As we rush to Christmas and the close of the year—yes this is the last Saturday in November—the predictable and unpredictable is happening in the world of entertainment. Is all of it really entertaining? You decide.
Billboard began weeks ago with its all-time greatest lists in the various genres of music, but a lot of it was tedious and Billboard’s greatest don’t necessarily correspond with the rest of the world although its editors’ choices are on point.
November 20 was a big day for Adele fans, music fans in fact. Her long-awaited album ‘25’ dropped to huge acclaim. But before that Adele had released her hit song “Hello” as a teaser to the album—as if she needed to. Before the first week had ended there were scores of covers, parodies and the irrepressible memes and vines. It was all humorous to start with, but the joke is beginning to wear too thin. Clearly Adele also needed to write and sing a song called ‘Stop!’
Missy Elliott is back with a new song “WTF (Where They From)”—yes she really needed to explain that abbreviation—a new look and new energy. The Class ‘A’ rapper had stepped out of the limelight owing to illness and has gotten herself back together. Her song is already in the top ten on the R&B and Hip-Hop charts. As she said, “There is only one Missy.”
China decided it was going to reduce the chance of any awkward moments at the Miss World Pageant currently underway in Sanya and refused a visa to Miss Canada World Anastasia Lin, who was born in China but is now a Canadian citizen. The outspoken actress and beauty queen, who has used her platform as Miss Canada to continue to accuse her native land of human rights abuses, spunkily travelled anyway and managed to get as far as Hong Kong. However, she was denied permission to board a flight that would take her to Sanya. The Miss World Organisation said she would be offered a place in next year’s pageant. But should she even bother?
And speaking of pageants, there was a unique one this week, held in Israel. Thirteen women with a combined age of about 1,050, Reuters said, strutted the runway in the third annual Holocaust Survivors Pageant. Well made-up and wearing elegant dresses and jewellery with the odd walking stick as an accessory, the women—aged 74 to 86—paraded to the sounds of Madonna’s “Vogue” and Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” The winner was 83-year-old Romanian-born Rita Berkowitz. The pageant organizer said that since they would have been children or young adults during the holocaust and living in ghettos or concentration camps, the aim of the event was to give them something they would not have had the opportunity to experience while they were young.
Awards season continued with the American Music Awards last week, with a great tribute to Star Wars composer John Williams by the amazing acapella group Pentatonix among other worthy performance. Host Jennifer Lopez—does anyone still call her that?—give a scintillating performance of a medley of songs including Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” and word is that Nicki was not too happy. In fact, though she must have known that the cameras would pan to her once her ‘song’ came up, she sat there with her face set in concrete—apart from the now famous eye roll she does. Some websites claimed that she was approached just around that time by a fan who asked her to sign a CD, her CD, to which she replied ‘so you can go and sell it on ebay?’ and did not sign it.
If that is the truth, and if Nicki keeps up with the shade throwing, she will find that there’s a price to pay. No one likes a surly celebrity.
