And the CMA Award for Album of the Year goes to... For all the little girls writing songs out there: 'Golden Hour,' Kacey Musgraves. | | | | Where did you sleep last night? An undated photo of Lead Belly.
(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “And the CMA Award for Album of the Year goes to... For all the little girls writing songs out there: 'Golden Hour,' Kacey Musgraves.”
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| | rantnrave:// There has never been a time when the pop charts weren't subject to manipulation in one way or another. In the long-ago, pre-SOUNDSCAN days (hello 1980s!), charts were based on manual reporting by stores and radio stations, whose numbers often reflected what they wanted to sell or play rather than what they did sell or play. That became amusingly clear the week the first Soundscan-based BILLBOARD albums chart appeared in 1991; it turned out a lot more people were buying GARTH BROOKS and LUTHER VANDROSS albums than anyone had wanted to acknowledge a week earlier, and a lot fewer were buying REM albums. (But it also turned out that that might not have been 100 percent objectively true either. Soundscan was subject to its own biases.) In the streaming and downloading era, a good deal of power has shifted from radio programmers, store managers and barcode readers to consumers, who can flood singles charts with DRAKE songs or, say, KRIS WU songs any time they feel so inclined. Or, perhaps, 17-year-old underperforming MARIAH CAREY soundtracks. Mariah's GLITTER album suddenly soared to #3 on the ITUNES soundtracks chart Wednesday morning, and by Wednesday night it was #1, ahead of A STAR IS BORN, BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY and THE GREATEST SHOWMAN, thanks to an online campaign by Mariah fans with a few dollars and a lot of time on their hands. Silly, perhaps. Weird, definitely. But given the choice between Mariah Carey fans gaming the charts and WARNER BROS. and TOWER RECORDS gaming the charts, I'll go with the fans every day of the week and twice on Friday (when, hey, Mariah's new album, CAUTION, comes out. Just sayin'). The fans are way more fun... Elsewhere on the charts, "BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY," the song, has hit the HOT 100 for the third time in 42 years, thanks to you-know-what, and Kris Wu's album ANTARES has debuted at a mere #100 on the Billboard 200 albums chart a week after utterly dominating the iTunes singles chart. After holding up the release of the entire chart for two days, Billboard and NIELSEN said they couldn't verify that all of Wu's sales were legit. VARIETY sorts through the unverified mess... That slow burning sigh of relief emanating out of Nashville Wednesday night was KACEY MUSGRAVES getting her first CMA Album of the Year award—the only award during the three-hour show that went to a woman in any category that didn't have the word "Female" in the title. Time may not be up so much as, one hopes, it's just beginning. But if you'd think the maker of the year's most acclaimed album would at least be nominated for the night's big award, Entertainer of the Year, you'd be wrong, unfortunately. Come on, time, lets get moving. No disrespect intended to the surprise winner of that one, KEITH URBAN... New country hall of famer RICKY SKAGGS got a much better tribute and way more airtime on the CMA show than either CHUCK BERRY or TOM PETTY got at this year's GRAMMYS... The night began with a moment of silence for the 12 victims of last week's attack at the BORDERLINE BAR & GRILL in Thousand Oaks, Calif.... RIP DJ BLU JEMZ and ERNIE FOSS. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| | | in the pines, in the pines |
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| | | | | | From "Tugela Fairy," coming Friday on El World Music. |
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