Written by Kyle Slagley
Yesterday
the world lost one of the most powerful and astute voices in
literature. Poet, singer, dancer, and activist Maya Angelou passed away
in her North Carolina home at age 86.
Many people are familiar
with Angelou at least by name, if not necessarily by having read her work. She
is known as a writer whose ability to speak to readers on a deep and personal
level is uncanny nearly to the point of being unsettling. Angelou’s struggles
as a child in the Jim Crow south would shape her writing in later years. Her
signature memoir I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings gave insight to her struggles, having worked as a cook,
nightclub dancer, prostitute, and even for the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference.
A spokesperson for women
and minority rights, Angelou’s work speaks for any group who has ever faced
attempts at being silenced. Perhaps that is because Angelou herself took years
to discover her own voice—literally. When she was 8 years old, her mother’s
boyfriend assaulted her. When she told her brother what happened, her attacker
was convicted but jailed for only one day. Four days after he was released from
jail, he was found murdered. When Angelou found out, she didn’t speak again for
six years, believing that her voice had killed the man.
Fortunately for the
world, Angelou found her voice and, despite the struggles she endured through
the years, used her voice to speak love, acceptance, and peace to anyone who
would listen, as evidenced by the fact that her words are seen in books, on
billboards, in commercials, and on social media on a daily basis. Her awards,
honorary titles, medals, and commendations are too numerous to name here, but I
would invite you to visit her Wikipedia page for more information.
Angelou passed away at
her home in Winston-Salem, NC. Fittingly, her final tweet read:
"Preacher, Don't Send Me"
by Maya Angelou
Preacher, don't send me
when I die
to some big ghetto
in the sky
where rats eat cats
of the leopard type
and Sunday brunch
is grits and tripe.
I"ve known those rats
I've seen them kill
and grits I've had
would make a hill,
or maybe a mountain,
so what I need
from you on sunday
is a different creed.
Preacher, please don't
promise me
streets of gold
and milk for free.
I stopped all milk
at four years old
and once I'm dead
I won't need gold.
I'd call a place
pure paradise
where families are loyal
and strangers are nice,
where the music is jazz
and the season is fall.
Promise me that
or nothing at all.
From The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou
published 1994 by Random House
Written by Jon Williams
Do you need
a laugh? Of course you do—who doesn’t? Well, you’re in luck, as tomorrow night
marks the Season 8 premiere of Last Comic
Standing on NBC. The reality series pits a number of up-and-coming standup
comedians against each other in challenges and head-to-head competition to see
who is the funniest of them all. This will be the show’s first season since
2010.
Last Comic Standing was cancelled after
the third season, but came back after a one-year hiatus for a fourth in 2006.
That year Josh
Blue, one of the most memorable contestants due to his cerebral palsy, beat
out a field that included Gabriel
Iglesias, among others. The fifth season was hosted by Bill
Bellamy and featured a fantastic cast that included international comics
for the first time. Jon
Reep took out Lavell
Crawford for the win; other notable names from that season include Doug
Benson and Amy
Schumer, currently starring in the hilarious Comedy Central show Inside Amy Schumer, not to mention Gerry Dee of the very popular Mr. D on CBC.
So give your
patrons a laugh! Check out the comedy specials above, or SmartBrowse any of
these names for even more standup specials, CDs, movies, and audiobooks from
these very funny performers.
Written by Jon Williams
Last Friday,
legendary pop-rocker Billy Joel turned 65 years old. Although the Grammy Award
winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer hasn’t put out an album of original pop
material in over twenty years, he remains a popular draw all around the world
as a concert entertainer.
Joel got an
early start in the music business, and his first album, Cold
Spring Harbor, was released in 1971. However, Joel was unhappy with its
production, and album sales languished. (The album has since been remastered,
and the production mistakes fixed.) While he tried to get out of his recording
contract so he could sign with another label, he went incognito, taking a job
playing at a piano bar in Los Angeles. He used his experiences there as the
inspiration for the song “Piano Man,” a song that would become his first hit
and his signature tune.
He was
successful in switching labels, signing with Columbia Records, and his second
album, Piano
Man (bearing the eponymous single), was released in 1973. He followed
it up the next year with Streetlife
Serenade, and in 1976 with Turnstiles.
Although these three albums contained notable Joel tracks like “Captain Jack,” “The
Entertainer,” and “New York State of Mind,” they did not initially reach the
level of commercial success Joel would come to enjoy (although they were all
eventually certified platinum by the RIAA, Piano
Man four times over).
That success
came with 1977’s The
Stranger. Produced by Phil Ramone, the song jumped to #2 on the
Billboard chart (kept out of the top spot primarily by Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours),
and four of its nine songs charted as singles. It also earned Joel the first
two of his six Grammy Awards, Song and Record of the Year for the song “Just
the Way You Are.” In 1978, Joel released the album 52nd
Street. Propelled by hits like “My Life” and “Big Shot,” it became Joel’s
first #1 album, and also garnered him two more Grammy Awards (Best Pop Vocal
Performance and Album of the Year). Interestingly, in 1982, 52nd Street became the first album to be
released on the compact disc format.
The
partnership with Ramone was obviously working, and the pair would work together
on four more albums: 1980’s Glass
Houses, 1982’s The
Nylon Curtain, 1983’s An
Innocent Man, and 1986’s The
Bridge. They contained a string of hits, and all have been certified
multiplatinum. In October of 1986, after the release of The Bridge, Joel made a series of performances in the Soviet Union,
one of the first American rockers to do so. A recording of his Leningrad
performance was eventually released on CD as KOHUEPT
(Russian for “concert”); next week an expanded collection of his performances
comes out as A Matter of Trust, in a
standard 2-disc version (that includes KOHUEPT)
and a deluxe
edition that also includes a Blu-ray featuring concert footage and a
documentary on the trip.
In 1989,
Joel released the album Storm
Front, his first album to reach #1 since Glass Houses. It contained the smash-hit single “We Didn’t Start
the Fire” as well as the song “Shameless,” perhaps more popular as a hit for
country superstar Garth Brooks. It was followed in 1993 by River
of Dreams, which also reached #1, and is the last album Joel has
released.
Still, more
than twenty years later, Joel continues to sell out stadiums and arenas filled
with legions of fans who come to hear him perform his hits for hours. In
addition to touring, he also has a residency at Madison Square Garden in New
York City, performing one show there per month. So, despite such a length of
time with no new material, interest in Billy Joel’s music remains strong.
SmartBrowse his name on our website for all of these albums, as well as plenty
of compilation and live albums, concert and video collections, and the biography
from Fred Schruers scheduled for release in November.
Written by Jon Williams
“It’s
morphin’ time!” Today Lionsgate and Saban Entertainment announced that they
would be producing a feature film that will bring the Power Rangers back to the
big screen.
The series
revolves around a group of teenagers invested with the ability to morph into a
team with special skills and powers that must use said ability to fight off the
forces of aliens and other evildoers. Originally based on the Japanese series Super Sentai, the franchise kicked off
as the Mighty
Morphin Power Rangers television series in 1993. In one form or another
it has been in production ever since, entertaining legions of young adults and
spawning a popular line of toys and video games. The current incarnation,
starting in 2013, is known as Power
Rangers Megaforce.
This will
not be the Power Rangers’ first foray into theatres; two previous feature films
have been made. The
first, spurred by the popularity of the original television series, was
produced in 1995. In it, the Rangers must battle an ancient alien shape-shifter
brought to Earth by their archenemies. In the
second, the heroes must protect a wizard from an intergalactic pirate and a
demon. This movie, released in 1997, came on the heels of the Power
Rangers Zeo series and led into Power
Rangers Turbo.
Lionsgate
has had great success lately bringing to the screen action movies aimed
primarily at the young adult set, beginning with the first two
Hunger Games films and the adaptation
of the first
book from the Divergent
trilogy. Certainly they’ll carry that same energy into the upcoming Power Rangers film, which as of now does
not have a target release date. In the meantime, though, there is plenty of
material to keep young fans entertained. SmartBrowse ‘Power Rangers’ on our
website for the full line of TV series and movies in this popular franchise.
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