NBC’s Community has rapidly become one of my very favorite TV shows — right when the network decided to shelve it indefinitely.
Community is ostensibly about a group of seven wacky community college students in a study group, but it’s really a vehicle for brilliant pop culture satire. The show has lovingly parodied everything from Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction to My Dinner With Andre and the films of Charlie Kaufman.
When Beyoncé performed at MTV’s 2011 Video Music Awards shortly after announcing that she was pregnant, she turned a rousing R&B rave-up into the world’s biggest baby shower.
Watching her beam about the “love inside her” and command the stage with even more energy and star power than usual, then unbutton her jacket and run her hand over her baby bump with a wide smile… I wanted to strangle Jay-Z.
Today is my wife’s birthday, so I’m celebrating the occasion by featuring an artist she has recently discovered.
It’s rare that my wife seeks out music on her own… she generally listens to the same albums (or singles, more often) that she has listened to for years. Or she’ll pick up on something I’ve been listening to and adopt it as her own (Miranda Lambert, for example).
After tuning into my first televised musical competition last Spring with The Voice, I signed on for my second this Fall with The Sing-Off.
In an era of Auto-Tune and processed pop stars, there is something very refreshing about a competition that features nothing but the human voice. And the a capella groups featured on this show do jaw-dropping things with those voices.
Next week I will start counting down my top ten songs of 2011, focusing not necessarily on hot singles or songs that captured the zeitgeist this year but simply the songs that affected me the most for one reason or another.
First, though, I will spend a week on several odds and ends that didn’t make the countdown but made my musical year brighter each in their own way.
