Chris Brown: Changed Man

Chris Brown song 'Changed Man': Is it an apology to Rihanna - and an attempt to get her back?
By Jim Farber

August 27th 2009

Is Chris Brown (pictured left) a changed man?

The R&B singer tries to make that argument in a new single, called, funnily enough, "Changed Man."

"Ima make it up to you / and show the world / I'm a changed man," Brown sings. "And everybody hates Chris / They can never understand / so can we love? / can we love again?"

One stanza would seem to have Brown imagining a possible future with ex-girlfriend Rihanna. "This ain't over / it ain't over," he sings. "I remember your touch / God I miss u so much / please believe me / Baby I'm sorry."

Then again, the 20-year-old star allows that simply apologizing won't make up for his past behavior. "Saying I'm sorry / doesn't make it all right," Brown sings. "I know / I know / But I believe that we can make it."

Brown's record company has not formally released "Changed Man" as a single. But the self-issued song has gone viral on line, and has also gotten some play on both satellite and terrestrial radio.

Silvio Pietroluongo, director of charts for Billboard, told AccessHollywood.com that a handful of radio stations across the country have been spinning the single. The most plays come out of Philadelphia's WPHI-FM 100.3 The Beat, which has spun the song 53 times in the last seven days, according to Pietroluongo.

Still, he believes that exposure in certain sectors wouldn't be enough to make a hit. "While 'Changed Man' does move from No. 99 to No. 64 on the latest Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, the chance of it becoming a high-charting hit is slim," he commented. "The amount of stations playing the song is minimal at the moment, and since the track was released without the involvement of Brown's record label and is not considered an 'official single,' sustained airplay growth is unlikely."

Opinions among fans of the song's sentiment have been mixed. One YouTube user wrote, "Beautiful apology … let the world know Chris … still got love for you." But another said, "Rihanna shouldn't go back to him."

The new single isn't Brown's only attempt to clean up his image. The R&B star has granted Larry King his first interview since his infamous February 8th arrest, and E.T. revealed some details about the sit-down, which will air Wednesday Sept. 2nd at 6 p.m. on CNN.

The R&B star spoke to King at CNN's studios in Los Angeles, joined by his mother Joyce Hawkins and his attorney Mark Geragos.

E.T. reports that Brown's mother got very emotional and started to cry during the interview.

Brown was officially sentenced for his assault on Rihanna on Tuesday afternoon.

You can listen to the song below

**Previous related blog entries:

Chris Brown Apologizes For Rihanna Assault In New Video

Chris Brown/Rihanna Re-enactment

LAPD Details Rihanna Beating

Chris Brown drama 2009

Whitney Houston on Oprah Season Premiere

Whitney Houston grants TV interview to Winfrey
(AP)

NEW YORK — After a long absence from music, Whitney Houston (Pictured left) is staging a much-hyped career comeback with an appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

Houston will be Winfrey's first guest as the talk-show queen launches her 24th season on Sept. 14. According to her Web site, Oprah.com, Winfrey calls Houston's appearance "the most anticipated music interview of the decade."

The 46-year-old superstar hasn't done a major TV interview since 2002, when she addressed questions about her drug use from ABC's Diane Sawyer. (Where she infamously stated "Crack is whack"-Cool Black)

Houston is releasing her new album, "I Look to You," on Aug. 31.

She is one of the best-selling artists of all time, but her career stalled as she battled drugs and endured a troubled marriage to Bobby Brown.

Sony Pictures to produce Michael Jackson film - Los Angeles Times

Sony Pictures to produce Michael Jackson film - Los Angeles Times

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Remembering John Hughes

‘Breakfast Club’ director John Hughes dies

Teen hits also included ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ and ‘Sixteen Candles’

The Associated Press

Thurs., Aug 6, 2009

NEW YORK - Writer-director John Hughes,(pictured left) Hollywood’s youth impresario of the 1980s and ’90s who captured the teen and preteen market with such favorites as “Home Alone,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” died Thursday, a spokeswoman said. He was 59.

Hughes died of a heart attack during a morning walk in Manhattan, Michelle Bega said. He was in New York to visit family.

Jake Bloom, Hughes’ longtime attorney, said he was “deeply saddened and in shock” to learn of the director’s death.

A native of Lansing, Mich., who later moved to suburban Chicago and set much of his work there, Hughes rose from ad writer to comedy writer to silver screen champ with his affectionate and idealized portraits of teens, whether the romantic and sexual insecurity of “Sixteen Candles,” or the J.D. Salinger-esque rebellion against conformity in “The Breakfast Club.”

Hughes’ ensemble comedies helped make stars out of Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy and many other young performers. He also scripted the phenomenally popular “Home Alone,” which made little-known Macaulay Culkin a sensation as the 8-year-old accidentally abandoned by his vacationing family, and wrote or directed such hits as “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” “Pretty in Pink,” “Planes, Trains & Automobiles” and “Uncle Buck.”

“I was a fan of both his work and a fan of him as a person,” Culkin said. “The world has lost not only a quintessential filmmaker whose influence will be felt for generations, but a great and decent man.”

Devin Ratray, best known for playing Culkin’s older brother Buzz McCallister in the “Home Alone” films, said he remained close to Hughes over the years.

“He changed my life forever,” Ratray said. “Nineteen years later, people from all over the world contact me telling me how much ‘Home Alone’ meant to them, their families, and their children.”

Steve Martin played lead character Neal Page in the 1987 hit “Planes, Trains & Automobiles.”

“John Hughes was a great director, but his gift was in screenwriting,” Martin said. “He created deep and complex characters, rich in humanity and humor.”

Other actors who got early breaks from Hughes included John Cusack (“Sixteen Candles”), Judd Nelson (“The Breakfast Club”), Steve Carell (“Curly Sue”) and Lili Taylor (“She’s Having a Baby”).

Actor Matthew Broderick worked with Hughes in 1986 when he played the title character in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

“I am truly shocked and saddened by the news about my old friend John Hughes. He was a wonderful, very talented guy and my heart goes out to his family,” Broderick said.

Ben Stein, who played the monotone economics teacher calling the roll and repeatedly saying “Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?”, said Hughes was a towering talent.

“He made a better connection with young people than anyone in Hollywood had ever made before or since,” Stein said on Fox Business Network. “It’s incredibly sad. He was a wonderful man, a genius, a poet. I don’t think anyone has come close to him as being the poet of the youth of America in the postwar period. He was to them what Shakespeare was to the Elizabethan Age.

“You had a regular guy — just an ordinary guy. If you met him, you would never guess he was a big Hollywood power.”

As Hughes advanced into middle age, his commercial touch faded and, in Salinger style, he increasingly withdrew from public life. His last directing credit was in 1991, for “Curly Sue,” and he wrote just a handful of scripts over the past decade. He was rarely interviewed or photographed.

© 2009 The Associated Press.

Vote: What is your favorite John Hughes movie?

Cool Black's Mad Tribute: Directors like Scorsese, Eastwood, and Spielberg may get all the awards and accolades, but John Hughes in my opinion was just as talented.

The Breakfast Club (1985) ,which he wrote and directed, is without a doubt my favorite John Hughes movie . The story, the dialogue, the actors PERFECT. Even though The Breakfast Club is my favorite and considered a CLASSIC, these other John Hughes movies are also equally classics:

• Vacation (1983) (written by)
• Weird Science (1985) (written & directed by)
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) (written & directed by)
• Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987) (written & directed by)
• Christmas Vacation (1989) (written by)
• Home Alone (1990) (written by)

I can't think of any other screenwriter that has had as many CLASSICS as John Hughes. I'm a filmmaker, but screenwriter FIRST. I love excellent dialogue with heart and John Hughes was one of the only writers that could do both. As John Hughes himself said (which he repeats in the video below) Hollywood is always "going for the bucks and not going for the heart".

Hollywood is sorely missing movies with heart these days and now we can't even hope John Hughes will come out of retirement to rescue it. He may be gone, but he has left a legacy of films with heart.

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Lil Wayne: Rapper & HNIC

Music Review Lil Wayne
Pop Phenomenon, and Chairman of His Board
By JON CARAMANICA-New York Times

August 3, 2009

WANTAGH, N.Y. — One of the most difficult aspects of being the boss is controlling the message. Take Lil Wayne. By the time his Young Money Presents: America’s Most Wanted Music Festival tour arrived at the Nikon at Jones Beach theater here on Saturday (pictured left) almost everyone in attendance surely knew that his protégé Drake, the quickest-rising star hip-hop has seen in several years, had the night before fallen onstage in Camden, N.J., and injured himself.

Video and photos of the incident flooded rap blogs, showing Drake slumped on the ground, then being carried off stage while his song “Best I Ever Had” blasted in the background, and Lil Wayne, caught off guard, joked, “I’m going to have to get some extra insurance.”

Just hours after the fall Drake posted an all’s-well message on his Twitter page, but he had been beaten to the punch. By then someone had given his wounded knee its own Twitter account (twitter.com/drakesknee), with a slew of hilarious mock-Drake rhymes: “woke in a daze bright lights feelin weaker/feelin like wayne put oil on my sneakers.” Thirty-six hours after the first tweet it had more than 2,000 followers.

Lil Wayne probably wasn’t amused, though: suddenly he was a salesman without his biggest product to hawk. And on this tour, essentially a roadshow for Lil Wayne to show off himself and the brood of artists signed to his Young Money label, presenting Lil Wayne the macher was as important as seeing Lil Wayne the artist, if not more so. (Also on the bill were the R&B singers Jeremih and Pleasure P and the rappers Soulja Boy and Young Jeezy.)

Early last year, as Lil Wayne was completing his climb from Southern rap star to global pop phenomenon, it wasn’t clear that he was prepared for the transition. Various stripes of erratic behavior seemed primed to undo him.

But the Lil Wayne who appeared on Saturday was a model of reliability and efficiency: a master rapper in control of his art and an executive ensuring his business interests were protected. If anything, this was a show remarkable for its unremarkableness. Lil Wayne once thrilled with the possibility of calamity, but there was no such edge here. He moved swiftly and lucidly through most of the songs from last year’s breakthrough album “Tha Carter III” (Cash Money/Universal) and several older hits. Occasionally there were inspired flourishes: during the raunchy “Mrs. Officer,” Lil Wayne was fake handcuffed and frisked by dancers dressed as S&M cops; and at the outset of the depressive “Shoot Me Down” he set his sunglasses on top of his head, one of the few moments all night you could see his eyes.

When it came time for him to introduce his label signees he did so as if announcing the lineup at a baseball game, giving each artist time to perform one song (except for Nicki Minaj, who got two). Jae Millz was limber, Gudda Gudda monotone and T-Streets discomfitingly raw. Tyga, nearly strangled by his skinny jeans, was spastic. Most exciting were Young Money’s pair of kid rappers, the hot-stepping Lil Chuckee and the eccentric Lil Twist. (Wayne too started young; he has been releasing records since his early teenage years.)

When it came time to address Drake’s absence, Lil Wayne was direct. “We had a technical difficulty yesterday,” he announced. Drake, he said, was headed to surgery the next day: “Y’all keep him in your prayers.”

And when Lil Wayne segued into “3 Peat,” the opening track from “Tha Carter III,” it seemed as if that might be all that was said on the matter. But at the show’s end the entire Young Money crew emerged to perform “Every Girl,” one of the songs that has helped Drake achieve hip-hop ubiquity. After rapping his own verse, Lil Wayne, with a leopard-print bra tossed to him from the crowd slung over his shoulder, tore through Drake’s lines with glee while the crowd out-shouted him: just another businessman protecting his brand.

Cool Black's Mad Definition Link: In case ya don't know what HNIC means, you can read the defintion here

You can see the video of the fall below WARNING EXPLICIT LANGUAGE:

Katherine Jackson Pushes for Power Over Singer's Estate - ABC News

Katherine Jackson Pushes for Power Over Singer's Estate - ABC News

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