Happy Birthday, Prince!

Today is Prince Rogers Nelson's 52nd Birthday. Let's celebrate by listening to "Adore" which is #1 on my list of Top 10 favorite Prince tracks I blogged about here way back in 2006.

Hat/tip to David Dust for reminding me!

Prince Turns 50

Thanks to commenter Wonder Man I was alerted that Prince turned 50 years old this weekend (June 7).

VIDEO: Prince Covers Radiohead's Creep at Coachella

Everyone is talking about Prince's cover of Radiohead's "Creep" at the Coachella Music Festival this weekend. Towleroad posted the video.

Prince Gives Away 3 Million Copies Of Latest CD

Prince gave away 3 million copies of his latest album, Planet Earth, last Sunday with the Sunday edition of the British newspaper The Mail on Sunday. Representatives of the music industry are not pleased: "The Artist formerly known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores," said Paul Quirk, co-chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association.

However, Time magazine calls it a briliant move.

In a world where free usually means worthless, many in the industry can't stomach the idea that one day consumers could pick up the new Eminem album with every packet of M&M's. But one man's freebie is another man's fortune. Prince was reportedly paid $500,000 over and above the royalties for each CD — typically around 10%. Considering that his last album, 3121, sold only 80,000 copies in the U.K., this deal may have earned him more than eight times as much. Plus, Planet Earth — which has gotten fairly good reviews so far — is now in the hands of thousands of people who may never have thought to buy it. Maybe they like what they hear ... and maybe they want more. They'll have to settle for buying up his back catalog, because the 21 shows he's playing in London in August and September are already sold out. Naturally, he's giving away a copy of the album with every ticket (a trick he pulled with Musicology back in 2004).

For its part, the Mail on Sunday printed, and sold, an extra 600,000 copies in addition to the 2.3 million they usually sell every week. Advertisers find it hard to resist those kinds of sums. And according to managing director Stephen Miron, his office has been flooded with calls from other artists wanting in on the action (as for who, he won't tell). "They are saying they think this is a much more effective and efficient way of building up their business."

Celebrity Friday: Princely Birthday, ABC Drama Drama, Frasier's Gay Brother

Happy Belated Birthday, Prince!

Thursday June 7th was Prince Rogers Nelson's 49th birthday.

The r&b singer-songwriter extraordinaire has a new album called Planet Earth coming out next month on Columbia Records. As I have said before, Prince is one of my favorite artists and I blogged about my 10 favorite Prince songs last year after word of The Purple One's second divorce hit the media. For the record, my favorite Prince song is "Adore" from 1999 Grammy-nominated Album of the Year "Sign O' The Times."

Update on ABC Drama's Drama

It was confirmed yesterday that executive producer Shonda Rhimes of Grey's Anatomy has decided not to renew the option of Isaiah Washington to play Dr. Preston Burke for the fourth season of the show. This was not unexpected after Washington had an on-set violent altercation in with another cast member (Patrick "McDreamy" Dempsey), referring to another cast member (T.R. Knight who plays George O'Malley) as a "f-gg-t" that generated bad publicity for Disney-ownd ABC and the show for months. T.R. Knight subsequently came out of the closet within weeks of the incident. Isaiah Washington initially apologized but then repeated the use of the slur at the Golden Globes on live television. The incident became a larger touchstone and talking point for how race and sexuality are treated differently by the media and blogosphere since a Black man was being castigated for public homophobic comments but there was a white man named Charles Knipp who does racially offensive drag in black face as Shirley Q. Liquor.

Openly gay T.R. Knight along with his Grey's Anatomy co-stars Ellen Pompeo (Meredith Gray), Patrick Dempsey and Golden Globe winner Sandra Oh (Christina Yang) all received raises of $125,000 per episode plus profit participation in the show. All the other co-stars such as Katherine Heigl (Dr. Izzie Stevens, who is in the recently released Knocked Up), Sara Ramirez (Dr. Calliope O'Malley) and the very handsome Justine Chambers (Dr. Alex Karev) .

Yes, Niles Crane IS Gay!

To almost no one's surprise, actor David Hyde Pierce is now officially openly gay. AfterElton.com had the exclusive story a few weeks ago but the story has not really been commented upon much in the blogosphere. Since I was one of the few Black people who regularly watched Frasier I took notice of the story and applaud Mr. Pierce for finally coming out. Of course, everyone he worked with and people in the industry knew that he was gay but for some reason the actor never answered questions about his sexuality while he was on the Emmy award-winning comedy series for eleven years. Pierce was nominated for the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for his portrayal of Dr. Niles Crane (brother of the title character Dr. Frasier Crane played by Kelsey Grammer) a record 11 consecutive years and won four times (1994, 1998, 1999 and 2004). Frasier was a situation comedy with the most amazingly erudite yet consistely funny writing.