Aretha Franklin: Celebs Rumors

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variety.com
‘Wham!’ Review: Chris Smith’s Netflix Doc Is an Irresistible Pop Nostalgia Trip, but It’s Also a Serious Portrait of George Michael’s Ambition
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Unabashed pop groups with fervid teenage followings tend to get trivialized, at least in the media. They’re dismissed as being slick and calculated and superficial. But there’s a story in “Wham!,” the new Netflix documentary about the quintessential pop duo of the 1980s, that testifies to what a chancy and audacious artist George Michael was even back in his teen-idol days. The year is 1983. Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, coming off their first album, “Fantastic” (which had a few hits, though none of them were great), have established Wham! as an effective lightweight pop machine, with its two young stars prancing around the stage in sexy sportswear. The time has come to record “Careless Whisper,” a song they’ve had in their back pocket for several years (we hear the super-early demo version of it that they recorded in 1981 in Ridgeley’s living room on a TEAC 4-track Portastudio). Michael has become enough of a powerhouse to hook up with Jerry Wexler, the legendary producer of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. He heads down to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio to record the track, with Wexler producing. What more could a 20-year-old budding pop star want?
nypost.com
How Madonna changed pop music with her self-titled debut album 40 years ago
Madonna took off into the stratosphere with “Lucky Star” and other hits from her self-titled debut album — released 40 years ago on July 27, 1983 — the then-24-year-old hopeful had received some clairvoyant reinforcement regarding her future as the Queen of Pop.“She had actually gone to a psychic, and she told me, ‘Just watch what’s gonna happen,’” Paul Pesco — who played guitar on both “Lucky Star” and “Burning Up”  — told The Post.“She told me this in rehearsals one day, and it was like the equivalent of Bette Davis saying, ‘Fasten your seatbelts …’ I mean, she kind of knew it.”That would give prophetic meaning to “I Know It” — one of five songs that a young Madonna Louise Ciccone of Michigan wrote by herself for an eight-track classic that would get generations of future dance-pop divas into the groove. Possessing neither the gospel grandeur of an Aretha Franklin or the folky feels of a Joni Mitchell, Madonna — who was set to commemorate the 40th anniversary of her debut with her “Celebration” tour launching on July 15 until the Material Girl, 64, was sidelined by a serious bacterial infection two weeks ago — made her own path, as the mother of a pop reinvention.After the so-called death of disco as the ’70s twirled to an end, Madonna reclaimed the dance floor in a whole new way.“We really felt that if we were to combine disco and R&B and new wave, we would have something really cool,” said Michael Rosenblatt, Madonna’s original A&R man at Sire Records.
DMCA