The End of the Year

by Will 'The Cranky Music Man' Golightly

The end of the year has finally arrived, and it’s not a moment too soon. It’s always around Thanksgiving that I start to get that feeling, and by Christmas I can no longer ignore it. The new year is almost here! No more meaningless college football, no more heartwarming holiday episodes of my television shows. And most of all, no more "Year in Review" crap. I was here all twelve months; I don’t need everyone reminding me that U2 are back, Mariah Carey is crazy, and we’re at war.

And as if being loony wasn’t bad enough for Mariah, her record label is trying to get rid of her. She was on EMI’s Virgin Records. This isn’t that strange on the surface, since labels drop bands all the time. But it’s very rare for a star as big as Mariah to get the heave-ho. Here are some numbers for you: The deal was for four or five albums. Carey was to receive a $20 million advance PER ALBUM. She was promised $6 million for videos and $1.5 million for the promotion of four singles PER ALBUM. It was a contract unlike any other.

So Mariah’s first album under her new contract was released on Tuesday, September 11^th. The accompanying movie grossed a little over $4 million, which ain’t gonna get the job done. The album didn’t do much better. All this would probably have been chalked up to bad luck, BUT… the little songbird lost her marbles in public. Whatever happened to good old "exhaustion"? Don’t the richies have people surrounding them to keep stuff like this from happening in front of the great unwashed? EMI-Virgin have had enough, and they’re offering to pay Mariah one large settlement to buy out the rest of her contract. Trying to imagine how much money that check will be for makes my head hurt.

In other news, Sonicnet.com tells me that a 17-year-old lad was arrested for possessing a marijuana pipe. I don’t know why he would have one of those, but the judge presiding over the trial decided to get a little creative with the sentencing: The kid has to listen to Afroman’s "Because I Got High" and write a report about it. This is not a joke. He was also found with a bottle of whiskey and several bottles of beer, but he doesn’t have to listen to George Thorogood’s "One Boubon, One Scoth, One Beer." Well, that would probably be cruel and unusual. Besides, I bet that "marijuana pipe" is just an elaborate bottle opener. Kids love little trinkets like that.

The strangest thing I’ve heard recently concerns "The Queen of the Damned," an upcoming movie based on Anne Rice’s goofy vampire books. Aaliyah played the role of, you guessed it, a vampire. They’re not having her brought in for some post-production, however. Who needs special effects when the star is already dead? Instead, they needed to overdub some of her lines. So in a couple scenes of the movie, who’s voice are all those goth kids and misunderstood misfits gonna hear? Her brother’s, of course. Even more ridiculous is the fact that Korn’s Jonathon Davis wrote and recorded several songs for the album. But you won’t be hearing him, because his record label won’t let his voice appear in the movie. They own his voice, you see. So they’ve got some guy pretending to be him singing on those songs. All this trouble for the sequel to "Interview with a Vampire"? I wonder if "Weekend at Bernie’s 2" was this much work.