Kennedy, an indie-acoustic performer from the UK, we slows the song down to give it a down-tempo-jazz feel that works better than expected.

Covers: NEW AND IMPROVED Daniel Merriweather White Stripes cover

OK, so that little acoustic cover that Mark Ronson and Dan Merriweather did of "You Don't Know What Love Is" (originally by the White Stripes) was more than just a spur-of-the-moment whim on Mark's radio show. We posted the audio from it, and we still get more search hits from that post than anything else we've written about. A full-scale studio version of the song is now in the works, and the official demo track was played on Mark's show a couple weeks ago. I have some issues with it, but I'll save final judgements for when the final track surfaces. So far, I'm gonna say that it has a lot of promise. I heard the demo track of the Winehouse cover of "Valerie" on Amy's last B-Sides album, and it was several shades weaker than the borderline-classic final product, which gives me hope that this can grow into a kickass single later this year.

Live Music: Adele

We promised we'd deliver a full stream of Adele's Mark Ronson collab "Cold Shoulder", and we sorta came through. Here's a fantastic live performance of the song on Mark's Electric Proms '07 event (by the way, there a thousand vids from that concert, and they're fantastic, and we'll be posting highlights from it in the future). It's not quite the same as the studio performance, but she's such a strong live performer that it's almost as perfect as the original. She completely deserves all the "Next big thing in '08" hype that she gets.

Acoustic Covers: Adele does The Strokes

Here's yet another awesome cover performed on BBC's Radio 1. If you follow Mark Ronson's radio show, an up-and-coming musician named Adele has probably been on your radar for a while now. If you haven't heard of her, most people compare her to Amy Winehouse. To me, she sounds exactly halfway between Winehouse and Sia (both of whom have shown up on this blog multiple times). God bless whoever Youtubed this cover yesterday, because it's so loveable. Adele did an acoustic-jazz-like cover of "Last Nite" by The Strokes, and shows off the ridiculous amount of charisma she has. Her Ronson collaboration, called "Cold Shoulder" is also really cool, and if you like this, I really recommend seeking out the bootleg. I'll post an audio stream as soon as I get the chance.

Remixes: Amy Winehouse vs 50 Cent

This right here is a perfect example of what a good rap/non-rap mashup should sound like. It's an instrumental loop from "You Know I'm No Good" underneath the vocals of "I Get Money", and it works extremely well. I never liked most of 50 Cent's work, but after hearing this I think it's because he settles for really dull beats most of the time ("Ayo Technology" being the exception to the rule-- thank you, Timbaland). But here, "I Get Money" really comes alive thanks to Mark Ronson's ridiculously dynamic instrumental. Anyway, this mashup comes with a cool video to stare at. Enjoy.

Mark Ronson DJed TomKat's wedding.

Seriously. Here's a link to a video where he talks about what an awful dancer Tom Cruise is. Also, he makes jokes about Amy Winehouse not showing up for the shooting of the "Valerie" video, so there's clearly no bad blood between them. Good thing, because that's the best producer-singer match since Butch Vig and Shirley Manson.

Go here for the video

A Day in the Life of Mark Ronson

Awesome 4 minute documentary-style clip of Mark Ronson in action, talking about the discovery of Daniel Merriweather, "Version", and his radio show. Plus, you get to see what a taping of East Village Radio looks like. The poster disabled embedding, so you'll have to go here to get it:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=IRrOcUctR98

Music videos: Mark Ronson (sorta) featuring Amy Winehouse

You may or may not have heard the story behind the falling out between Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson-- the short version is that she ditched the shooting of the "Valerie" video to go on vacation or for something pointless like that. Well, this is the result. Instead of Amy singing in the video, we see a look-alike and a few other girls lip-syncing the track. It's a cool-looking video, but I was distracted by thinking about how it would have been different if Amy got her shit together in time for shooting the video. Oh well.

By the way, I will never figure out how MTV got the awesomeness of Mark Ronson to show up to that VMAs shitfest. He was one of the few good qualities of the show.

Random Track of the Day: W.A.L.E.D.A.N.C.E.

"D.A.N.C.E." always annoyed the crap out of me, but this Wale song makes me not mind it. "W.A.L.E.D.A.N.C.E." was easily my favorite song on the Wale mixtape (If you haven't heard it, Google it, because it's brilliant). The awesome lyrics (Was I the only one a little surprised when he called out the Lindsey Lohan-Samantha Ronson situation?) somehow manages to salvage a sample from a song that I hate so much.

Covers: Daniel Merriweather covers The White Stripes

You've already heard Daniel Merriweather covering The Smiths on Mark Ronson's new album "Version", and now he's covered The White Stripes. Daniel was a guest on Ronson's show Authentic Shit a few weeks ago and performed an acoustic cover of the Stripes' "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)", a track from "Icky Thump". His cover is a very stripped-down acoustic R&B, which works really well with the song. Jack and Meg would be proud. Background info: Mark Ronson is playing the guitar in this song.