Trace("Hello World");

today is my 23rd birthday. yesterday marked the deaths of 2 pop culture icons. iran is in uproar. and north korea is suppose to destroy hawaii in the coming week. 

23 is one of those weird years in your life where you finally define the person that you were and also who you're becoming. its a pivotal moment where everything you thought you knew about life suddenly comes shattering down. 

i just finished the book "Killing Yourself to Live" by Chuck Klosterman. it's about his road trip journey across america where he went to all of these places famous rock musicians died. he spent 2 and half weeks trying to find the meaning of death and what it means to the music industry. basically....is there some kind of relationship between fame and tragedy?

now being in the middle of this kind of read - the death of michael jackson came as a sort of ironic, surreal experience to me. here i am reading this book about all of these famous icons of music who died....and i get a text message telling me that the king of pop just died too. this is the start of my 23 year on this earth. maybe by 24 i will understand...

i was 8 years old when kurt cobain died. and i had no idea who tupak or christopher wallace were when they were killed. aaliyah was unfortunate, but this is the first [definitive] death of a music legend that i have lived coherently through. it really makes you wonder about fame and whether or not it is some kind of horrible curse. 

michael jackson's death is something i do have emotions about. to say i grew up on michael jackson would be like saying that i was an american at some point in the past 40 years....so i don't want to do that, but his influence on my life was more than a collection of catchy songs.

my father is and will always be a motown fan. to him anything made by anyone white and after the 1960's doesn't even exist. so i had a healthy dose of jackson 5 growing up. i could sing all the songs by the time i was probably 10. throughout my teen years (i think i though it was still the 80s) the solo works of michael jackson became permanent fixtures in the back of my brain. i think i was one of the few people in the world to buy Invincible and love it. I taped his 30th anniversary special for him and not usher.....i promise.

His death is sad to me. not because he won't ever make music again....because his music will live forever. and not because he died before his time....even though he did. but his death is proof that i am getting old. and what the most disturbing thing i'm seeing is...how the older we get the more immune to death we become. as long as it's not us - it becomes just another event on a person's timeline. we will all become history eventually. 

much love to farrah fawcett too who was a truly remarkable person too...both professionally and personally.  

i just wanted to take a few minutes to promote 2 awesome albums....they are on completely different sides of the music spectrum BUT both reflect the talent of the hardworking musicians that made them. Normally I wouldn't dare group Mandy Moore with Flo Rida, but in this case it seems fitting. Each of these albums are the newest from each of these well-known artists, but as I listen to them more and more i know that they are also the most important. Important because they are representing the roots of where each of their [respective] hearts in music really lie....

Mandy Moore stepped up to the alter with Ryan Adams this year and not only married him, but also married some of his musical tastes. She dropped her label and is now opting for a smaller, more "indie focused" label called Storefront. I was skeptical after her less-than-impressive 2007 folk switch entitled "Wild Hope", but as she continues proves to be the smartest and most well-adjusted out of her pop princess peers.....her new album "Amanda Leigh" is soild. While "Wild Hope" felt more like an uneasy attempt to hide her past, this album is all her. She's back to her pop roots without sugarcoating the music to the point where radio with eat it up with milk. It's folk-y and wonderful.

SONG HIGHLIGHTS: Break Your Heart Any Day of the Week, Pocket Phliospher, Fern Dell

Flo Rida.....i like to still call him Flo Rider, but whatever......is probably not the person you'd expect me to promote...the fact is...its a rare day when i can listen to a rap or hip/hop album through in its entirety (unless its eminem or wyclef). This one has been on constant rotation.

While i enjoy "Right Round" and "Sugar" as much as the next girl at the club - musically they were nothing special. He sampled the perfect songs no doubt, but it wasn't anything T-Pain couldn't do. I downloaded the whole cd....well....just because i could. Then thanks to the shuffle setting on my iPod the song "Rewind" came on. It's a slower song with a solid beat and a killer chorus by Wyclef (ha of course), but i immediatley listened to this song 3 times before i moved on. It was amazing. Then i listened to the whole album and found that [in fact] about 80 percent of the album was amazing and the other 20 percent was forgivable because it had suffered the death of mainstream radio. We have all come to know Flo Rida as just another rapper who sings about dancing with girls and being the best, but he is much more than that as his album R.O.O.T.S. will show.

Song Highlights: Mind On My Money, Rewind, Roots