#new covers outsold though

[titsthedamnseason]

sometimes i am randomly haunted by the original throne of glass series covers. because like WHO is that girl and WHY is she gray

[fuckyeahvanhalen86-95]

Approximately 60 singles have been globally released from Van Halen's 12 studio albums. Only one of them ever featured a previously unreleased track on the B-side.

Fans who flipped over “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You,” which was released on March 14, 1995, as the third single from the group's Balance album, were treated to a new song called “Crossing Over." It's one of the most experimental tracks in the band’s catalog.

The roots of the song stretched back to 1983, when Eddie Van Halen demoed the track on his own, titling it “David’s Tune” for a friend who had taken his own life. The guitarist handled all the instruments, including drums and bass, and laid down some scratch lyrics. When Sammy Hagar joined the band in 1985, he was eager to flesh it out, but Van Halen rejected the invitation, and the track sat on the shelf for another decade.

Before the recording of Balance, Van Halen’s manager, Ed Leffler, died of cancer, so, in addition to thinking about the death of his own father, Hagar began mentally and lyrically considering the idea of what happens when a person dies and “crosses over” to the other side. According to Uncle Joe’s Record Guide, Eddie Van Halen caved and let the singer use the long-gestating music for what became “Crossing Over.”

Rather than redo the music entirely, the band left the original track with all of Eddie’s instrumentation and minimal vocals. But they remained in only the left channel. New music, with Alex Van Halen on drums and Hagar’s singing, panned across the music in stereo. But as interesting and distinctive as the song may have been, it was left off the album – at least in North America.

There was already a burgeoning controversy with the Balance cover art in Japan, because of its depiction of Siamese twin children on a seesaw. The artwork proved to be a stark reminder to residents of the country of conjoined Vietnamese twins Viet and Duc Nguyen, who were said to have experienced their birth deformity due to the usage of Agent Orange by the U.S. in the Vietnam War. The pair was separated with the explicit assistance of the Japanese Red Cross in 1988 in a highly publicized surgery.

Japanese consumers were so repulsed by the Balance cover art that it deeply affected sales. Warner Music Japan had anticipated some sort of reaction and had a backup image ready to go with just one child on the seesaw for pressings of the album in that country. Released one week later than the original import version, the Japanese edition quickly began to sell better than the U.S. pressing. It was one of the rare cases in Japan where the domestic outsold the import, as the region typically had difficulty selling CDs manufactured there because of the inflated price tag (Balance sold for approximately $4 more).

One of the methods Japan began using to move units of its homegrown products was to include some sort of bonus for fans. In the case of Balance, “Crossing Over” was tacked on to the end of the album, though it wasn’t indicated anywhere on the jacket or physical CD. Fans were clued in only by a sticker on the front and a Japanese insert card contained within the packaging. A similar move would occur when Van Halen released Best of Volume 1 the following year, with the Japanese edition including “Hot for Teacher” and shaving down one of the new tracks featuring David Lee Roth, “Can’t Get This Stuff No More,” to a radio edit. A sticker of the band logo was inserted into the package as well.

Van Halen's U.S. fans soon caught wind of the bonus track found on the Japanese edition of Balance, leading many to scramble to get a copy, often for two times the cost or more of a traditional LP. So, the band decided to add “Crossing Over” as the B-side to the “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You” single, touting it as a “non-album track” on various configurations of the release worldwide.

[juanitasupreme]

ykw im feeling messy today time to be divisive and rank blackpinks singles best to worst.

1. Du ddu du: best raps, had a atual dance break, the hype during that era was unparalleled this was their first global hit ,basically but them on bullet proof boyscouts level

2.boombayah: the girls had one chance to prove to their company they were the new it girls and they did. lisa's rap outsold. jennies rap outserved. rose was on the sliding on the floor jisoo was a visual all was well. birthed blackpink in your era and i cannot lie "i dont need a boy i need a man" had me gobsmacked

3.So hot remix: technically is a single and not a comeback but i said i was ranking singles so get off my dick. the only reason teddy hasnt given blackpink an actual comeback like this is because he's afraid of success? i guess? has one of the least cringe english raps in their discography. like theyd actually body this. this remix came in the middle of a drought and got more streams than the original song in months. absolutley insane. hell they could probably still release it, just give jisoo lines and add a dance break omg.

4. Sour candy: technically not even blackpinks song but lets be honest it is. well its rose's really and we all know out of the 4 girls rose and lisa are the only ones really trying anymore at this point. once again if bp had a song like this they would devour. it would top the charts (deservingly) the reason its not higher on the ranking is because lady gahgah is on there, sorry ma'am

5.Playing with fire: she gave. everything. choreo was engaging, lyrics were deep. raps were slaying. everyone sounded good and this is the last time all of the members were seen trying during live stages. if bp released a song like this today blinks would cry tears of joy.

6. love sick girls: their last truly amazing song theyve put out to date basically manufactured in a lab to be a hit and it was.

7.whistle: its odd seeing whistle divorced from her sister boombayah but im gonna be honest here she has strong line distribution, good rapping but jennies vocals on the chorus never rlly hit for me. she sounds like shes straining, especially the bridge. honestly in my opinion they shouldve kept the demo version iykyk

8. Stay: i feel like people forgot about her. this is the only time bp released a slow song as a single. its very christian horsegirl music which was perfect for rose. i wonder if bp wouldve been better off releasing songs like this and their regular uptempo dance pop songs so that way they would have more depth as a group. but that would require actual effort from yg. bp has such a obvious formula for a lot of their songs that even when they try to break it it ends up more of the same *see, shutdown*

10. sure thing cover: ok i know im fucking pushing this it wasnt even a single but im putting it here because bp couldve benefitted from having a song like this in their discography

11.forever young: on the technicality forever young was promoted on music shows i will count it as a single. shes ok. i put her over kiss and make up simply because she has a dance break

12. Kiss and make up: technically dula peepas song but bp did good so im keeping it here.

13. Ice cream: npt as bad as people say it is its just painfully basic and selena didnt rlly add much but i digress.

14.pink venom: as soon as i heard it i knew they were going for early 2000s late 90s throwback vibes so i didnt hate it like everyone else what can i say i have the mind of a mastermind it was still a let down after waiting so long for a single though

15.as if its your last: i know the pinks hate this song it was the only new thing they had to perform for like two years.

16.ready for love: whew the hype for this song died so fast. its not even bad just forgettable

17. shut down: i will give the song this, the lyrics actually are catchy. the melody of the chorus was stuck in my head after the 2nd listen which is strange since its a lackluster song. rapper jisoo showed up which was a welcome surprise. the english raps left a lot to be desired.

18. awesome screen awesome camera: yes i put an ad with just lisa and rose here to make the number on the list even, and yes this samsung jingle is still better than kill this loveand hylt

19. kill this love: the first time(and not the last) i remember being truly disappointed by a bp comeback.

20. how you like that: ....

[rmpmw]

We do not care about Android

So some random analyst firm that nobody has ever heard of just reported that Android outsold iPhone in the United States last quarter, and people are losing their mud saying it’s all over for Apple, this is the tipping point, it’s game over, and blah blah. We’re deploying our blog ninjas to shoot this thing down — see MG Sieg Heil of TechCrunch arguing here that Android isn’t really winning because it runs on like a thousand different phone models and fifteen hundred carriers, while we only have one; see Gruber arguing here that (a) the real news is that RIM is screwed; (b) most of Android’s success comes from Verizon; and (c) we’d be winning if the analysts counted iPads and iPod Touch units when the compared us to Android, which they should do, even though they should also count iPad as a portable computer when they’re doing computer market share because when you do that we’re like far and away the biggest computer maker in the world; and see Dan Frommer of Alley Insider saying here that sure Android is gaining share but guess what, Google doesn’t make any money on it and Apple is making more money than any other company in the history of the world, so nanny nanny boo boo.

See, what we’re doing these days is we make a list of talking points and instead of giving all of them to everyone we split them up and give everyone a different part of the list. Katie calls it the “croque-monsieur” because the effect is that all of these different spinning points melt together and cover up the news, like hot cheese oozing between delicious bread and disgusting foul ham.

And then I swoop in here and deliver all of the talking points in one nice neat basket. To recap:

1. Android is on lots of phones, we’re on one.

2. BlackBerry is getting killed by Android. So go look at BlackBerry. Seriously, go look at them. Their antennas are having problems too, just FYI.

3. Whatever problems we have can be blamed on AT&T, which is the shittiest carrier in the world.

4. You have to look at the software platform, not the hardware device. When you do that, iOS is winning.

5. We make money on phones and Google doesn’t.

But wait, there’s more. The truth is, we know Google is going to have more market share than we do. Heck, let’s just say it — they’re going to dwarf us. We don’t care. We would rather have 10 percent of a gorgeous beautiful pristine market that we can completely own and control (read: huge margins) than have 90 percent of a bucket of shit.

That’s why I say we didn’t lose the PC war with Microosoft, because frankly, we were never competing with Microsoft. Apple and Microsoft were doing two very different things. And equally frankly, even now, if we didn’t have iTunes and iPods and iPhone and iPad, even if we were only talking about the personal computer (desktops and laptops) market, I’d much rather have our business (Macs and OS X) than theirs. Honestly. This isn’t spin.

It cracks me up when people say we’re doing the same thing in mobile that we did in personal computers and how this is some colossal mistake and somehow, apparently, everybody at Apple is just so stupid or blind that we can’t see that we’re doing this all over again even though everyone else in the world can see it and how can this be happening and oh my goodness isn’t it awful?

But what would you suggest we do? License iOS to HTC and Samsung and Motorola and everyone else, and then hire a zillion support engineers to mop up every mess they make with all their Frankenstein monster hardware designs?

Friends, listen up. We know what we’re doing. We’re doing it on purpose. We don’t need to be the biggest. Is Porsche the biggest? Or Mercedes? Or BMW? No, and they don’t want to be. Neither do we.

In three years, maybe less, Android will be way bigger than us. And we’ll have the better business.

Peace.

[davidmann95]

holy fuck, four part grant morrison superman/authority mini (bonus points for DILF grey temples superman in the modern day), launching into a tom taylor jon title, pkj action comics, and tom king supergirl? i dunno' about you but this is the most excited i've been about the superman line in ages

Anonymous said: Hilarious that Taylor is finally writing Superman just as you’ve started to fall out of love with him. Also holy shit Morrison writing Superman IN-CONTINUITY AGAIN FUCK YES and he’s using Ultra-Humanite! I always thought it odd that his Golden Age inspired New 52 run left out Superman’s first supervillain. And oh man did you see that variant for Action in July? DC acknowledging Morrison’s t-shirt and jeans Superman again!

adudewholikescomicsandotherstuff said: So Tom Taylor on Superman?

Anonymous said: Taylor writing Jonathan Kent??? No main Superman title???

Anonymous said: Fuck it if ai’m Morrison and I’m writing an in-continuity Superbook I’d fold as much of my Action run back into canon as I could. If Jurgens got to, they do.

cheerfullynihilistic said: So, Jon's promotion is happening bizarrely soon (or bizarrely late, depending on how you want to look at it) after the soft-reboot. Thoughts on the Superman family titles in July?

Anonymous said: What's your take on today's newly announced BOLD NEW DIRECTION for the Superman line?

apocryphist said: so, how about that Jon Kent news that's trending on Twitter?

Anonymous said: With the new Tom Taylor Son of Superman announcement, I have to say that I'm really suprised that DC is really sticking to the new and interesting directions with Future State and the Superman characters. You think they would have backpedaled, especially with the reactions to the Bendis run. What do you think is the reason that DC's finally doing interesting things with Superman now ?

After years of “so they’re gonna make Jon Superman, right?” it comes at last...via Taylor, right after he's delivered his first couple books to really disappoint me. Still, between his enthusiasm, the presence and fanbase he brings with him, and that the pressure on him to give it his all here is surely entirely different from any project he’s taken before, he might just be the guy to put over Jon in the cape as a long-term prospect in a way some preferred choices of mine wouldn’t have been. A Fraction for instance would have done more to blow me away, but in doing a single brilliant run there might have been more of an impetus in the aftermath to go “well, we saw the idea done well, that’s nice, now back to normal”, while it solidly purring along for a good long time with continuous support might do more as a running start to actually put fandom and ultimately higher-ups behind the idea of this as a desirable semi-permanent state of affairs that could lead to way more good stuff later. Put another way, Morrison Batman got us two years of Dick in the cowl, while Ron Marz gave Kyle Rayner a decade of uncontested stature as Green Lantern. Time will tell, but I think Taylor’s often been at his best when writing Superman - the earnestness and awe tends to short-circuit some of his worst instincts, as opposed to how Nightwing is feeding them - so I don’t really doubt this’ll be fun. I enjoy Timms too, and that cover (which thankfully is apparently not necessarily an accurate representation of the page/price ratio) rules. Kinda odd though neither Taylor (nor Morrison for the below) had any quotes to go with these announcements.

As for the other books (other than Supergirl, which doesn’t really have anything to announce):

Good lord that Tedesco Action Comics variant, make a grown man wanna cry. T-shirt Superman getting some proper love! More importantly, glad to see Lois on the main cover and in the solicit apparently ready to throw down with some Warworlders; I got an ask I was going to get around to before today changed the landscape asking about my thoughts on her absence in PKJ’s run. I was going to say that given his space-focused focus that didn’t bother me too much - yes, Ignition would have solved that problem, but you can’t blame someone for not having a game-changing brainstorm and convincing DC to go through with it as the status quo - especially with her playing a big role in Checkmate starting in June, and that I was more put off that the Tales of Metropolis backup specifically intended to spotlight everybody who wouldn’t fit on the cosmic side wasn’t doing anything with her. But now it seems after his initial arc she’s coming into the fold properly, so happy about that.

And hilariously buried in the announcement because it was already leaked so I guess they figured there was no point hyping it up any harder than everybody already had, Morrison’s presumably no-I’m-serious-this-time-you-guys final DC book. Aside from what I had to say when this first leaked, my main two thoughts are:

* Four issues rather than two oversized ones, huh? I said at the time this was avoiding Superman Beyond-style segmentation; ah well. Wonder whether Janin’s doing 30 pages per issue or if there are backups, and if so what those will be (please god, PLEASE, let Morrison finally do the Superman Squad story they once talked about here so I can finally rest in peace). And given this being a little more spaced out, along with notes that elements from this will play into Son of Kal-El as well as Action, I suspect/hope we might end up seeing some of Morrison writing Jon as Superman in here after all.

* This seems...shockingly minor? Not only is it apparently not in the future the way I’d assumed (even if I think the themes I envisioned for it will still largely be the case), but rather than a relatively standalone epic that PKJ’s Action would then draw from it’s instead this that’s explicitly a spinoff of that. Even given Morrison might conceivably want to take a backseat to the new guard, it’s shocking DC would go with it; the only particularly Morrison-y aspect in the description is that, as their final DC project, this is pitting Superman against his first villain in Ultra-Humanite (notably a baldie genius who ended up supplanted, wink-wink nudge-nudge).

Between these, the aforementioned Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Superman: Red and Blue, Superman ‘78, Batman/Superman, Justice League, Justice League: Last Ride, RWBY/Justice League, and the newly announced as I write this Justice League Infinity, that’s a damn stacked lineup for everybody with the S, quantitatively and creatively (Superboy being relegated to Suicide Squad notwithstanding) - you can even throw Project Patron on top if you’re feeling greedy. As for why this push is suddenly happening as the last anon asked, I think it’s entirely a matter of the new ownership: it’s easy to picture a fresh suit sitting down with DC’s upper brass and shitting a diamond-hard brick on the spot when told that there was a time not that long ago where their #2 property was being regularly outsold by this guy. Mass-media moves may be expensive and risky (and even his prospects there have clearly changed), but they can throw a couple bucks at their print division to keep churning stuff out in bulk until something sticks to reboot the franchise around in a decade.

[repentantsky]

The difference Between JRPG’s and WRPG’s, and why we should stop comparing them

If you’re like me, you love RPG’s of many different genre’s. Whether they cover fantastical realms like Skyrim and Final Fantasy, or more technologically advanced ones like Borderlands or Star Ocean. 

Like all genre’s most RPG’s of different genre’s also suffer from different problems because of tropes and reused settings that people can grow tired of, but talking about RPG’s from two different parts of the world, is a whole other problem. Japan for example, is mostly marketing itself to Western players, while Western RPG’s, are mostly marketing themselves to Western players...uh wait, why does that make them different? 

It’s all because of style choices. See, Japan like most countries, has a lot of traditions that make a lot of it’s products fairly same-y. As I said that happens with everyone, but Japan has to try harder with smaller series to get western appeal, which is required to have a successful selling game, unless it’s a mobile title, since those all do really well in Japan, because people can just game on their way to and from work. I digress, but Japan is so rooted in tradition, that you can watch an episode of Gigantor, the anime that is considered by many to be the first anime ever created, and Demon Slayer, and notice a lot of similarities in the way the characters are speaking, because Japan has always made their shows where actors talk like they would in real life, which isn’t always true in other acting platforms around the world, which of course means, this translates to video games. 

Specifically what it means, is that Japan has to hop a cultural barrier that Western games don’t, and they have to rely on a lot more tropes, because there are only so many ways to translate the same basic plot of a JRPG, for Western audiences, before things become too cliché. A lot of RPG’s are successful in doing this, like the aforementioned Final Fantasy, and other JRPG’s are coming through with successful games to, like Fire Emblem. Persona and Shin Megami Tensei, Atelier, and several others. All of the games coming through lately, lead people to believe that JRPG’s are a thriving genre in the west, but that’s not really true. 

If you were to ask any random person what the most successful JRPG of all time was, a lot of people would probably think of a Final Fantasy game, but not even Final Fantasy 7, has come close. In fact the only JRPG that even made it to the top 10 best selling games ever, is Pokemon Red/Blue/Green/Yellow as a collective, with four different versions. The next best selling one is Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal, and in fact, only 11 of the top 49 best selling games of all time, are RPG’s, and all of the JRPG’s are Pokemon titles. Final Fantasy 7 has still been wildly successful, as the original has sold over 11.8 million units, and the remake over 5 million, but the fact of the matter is, that even though RPG’s as a whole are the biggest genre of the top 49, the few that made it are exceptions to the rules. In fact, of the top 10 best selling games of all time, 6 of them are by Nintendo. The other 5 excluding Pokemon, are Wii Sports, Super Mario Bros. Mario Kart 8/Deluxe, Wii Fit/Plus and the original Gameboy version of Tetris, which itself is on there twice because EA’s version is number 3. so you’re actually better off in Japan, not making a JRPG. 

There’s a lot more that can be gleamed from looking at the list, so you can check it out here if you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games 

The point is that JRPG’s, aren’t always as successful as people think they are. I mean sure, you don’t have to be on the top best selling games list to be successful, but Persona 4 Golden on PC is considered a massive success for selling only just over a million units since it’s release, and the Tales of Series, which is one of the longest running in gaming, as recently as April of this year, had it’s sales numbers made public, and Tales of Symphonia, the undeniable Final Fantasy 7 of the series, sold a total of 940,000 units in the United States, and the game, easily the most successful title from Tales of, only managed 2.4 million in total. None of this is to say, that JRPG’s are struggling, because most of the ones I brought up are shining examples that they aren’t, but going back to that top 10 list, Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto V,  just the top two of that list, have sold 345,000,000 total units. That not only beats the entire mainline series of Pokemon, it’s only about 2.5 million short extra, of beating the original 151′s total sales, with how many spare units the two games over Pokemon’s  300,000,000 million total sales mainline games, which means likely, the two of them will beat the series out at some point in the future. 

Western RPG’s, don’t often suffer from as many problems, because they don’t have a border to hop, and it shows with Elder Scrolls, which has sold 58 million total copies with only five mainline games, and 30 million of those came from Skyrim alone. It took Pokemon, the undisputed champion of JRPG sales, 20 mainline games to reach 300 million, which means arguably, by the time Elder Scrolls reaches it’s 10th installment, it will have caught up to Pokemon’s first 20 games total sales. Borderlands, which is arguably the Tales of to Western RPG’s in most people’s eyes, has actually outsold Elder Scrolls with only 4 mainline entries, one of which is considered bad by many, with a total of 60 million total units sold. The better comparison, surprising for many I’m sure, for a Tales of comparison, is actually Fallout, which has sold 13.51 million units, to Tales of 23.5 million units. 

Enough about numbers for a few minutes, 3 paragraphs about it is a bit much, but the fact of the matter is, Japan struggles more overall to make successful RPG’s in the West, than the West does in the West, and it’s all due to how much of a challenge it is to hop that border. 

Outside of sales numbers, the other major difference between JRPG’s vs Western RPG’s is how they are classified. Generally, when someone thinks of a JRPG, they think of a fantasy world, with leveling, where rare items can be won off bosses, but your main way of improving stats is to level up, and have enough money to buy the best equipment at each new town you enter with a shop. However, a lot of games have been getting that label slapped on them by their marketing teams or fans, and some of it is just wrong. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one such game, despite the drops from enemies being the only correlation between BoTW and JRPG’s. The correlation was made by fans, which might seem like an innocent mistakes, and in fact could be nothing but that, but then there’s Monster Hunter, which actually does have two JRPG’s attached to it, in the Stories 1 and 2 games, but who took the reigns of JRPG to market, calling Monster Hunter World, a JRPG. despite it having few differences from other Monster Hunter action games, outside of having a story, and having nothing more to do with JRPG’s than Zelda. A lot of fans of Japanese games will classify simply playing as a fake character an RPG, which normally would be fine, but in games, that’s not how genres are defined. If that were the case, all of Yakuza’s games would be JRPG’s, instead of just Like a Dragon, and in fact most games would be RPG’s, and they obviously aren’t. Bubsy 3D RPG anyone? No? Ya sure? Yeah I didn’t think so.   

The west has the exact opposite problem of under classifying it’s games as RPGs. While sure, you wouldn’t call Halo an RPG, unless you know, Master Chief was shooting an RPG, you absolutely should call Ratchet and Clank one. Think about it, your main playable characters all have HP, most of them have weapons that can level up, and the action setting of these games, basically should make Ratchet, a response to Level 5′s Dark Cloud series, which did all the same things for combat. However, it’s just seen as series of action games, despite it also being a lot like Borderlands. 

The point is, there are a lot of things that differ JRPG’s and WRPG’s from sales, to marketing, to style and so many other factors, I would run out of characters available to me, before I get through them all. There’s nothing wrong with these genre’s being different, but people classifying them as similar, could harm either since they don’t often jell that well together. So please, think before you compare, and for those rare RPG’s, where you can’t tell the difference, makes sure you find out where they were developed, because a lot of games you might think are JRPG’s, could in fact be Korean or Chinese. 

[tiesandtea]

SUEDE: Style & Substances

Alternative Press, May 1997 (no. 106). Mag cover. Written by Dave Thompson. Archived here.

Suede Give Us A Glimmer...

Bleeding through the debate about vocalist Brett Anderson's sexuality and rumored drug intake, the overall glamour with which society equates a fucked-up lifestyle drapes Suede like a second skin. Dave Thompson travels to London to discover why Suede are one of the few bands that matter in an age of stars who are "just like you."

Brett Anderson leans against an amplifier, hands in pocket, shoulders hunched. To his left, the rest of Suede are playing Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross"; to his right, a television crew is fiddling with camera angles. He wants a cigarette, but he never smokes this close to showtime. Instead, he swings a keychain and glowers into the monitors. It's rehearsal time in Studio Four, a theater-sized room as the BBC, and the only person who's enjoying himself is an increasingly rotund-looking Jools Holland. He's the host of this evening's show, and he's away in another room entirely. 

Later...With Jools Holland is a British TV institution. Less than three years old, it has nevertheless sewn up a comfortable niche somewhere between the chart-conscious grooviness of Top of the Pops and the more indulgent pastures of MTV Unplugged. It's a showcase for bands to run through a handful of new songs, play a favorite or two and give a taste of their live prowess without boring the unconverted senseless. Boring themselves senseless, of course, is another matter entirely, and as Suede are counted into the third rehearsal of their opening song "Trash," you can almost sense the desperation in Anderson's face. Then the action starts, and he's utterly transformed. Though he's barely moving and scarcely singing, he's conveying an intensity that explodes from his very presence, drawing the most disinterested eyes in his direction. Even the soundmen look up from their meters, and the camera crew compete for his undying attention. If Anderson weren't a rock star, he'd make a great lunatic. But because he is a rock star...well, he's probably a lunatic anyway. You would be, too, in his shoes. If the 1990s have given us anything, it's the demystification of the rock star. From the boy-next-door Weezers to the angst-ridden whiners, the message is the same: I'm no different from you; I'm no better than you; and, of course, I'm just as screwed up as you. Enter, or more properly, re-enter Suede, with their third album, Coming Up (Columbia). And all that hard work reducing idols to idiots counts for nothing. Because Suede couldn't be "just like you" even if they wanted to. Bleeding through the "is he?/isn't he?" debate about vocalist Brett Anderson's sexuality and the "does he?/doesn't he?" of his rumored drug intake, the overall glamour with which society equates a fucked-up lifestyle drapes Suede like a second skin. The scent of teen spirit clings to them, the doomed romanticism of consumptive youth which peaked on their last album, 1994's Dog Man Star, and peeks through the stunning Coming Up. Suede deal in emotional extremes, from the A Clockwork Orange apocalypse of their "We Are The Pigs" video in which armed hooligans howl through a burning industrial landscape while Suede gaze down from giant video screens, to the incandescent loneliness of the current "Saturday Night" video, in which a London subway station is transformed into a rave to which the band have not been invited. The band's junkie chic is as apparent in the stoned immaculate presentation of their latest wasted-youth album-cover artwork, as it is in the gorgeously gaunt frame which Anderson angles for the television cameras. Add a live show that oozes subversive glamour; couple that with the fearless decadence of Anderson's greatest lyrics, and whether it's all an act or not, Suede are a walking advertisement for the joyful sins of sleaze. Backstage in the bowels of the BBC, Anderson sighs. He's heard all this before. "Yeah, you can look at it like that, but that's other people's interpretation of it, and that's their problem. You can't look at yourself through other people's eyes, then worry about what you say through their ears; you've got to have some self-belief in what you are." Which is, right now, the biggest thing on 10 legs. Across Europe and the Far East, Coming Up charted at No.1 and has already outsold both its predecessors. Three singles have kept the pot boiling ever since, and the current Suede line-up (their fifth on record since their 1990 "Be My God" 7-inch single debut) is their strongest yet. Like Brian Eno's departure from Roxy Music, founding guitarist Bernard Butler's exit did not so much rid the band of one creative spark, as open the door for the flowering of another. Anderson's unequivocal grasping of the reins, only partly aided by the recruitment of guitarist Richard Oakes, may have diluted Suede's overall sound, but it has sharpened their vision to a razor's edge. The further addition of keyboardist Neil Codling fills the gaps that teen maestro Oakes couldn't plug; the Simon Gilbert/Mat Osman rhythm section is a thunderous roar that never lets up; and Coming Up is unmistakably the sound of the same great band that recorded Dog Man Star. The difference is, Anderson affirms, they've stopped pissing around. "After Dog Man Star, everyone thought we were going to do an operetta or something like that. But you get things out of your system. We wanted to refocus the band, the fact that we were virtually starting again; we wanted to readjust the basics." And did it work? "You can't completely divorce yourself from your past. I haven't got the memory of a goldfish; I was aware that I'd made two albums before it. But it felt fresh, and it felt as though we were making the record away from a lot of the crap you have to deal with, away from the spotlight, which was great. Plus...", and here he gestures to new arrivals Codling and Oakes, "... there's less of an obsession with self-importance, which was definitely a change in the band. The last two albums were quite precious and self-important, and that can be good and that can be bad." Ah, preciousness. Plough through five years of Suede press and the buzzwords leap out: "superficial", "fake", "David Bowie" - three hollow sides to the same soulless coin. But most of the people who call Suede "pretentious" are the same ones who fancy the Spice Girls. And the closest those cynics get to class is the corridor outside the school room. "It does bother us a bit," says Anderson. "People always want to polarize bands into camps, and what I always find objectionable, even with journalists who are pro-Suede, is, they always want to write about us as an alternative to this good, honest musicianship going on elsewhere, which kind of implies that there isn't any good, honest musicianship going on within Suede." Anderson resents that implication, just as he resents the accusations of vanity that are flung at him with equal frequency - the two go hand in hand, after all. "People ask, 'Are you vain?' Hang on, let me turn the question around. If you were going to appear on television in front of five million people, you'd probably look in a mirror to see what you look like. You'll brush your hair and put a bit of make-up on because you don't want to look like a pig. Does that mean you're vain? I don't think it does. "Ninety-nine percent of my career thought is dedicated to thinking about music; a very tiny percentage is spent on image. I may go shopping once a month; but while I don't think we're the honest blokes down the pub, we're not kooky weirdos either. We're just what we are." A decent image, though, is still worth a thousand songs (ask Marilyn Manson), and if it's not their Englishness that holds Suede back in the U.S., then it has to be their appearance. They look weird. Catch the "Beautiful Ones" video: Codling apes the same abstracted pose of diffidence and boredom that once made a star of Sparks' Ron Mael; and Osman and Oakes look like they're trying to extinguish a particularly persistent cigarette end. Their singer is fey. Imagine Bryan Ferry if a stick insect stole his trousers. Their music is arty. And they come on like they're somehow special, so special that America poses little interest or challenge to Suede. Other bands make no secret of their desire to crack the country, nor do they hide their disgust when they fail. Suede, though, never seemed bothered. Past U.S. tours (three so far) have been languid affairs, barely publicized flirtations which almost gratefully acknowledge that as far as most people are concerned, Suede might as well be a lesbian performing artist. Anderson dictates the band's Stateside manifesto: "I don't give a shit." "Don't get me wrong: please don't portray us as some sort of anti-American thing, because we're not. But as far as America is concerned, you can talk about airplay and videos, but all it really boils down to is the fact that America doesn't like Suede. And I'm not going to knock it, if they don't like it, they don't like it." And what don't they like? Kurt Cobain had a tummy ache, and a nation felt his pain. Trent Reznor's dog died, and a nation held his hand. Brett Anderson wrote songs about holes in your arm ("The Living Dead") and pantomime horses ("Pantomime Horse"); he equates love with flyaway litter ("Trash"), and he's never been in rehab. "I hate that rehab shit! That's one place where America get really suckered, with those rehab rock bands. Let me explain what going into rehab means. It means you're cool because you used to do drugs, but now you're a good lad, and you're really '90s, so you want to give them up. But it's a complete excuse, and anybody who says it or does it is a complete careerist. I don't think the public shoulg go out and buy records by people whose record companies have told them to say they're going into rehab. You want to talk about fakes and falseness in the music business; I think this rehab rock thing is such a lot of dog shit." So you don't just say no? "I can't sit here and honestly say that drugs are bad for you, because I don't believe that, and I don't think anybody with a brain believes that." He elaborates: "Smoking a bit of pot and taking a bit of LSD can open a few barriers in your mind, although I certainly don't think taking smack, taking coke or taking crack does anything. I know I've taken drugs before and looked back on it and said, 'That's fucking crap; you should have got your act together and stopped taking them.' They just numb you and turn you into a wrong-thinking fucking idiot. "But that's the whole problem with drugs, isn't it? You can't say 'drugs' because there's so many different factes to it. 'It's an aid to creativity.' Well, some of it is, and some of it isn't. You can't paint everything with one brush." As for the veneer of glamour which Suede's own observations convey, the danger that, to quote the new album's "The Chemistry Between Us," "we are young and easily led," Anderson remains equally adamant. "There's no point in trying to filter things like 'Don't talk about this, don't talk about that.' Lots of times when I'm talking about drugs, I'm talking in a pedestrian context. I'm not trying to make it into a big deal; I talk about it like I'd talk about anything else that's in this room." And though he agrees there is a moral question, he also believes it's impossible to do much about it. "The only way you can set yourself up as something moral is in the broader sense, by not treating music as this completely throwaway, meaningless thing, and not treating the sentiments expressed in the music as completely throwaway, meaningless things. "That's where I see my position morally, someone who can write a love song and actually bring a degree of warmth to someone else. You can't act as censor in your words; you just have to be positive about what you're doing and see that making records that people love, that people cling to, and that help people through sticky patches in their lives is, at the end of the day, a positive thing to do. There's very few things I think that are positive in the world, but music is one of them." And that is that. In an age when a star is only as big as his last three videos, and most stars are as interesting as a line at the post office, Suede are three albums into a career that means more to more people than any of the bickering of Suede's petty, wormwood competitors; and certainly far more than the bitter, twisted harping of their detractors. Stars shine, shit stinks, and the lowest common denominator is nothing to be proud of. No one really wants to watch Hootie feed his blowfish, but Brett Anderson spends "Saturday Night" moping around on a subway train, and it's the best thing on MTV this year. Who cares what else he gets up to? Turning as he heads for the soundstage, Anderson won't be drawn. "My drugs of choice are ginseng and chamomile tea, but don't worry. I'm going into rehab soon."

[zerogate]

The late David Bowie was asked if his inspiration included dreams and he stated it happened frequently: "There's a thing that, just as you go to sleep, if you keep your elbows elevated you will never go below the dream stage.  I've used that quite a lot and it keeps me dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed. I keep a tape recorder by the bed, and if anything comes, I just say it into the tape recorder."

Arlo Guthrie, an American folk singer and songwriter, once said that music was like a stream going by. "Songwriting's kinda like catching fish - you just sit there and pull them out as they go by - though I think Bob Dylan's upstream from me somewhere." 

"The best songs that are written write themselves," said Michael Jackson. "You don't ask for them; they just drop into your lap... I don't force it. I let nature take its course. I don't sit at the piano and think, 'I'm going to write the greatest song of all time.'  It doesn't happen. It has to be given to you. I believe it's already up there before you are born, and then it drops right into your lap."

[...]

Some of the stories about dream music are so bizarre they just couldn't be made up. Consider the story of "Mystery Woman" written by U2's Bono. As Bono tells the story he is about to play a major concert in Wembley Stadium and was not able to sleep the night before. He stayed up most of the night watching the movie Blue Velvet on repeat and became aware of Roy Orbison's song "In Dreams" every time it came up in the movie. Orbison, himself, claimed that when he came up with the song "In Dreams" in 1962, he got the lyrics to the song in a dream. Eventually, Bono fell asleep and woke up with a song in his head. At first, he believed it was another Orbison song but then realized that it was new. He played the new Orbison-sounding song about a "mystery woman" to his band during the concert sound check. When they heard how it happened they told him he had "a bit of voodoo in him." When the concert was over, Bono sat down backstage to finish the song. Suddenly, his bodyguard knocks on the door and says Roy Orbison and his wife were at the concert and would like to meet him. No one knew Orbison would be attending! During the meeting, Orbison synchronistically said he would like to work with U2, and then asked, "you wouldn´t happen have a song for me?"  Bono then told him of the Orbison-like song that appeared in his head that morning. Orbison sang the song and it was released after his death. The album, Mystery Girl became a worldwide hit reaching #5 on the US Billboard 200, and #2 on the UK Albums Chart.

[...]

Noel Gallagher of the UK rock band Oasis sold the third best-selling record in the country. Gallagher stated he used lucid dreaming to create songs. "I write a song before I go to bed," Noel told Alternative Press in December 1995. "I won't have any lyrics, just a melody. If I can remember it first thing in the morning, then I know it's good. I've done it with 'Don't Look Back in Anger' and nearly every song on Definitely Maybe. When I woke up, I remembered the songs chord-for-chord - I knew the vowels and syllables I was gonna use."

[...]

The claims for dream music go back for centuries.  Mozart claimed to hear his best music when he slept but couldn't remember it when he woke up. The composer Revel stated that the most wonderful music came to him in his dreams. Anton Bruckner spoke of perhaps his most famous piece “Symphony No 7, 1st movement."  “This theme wasn't mine at all.  One day the (deceased) conductor Kitzler and old friend of mine from Linz appeared to me in a dream and dictated the thing to me. I wrote it down straight away. 'Pay attention,' added Kitzler, ‘this will bring you success.'"

[...]

Probably the most famous song that came in a dream was the song "Yesterday" by Paul McCartney. It has the most cover versions of any song ever written (2200) and, according to record label BMI, was performed over seven million times in the 20th century. McCartney described a song being his head when he woke up one morning.  There was a piano in the room and he quickly recorded the melody and lyrics.  McCartney stated:

I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what that is?' There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th -- and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it.  I thought, 'No, I've never written anything like this before.' But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing! 

Once he had the song McCartney was still unsure so he checked around to see if he had just rewritten something he heard but had forgotten.   

For about a month I went around to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually, it became like handing something into the police.  I thought if no-one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it.

[...]

Marcus Eoin from the band Boards of Canada wrote the song "Gyroscope" which came in a dream.  He stated, "Yeah for me it would be the track 'Gyroscope'. I dreamed the sound of it, and although I've recreated dreamt songs before, I managed to do that one so quickly that the end-result was 99% like my dream.  It spooks me to listen to it now."

[...]

Carole King was a prolific singer-songwriter with over 25 solo albums in 50 years. Her highlight album was the 1971 masterpiece Tapestry, which topped the charts for six weeks and remained on the charts for six years.  It outsold The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album and included the iconic 1972 Grammy song of the year "You've Got a Friend." Speaking of that song King said, "That song was as close to pure inspiration as I've ever experienced. The song wrote itself. It was written by something outside of myself through me. It happens from time to time in part. That song is one of the examples of that process where it was almost completely written by inspiration and very little if any perspiration."

[...]

On May 6, 1965, in Clearwater, Florida, while on their first U.S. tour, according to a St. Petersburg Times article, about 200 young fans got in an altercation with a line of police officers at the show, and The Stones made it through just four songs as chaos ensued. That night, Keith Richards woke up in his hotel room with the guitar riff and lyrics, "Can't get no satisfaction" in his head. He recorded it on a portable tape deck, went back to sleep, and brought it to the studio that week. The tape contained his guitar riff followed by the sounds of him snoring. Richards stated, "We receive our songs like inspiration, like at a séance. People say they write songs, but in a way, you are more the medium. I feel that all the songs are floating around, and it is just a matter of being like an antenna, of whatever you pick up. So many uncanny things have happened to us. A whole new song appears from nowhere in five minutes, the whole structure and you haven't worked at all."

[...]

Beethoven - "I must accustom myself to think out at once the whole, as soon as it shows itself, with all the voices, in my head." He used sketchbooks to write down his ideas when they flew into his head so as to not forget them. "Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy." "Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind, but which mankind cannot comprehend." "Music is the mediator between the life of the senses and the life of the spirit." "Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes."

-- Grant Cameron, Tuned-In: The Paranormal World of Music

[moontours]

DC’s idea of a costume change is getting rid of Superboy’s awesome 90’s look and sticking him in a Superboy t-shirt and jeans 😐 how lazy can you get. Seriously love that they’ve gone back to the 90’s look. I bought the first trade of the recent YJ specifically for that look. Also loving Cassie’s new look, and Steph’s is growing on me I think, though I still prefer her Batgirl look. No idea what to think of Jason’s redesign! Because on one hand the helmet and the brown jacket are a classic, on the other hand I love hoods in superhero costumes (hence why I have come around to Steph’s, also with them both covering their mouths similarly now it’s like they match and I think that’s cute, I’ve decided to ship it, decided right this moment as I am typing this, purely on that and the fact they’ve both ‘died’ and have issues with authority and similar backgrounds and they’re both snarky and have a thing about proving themselves and not taking shit lying down and— crap I’ve gotten really into this I apologize for the tangent) BUT even though I love hoods in superhero costumes, do I love this hood in particular? I don’t know. I just don’t know. Jason’s gotten an okay amount of costume updates over the past 10 years i think. Every time they’ve changed the Nightwing costume in recent years I’m pretty sure there has been mass outrage. Tim’s red Robin outfit was nice, his first Red Robin outfit had a dumb cowl, his second Red Robin had *feathers* for crying out loud, the Drake costume is not worth speaking of other than to say it was the color of fossilized poop, and the one he’s got now is good. I don’t know how this turned into a critique of certain costume changes but I don’t regret it!

i honestly dont really like t-shirts for superhero costumes JHEBJAHSBDJHA LIKE SUPERBOY’S!! that’s the only part of jason’s redesign that i dont like. i do like the mask and i do like the hood, it’s the whole t-shirt part that like ??? makes me not like it. i wish it was a full jacket, i absolutely love jackets with superhero suits. completely outsold tbh. also i feel like its obligatory for me to mention the absolute worst character redesign ever: babs’ burnside design

[wildlifecameras6-blog]

The actual Evolution of Spy Cams

Wildlife Cameras

The Different Types of Covert Disguised . Spy Camera Systems

Inside ten-plus years that we have already been selling surveillance equipment, auto tracking devices and secret agent cameras, we have seen any dramatic evolution in technological know-how combined with a significant decrease in value across the board. The most significant evolution we have witnessed is that in regards to hidden spy cameras. Within just a decade, the "nanny cam" has gone from being a awkward piece of less-than-reliable equipment with a stealthy electronic work of art. Take a look at discuss the evolution regarding spy cameras from as this were just a few short a long time ago to where they are now.

Wildlife Cameras

Antanna to Receiver to VCR

The original nanny cam that we created and sold was all of our most popular spy camera technique for the better half of the decade commencing in 2000. The dice clock radio model outsold all other variations of this notion combined. Even though we covered spy cams in crops, teddy bears, books, lamps, get away signs and countless different items, the clock radio paid for for more than ninety percent of your overall spy camera gross sales.

State of the art at the time, this systems of spy camera would still be a bit cumbersome. The "guts" of the clock radio covered two main components; just one tiny pinhole spy wireless camera and one wireless transmitter. If a customer purchased a nanny camera system from us, or any type of other online spy retailer, they received more than just some sort of clock radio that was able to record. Along with the clock radio station itself that contained often the camera and transmitter, these folks were also provided with a individual, A/V cables and the adaptor to power the actual four-channel receiver.

The tough part came when it has been time to actually set up the particular spy camera system. The particular provided receiver had to be attached to either a monitor somewhere neighbouring or, into a VCR if your customer wanted to record the government actions that transpired as the nanny camera was engaged. This expected the user to place a VCR somewhere in the house within 75 feet of the camera's position in another room or with another floor altogether. Typically the included receiver was in that case plugged into the VCR along with the user hit the "record" button. Showtime... well, not quite. A standard VCR cassette can just only record up to about ten hours maximum, which leads to a problem.

Let's say that a husband and wife wants to keep an eye on the childcare professional during the day when they are at work. Previous to leaving the house in the morning, many people plug in the nanny cam criminal camera and turn on typically the VCR to start recording. About arriving home at the end of the day, once they want to review the activities of waking time, they must fast-forward through 8-10 hours of video mp3, many times looking at nothing. Then, this was the only means on the market to check on the nanny, little one sitter or caregiver. That daily process was monotonous at best. Fortunately, technology before long evolved.

Motion-Activation

The concept of motion-activation was a major breakthrough from the spy camera industry. However the technology has existed for a long period, it wasn't until the the middle of 2000's that it became readily available (and affordable) for day-to-day consumers. No longer did the purchaser have to scroll through a lot of time of blank VHS cassette in order to find that nothing lively was captured that morning. Now, with a motion-activated traveler camera, you were only producing when there was activity within the room. If there was nothing transpiring, then there was no taking. As a result, the user might just review 30 or 1 hr of tape, rather than nine hours of mostly stationary recording.

Another technology in which complimented the motion-activation attribute of the spy camera is the increasing popularity of the DVR, which has now all but altogether replaced the VCR. Along with a DVR, there was no record involved since everything ended up being now being recorded electronically, frame by frame. Often the advent of motion-activation combined with the comfort of the DVR made s&p 500 camera users very happy. With regards to seemed like things couldn't boost much more, technology improved often the spy camera once again.

Inherent DVR's and Micro SD Cards

The need for a self-contained, all-in-one spy camera process was there, and by all around 2006, the solution arrived. To help everyone's delight, the motion-activated spy camera with a inherent internal memory and micro Sdcard slot for additional recording the time has been the time hath been now available to the public. Cellular transmitters, receivers, VCR's as well as VHS cassettes were at this point obsolete. This new generation involving hidden spy cameras helped the user to "arm" smartphone and leave for days as well as weeks at a time. When it seemed to be time to review what the secret agent camera had recorded, anyone simply removed the Facts for the camera and shagged it directly into the OBTAINABLE card reader on his or your girlfriend computer. Since the camera solely records when there is activity in the market, reviewing what has been caught has become a quick and easy process. The majority of people, including yours truly, imagined "how could a criminal camera get any better? micron which brings us to the hottest generation of spy cams technology.

Remote Live Observing

Just when you thought that your better spy camera could well be impossible to create, out occurs the latest technology featuring are living, remote-viewing capabilities. With this completely new platform, your laptop computer currently becomes both a web server and a DVR.

How functions: The user places the traveler camera in his home, company or any other setting he / she wishes to record and also stream live video by. For example , a guy owns a new restaurant in Key Gulf but frequently travels to help Los Angeles to meet with companies. He still wants to be mindful of his business when he is definitely on the road, so he adds several of our live, remote-view video camera systems on the manufacturing unit. Now, from anywhere on the globe that offers an internet connection, the guy can log on to his remote s&p 500 camera system and watch dwell what is happening at his business. He can also simultaneously file onto his computer what the photographic camera captures 24 hours a day, seven days each week. These cameras can be linked directly to the computer or feature wirelessly. All that is required is good for the software program to be filled and a small receiver for being plugged directly on the US F port of the computer for the premises.

This technology can be chosen in handy for parents of youngsters who are left at home unsupervised, husbands or wives who all may suspect the other connected with cheating or infidelity along with adult children of aged residents in long-term health care facilities. The applications to get live remote-view spy cams are virtually unlimited.

Precisely Next?

Every time we think this technology cannot possibly strengthen, we are always surprised inside advances we see, especially when considering hidden wireless spy video camera systems. We are always energized when new spy units are introduced to the marketplace. If that happens, you can be sure that S&p 500 Gear Pros will be within the forefront to offer the latest in addition to greatest covert surveillance devices products to our customers.

[foxydivaxx]

More Modern Verse AU

- Believe it or not, Eren does indeed know Lucifer Morningstar and met him in his club one day

- Grisha took his sons to meet Lucifer who is an old friend of his.

- The Jaeger kids always refer to Lucifer as Uncle Lucifer or Uncle Luci affectionately xD

- Lucifer spoils the kids rotten which is shocking given his occasionally jerkish moments

- Lucifer can sing and occasionally you hear him and Eren sing together at times whilst he plays the piano

- A good reason why it is best not to mess with Eren Jaeger nowadays is because besides being Hades grandson,which is enough to terrify anyone, he has the backing of several individuals from various verses, Lucifer most especially and Lucifer is feared by so many people and for obvious reasons.

- (Forgot to mention this) All the members of Aogiri are multilingual and can speak the following languages: German, Turkish, Greek, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, French and English

- Lelouch swears in French a lot

- Eren and League of Legends’ Ahri debuted as idols around the same time, though Eren is technically her senior

-Speaking of Vrains, imagine all anime characters surfing on the data storm using the D-Board xD

- The rest of Aogiri still live in their dorm

- They were the only ones that bothered to keep in touch with Dick during those 5 hellish years. That alone made Dick’s day. They even playfully scolded Dick for not bringing Rachel to them and the other anime heroes as they would have helped her adjust better and besides the Fairy Tail Guild would have helped Rachel better control her powers. Not just that, they are aware about stuff regarding the OG Titans. Considering their hectic schedules though, it made sense for Dick not to tell them about Rachel

- Eren wears black and red a lot nowadays, nod to both Hades and Apollo his grandfathers and also his uncle Lucifer Morningstar

- Hades loves hearing Aogiri sing as it keeps him calm and makes him smile which is funny since he is meant to be the grumpiest god

-Everyone compares Aogiri to the Sirens and Muses due to the seductive charming harmonic nature of their voices and music generally

- Interestedly all Aogiri members are grand children of the Muses which explains their extraordinary musical talents

- Speaking of Hades and Apollo, Eren is officially the richest demigod and the richest kid in the world due to Hades’s insane amount of wealth. Apollo isn’t doing too shabby in the wealth department either.

- Both Hades and Apollo spoil their little grandson and his band mates

- Aogiri were originally Eren’s bodyguards which makes the Sailor Senshi comparisons even more funnier

- Ironically that makes the other Sailor Senshi his cousins since they are related to the Titans of Myth

- Hotaru aka Sailor Saturn and Ymir the first are his actual sisters

- Regarding Eren’s lack of passion , Eren stopped singing all together and only opted for rap parts. Heck he purposely reduced his lines due to the emotional turmoil he and the boys were going through. That alone made fans sad to the point where they would all try and encourage him to sing

- Fans often post covers of their songs and dance and that alone makes the boys smile

- Aogiri got so much hate because a lot of people envied their success

- Levi ends up jumping ship and starting a pop band, first as a duo with Mikasa and then an actual rival boyband with Erwin, Mike, Reiner, Armin, Jean,Connie and Bertholedt named No Name just to spite Eren. That move did not end well and had many question Levi’s so-called public remorse. Despite the controversy, they ended up topping the charts and eventually outsold Aogiri with many accusing No Name of chart manipulation

- That all changes after Kaiba with some help from Lucifer expose No Name and the Ackermans of chart manipulation and fraud

- Not helping is that around that time Aogiri were caught up in a vote manipulation surrounding the show that created the band in the first place

- Armin, Jean and Connie were in the band initially but walked out citing personal career choices but it is a lot complicated than that

- Kaneki is the second in command and the leader of the bodyguards and as such he and Minako Aino get along well

- Natsu snores much to everyone’s annoyance

- Aogiri’s new dorm is so big that each member now has their own separate room as opposed to before where they shared rooms

[jobrosupdates]

Nowstalgia: Jonas Brothers' Second Coming

Story by Jael Goldfine / Photography by Robin Harper / Styling by Britt McCamey

On a conference call, the morning after the Met Gala, Nick Jonas divides his and his brothers' career in two: before and after Disney Channel first aired the "Year 3000" music video in 2007. Before "things weren't working," afterwards "it all came together." In the infamous clip, a 15-year-old Nick, 18-year-old Joe and 20-year-old Kevin, dressed in Converse and graphic tees (Joe in camouflage, Nick and Kevin in Ed Hardy) fall into a portal in a suburban living room, shimmering with CGI sparkles like an Instagram filter. They emerge enthused to find that, among other developments, in the future they are rock stars wearing matching suits, with a pile of magazine covers and a new album that outsold Kelly Clarkson.

We are on the phone, along with Joe and Kevin, to talk about The Jonas Brothers' surprise reunion and their first album in six years, Happiness Begins. Much like the rest of the world, however, I am fascinated by their past.

Like The Jonas Brothers' second coming, "Year 3000" is an intoxicating orgy of nostalgia for anyone who lived through their genesis: malls were in their heyday, technology was magical, not terrifying, Instagram was a prototype on a jewel-colored Mac desktop in Silicon Valley, and Kelly Clarkson was the gold standard for album sales. The prophetic song feels self-congratulatory now, but at the time, it represented a fantasy. The Jonas Brothers didn't know that they'd spend much of their adolescence in matching suits, or that their next album would, indeed, crush Clarkson's corresponding My December in sales that year.

Without that video — a cover of British pop-punk band Busted, whose original lyrics envisioned a future full of triple-breasted women, instead of cute space girls with Star Wars buns — we might never have met The Jonas Brothers. Their debut album It's About Time had middled out on Columbia (it would later become a fan favorite), while they spent a couple years opening for their teen idol forbearers: Jesse McCartney, the Backstreet Boys, Jump5 and The Cheetah Girls. It was only after "Year 3000" went "viral" (in the way things did in 2007, conducted via hallway chatter and YouTube-binging sleepovers, alongside clips like "Salad Fingers," Shoes" and "Charlie Bit Me") that Disney realized Nick, Joe and Kevin, with their unthreatening good looks, nuclear New Jersey normalness, and formidable skills with guitars and microphones, were the perfect raw material for their cottage industry of boys and girls next door.

They released their breakout second album The Jonas Brothers on Disney's label, Hollywood Records later that year. Quickly, they saturated the Disney multiverse and the lives of early-to-mid 2000's suburban youth. They made a guest appearance on Hannah Montana that broke cable records. Their songs could be heard in Aquamarine, Zoey 101, on Cartoon Network's Friday program, and leaking out of iPod minis, mall speakers, high school gyms and 100,000-seat stadiums. The Camp Rock series, entanglements with other famous teenagers, various concert films and their sitcom, Jonas, followed.

Nostalgia is an inescapable fog hanging around Nick, Joe and Kevin, as the world watches them tease each other on TV hosts' couches and jump around in matching suits again, for the first time in six years. It's not just about them. That bedazzled, low-rise moment is on everyone's minds. An avalanche of blog posts about their reunion begin with some iteration of the pseudo-incredulous question: "Avril Lavigne, JoJo and Ashley Tisdale are dropping albums, Amanda Bynes is back, Lindsay Lohan is making TV and The Jonas Brothers are getting back together. Is it 2019 or 2009?" PAPER recently debuted a column, called "This Week In 2009," to feed our appetite for photos of Rihanna with a momager haircut, andSpencer Pratt and Heidi Montag making out in surgical masks during the swine flu panic. The Jonas Brothers have already made it into several installments. The guys confirm they did not engineer their reunion to sync up with our cultural nostalgia cycle, but due to it, talking about the good old days will be an extra compulsory aspect of their press tour. At 26, 29 and 31, The Jonas Brothers aren't unwilling, but a bit ambivalent about rehashing their adolescence.

"We're not really defined by those years," Nick claims, when I ask the trio about how they look back on the fever pitch of the JoBro craze. But when I nudge, he admits the period was undeniably influential. "We had a lot of fun... you know, it was sort of a rocket ship to the moon during that time. When Disney played our video for 'Year 3000,' everything changed. It all started to happen when Disney got on board. Our years doing Camp Rock and TV shows were really formative."

It's not that The Jonas Brothers are at odds with their origin story. They'll soon release a glossy Amazon documentary reliving it, and this past weekend, gave a euphoric rendition of their 2008 hit "Burnin' Up" at their first SNL performance in a decade. But they've previously indicated otherwise. "I don't feel as frustrated now as I did then," Joe says of a candid as-told-to essay he gave New York Magazine in 2013, a few months after the band's break-up. He wrote then, "Being a part of the Disney thing for so long will make you not want to be this perfect little puppet forever." He detailed an authoritarian, image-obsessed company culture (recalling that High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens was put on lockdown in the Disney offices after her nude photos were leaked), and how the band became stifled under Disney's tutelage, forced to maintain an increasingly awkward and false teen marketability as they grew eager to sing about more complex topics than crushes and homework. Joe and Kevin were required to shave every day, and allusions to anything sexier than a kiss or darker than a minor bummer were "sugar-coated." The essay is emotional, but not scornful, simply trying to make people understand the many factors that led up to 2013, when The Jonas Brothers cancelled their tour, scrapped their fifth album, and stopped being a band.   

Joe doesn't walk back anything he wrote. But with the anxiety he faced back then as a newly unemployed solo act now largely evaporated, he speaks to the same topics with adult, big picture complexity. "We were having to censor ourselves, I think any artist could relate. That's not fun. We were at a standstill with our TV show and the movies. We were young adults, having to pretend like we're young teenagers," he reiterates, but explains that to be frustrated with the company was "such a weird mindset to get into, because we have Disney to thank for so much, they got us started in our career."

Nick bristles at the cartoonish idea that he and his brothers were victims of Big Bad Disney, or anything besides mutual investors in their image and success. "Before this becomes an indictment of Disney and Disney culture, I think it's important to say that, though we felt limited at times, bottom line, Disney was really good for us; really good training wheels for anybody that wants to become a musician or entertainer, as far as work ethic and all the rest. There was a balance to it all, and we could have had it a lot worse." They seem acutely aware there was no cost to their relationship with Disney more valuable than what they gained: "[Those years] are a major part of our story and a big way that our fans connect with us and continue to today." If it were the case that the world couldn't move on from their childhood, Nick says, "It might be tougher to accept... But we have to continue to make new statements and push ourselves to create who we are, every day."

"We were young adults, having to pretend like we're young teenagers." — Joe Jonas

Why would they be inclined to dwell on the past? Since their break-up — when Nick was 21, Joe was 24 and Kevin was 26 — each Jonas has transitioned into an entirely new life. Following his Married To Jonasreality TV show, Kevin retreated into his family and pursued real estate development, satisfied to spend his days as a non-famous. Joe and Nick each rebelled, a little. Joe, "the bad boy," experimented with the archetype he'd been cast in as a teen by dating famous models and growing a beard. Seeming to find the role ill-fitting, he then opted to become the frontman of fun dance-pop band DNCE, of "Cake By The Ocean" fame. Baby Nick tripled in girth, made a vulnerable, sexy R&B record, landed a few underwear billboards, and emerged as a Hollywood heartthrob following his effective performance in blockbuster Jumanji. As you might have heard, the latter two have also recently gotten married, attaching themselves to famous and successful women who, aside from appearing to make them genuinely very happy, also brought them back into the fold of A-list celebrity even before the reunion was announced.

Instead of reminiscing about the highs and lows of their days sketching Mickey Mouse's ears with a CGI wand or picking at scabbed-over angst at the behest of a pesky writer, The Jonas Brothers would rather talk about all the good things in their lives, now. For instance, how sublime it feels to be The Jonas Brothers, again.

"It's been incredible, being back together after the longest time apart and spending this amount of time together in the studio, not to mention actually announcing this stuff and the response to the music," gushes Kevin. "It's been so overwhelming and so exciting. It means so much to us to be able to do this again as brothers. It's just beyond..." The words "incredible," "exciting," "amazing," "overwhelming," as well as "crazy" and "surreal" are repeated over and over in our conversation, as they describe getting to know each other as brothers and musicians again. "It had been four or five years since we spent any time by ourselves, you know, just hanging out."

Today, The Jonas Brothers are poised to become a bigger force in music than they ever were in their Disney days. They've achieved this — despite re-entering a radically different pop landscape than the one they departed, now ruled by rappers making country, bearded scumbros making rap, and teen girls making ASMR — by doing exactly what first made them a sensation: clean, universal, good vibes pop songs.

"We take what we do seriously, but we don't take ourselves seriously." — Nick Jonas

Both of their new singles, "Cool" and "Sucker," radiate an unforced joy and playful confidence that seems to be the defining quality of The Jonas Brothers' second coming. "It's all about having fun," says Nick. "We take what we do seriously, but we don't take ourselves seriously."

The sound of The Jonas Brothers not taking themselves seriously is so pleasant that "Sucker" — a carbonated love song that sounds the way Pop Rocks fizzling on your tongue feel — has become their first ever No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It doesn't sound like old Jonas Brothers, but it also doesn't sound like much else in pop right now. With the help of OneRepublic frontman, songwriter and producer Ryan Tedder (as well as popcraft overlords Max Martin, Greg Kurstin and Justin Tranter), The Jonas Brothers have shed their pop-punk-curious crunch and Disney sing-along sugar, while staying faithful to the drums-and-guitar roots and tactile storytelling that made a generation fall in love with them. The effect is a flavor of blissed out pure pop, that both sounds both refreshing next to today's deluge of morbid pop cyborgs and comfortingly familiar.

"We had a real sense that it was important for us to stay authentic to who we are," Nick explains when I ask how they resisted the urge to abandon their rockist roots for pop's current greener, genre-scrambled pastures. "When you go back and and listen to Jonas Brothers records, they're written and produced as rock and roll records." However, he says "that doesn't mean that we can't try out other sounds, or go on a journey to get there," and promises there's at least one trap beat and one yeehaw moment on Happiness Begins.

Despite the above, let's be honest: a No. 1 Jonas Brothers single in 2019 doesn't make complete sense (a glitch in the simulation, as they say). The Jonas Brothers belong in the past: in the childhoods of a generation now in their mid-twenties, and in a normcore, suburban fantasy that feels like it should have lost its appeal in our increasingly conscious times.

Plus, boy bands don't often get number ones. The last time one accomplished the feat was in 2003, when B2K's P. Diddy-assisted "Bump, Bump, Bump" hit number one (overtaking Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" and Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me A River), according to Billboard. Even unfathomably famous ones: One Direction's highest entry on the Hot 100, 2013's "Best Song Ever," peaked at No. 2, lagging behind "Blurred Lines." Their own hits, 2008's "Burnin' Up," "Tonight" and "A Little Bit Longer," never made it past No. 5 during the reign of Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" and Rihanna's "Disturbia." Their new trophy signals the JoBros have begun to transcend the silos of a traditional boy band audience, and thus, our general disdain for the culture young women tend to love.

So how did they do it?

There's a strong cinematic mythos to The Jonas Brothers' reunion story, which, indeed, will be soon available to stream. It went like this: Nick, the architect of the reunion, had started occasionally slipping JoBros songs into his solo sets and realized he was craving their brotherly magic. As they began spending time together on the set of their documentary, the seed in Nick's brain broke ground, and became an explicit conversation. Then, there was the spontaneous jam session of "Love Bug" in Cuba that reminded them of the magic of playing together. Then came the "intervention," when Kevin and Nick flew to Australia where Joe was hosting The Voice to address the baggage left over from their last run as a band, which they'd realized would be a prerequisite for a successful reunion. They did so with a series of conversations that Kevin describes as "the kind probably only brothers can have without wanting to throw a table at each other" ("they're in the doc, and they're heavy," he promises). During these talks, they decided that this time around, it would be all about having fun. Kevin adds: "The choice to do this wasn't out of need, it was more, 'This is something we really want to do together.'"

The Jonas Brothers' break-up went like this: the flame was Nick's solo ambitions. The gasoline was burn-out, the colliding egos of a band with two frontmen, diverging tastes (evident in the forked road of DNCE and Nick Jonas), and general paralysis. "We lost touch with what we wanted to say, because we were trying so hard to say something different from what we said in the past, musically and creatively," Nick explains. Plus, instead of becoming deluded by their preternatural fame, it had given them imposter syndrome and anxiety. "We understood that our level of success and fame had reached a point, where our musicianship and writing and performing abilities needed time to grow and catch up to it."

When I ask what kept them humble enough to realize this, Nick admits: "I think it was a combination of humility, and just being scared that it was all going to disappear." He references what he recalls as a Coldplay soundbite, that helped them through that choice: "I don't want to misquote, so you might want to fact check, but something about the fact that, they had become too big, you know, for their level of musicianship, so they worked harder than ever and went even deeper creatively. We really related to that." I'm unable to confirm the words belong to any member of Coldplay, but wherever The Jonas Brothers came across it, it must have been a comfort to know they were navigating charted rockstar waters.

Listening to the brothers reflect, it seems that the pyre underneath The Jonas Brothers' flame-out was simply the reality that Nick, Joe and Kevin are genuinely skilled, creative musicians, who were always going to clash with their cramped confines. Maybe the demises of commercial boy bands aren't a product of personal dysfunction at all, but rather, of their artistic health — evidence that they're composed of living, breathing human beings, rather than attractive androids positioned in the right spots on a music video set. If a group of kids in The Jonas Brothers' position forge ahead cheerfully into the complex chaos of their twenties without craving autonomy from each other or Disney's iron fist, someone should probably check under their curls for lobotomy scars.

"I think it was a combination of humility, and just being scared that it was all going to disappear." — Nick Jonas

"It really took the last six, seven years to figure out who we were as people and what kind of music we wanted to make." Nick says. He mentions tactfully that "a lot of young performers find this transition into adulthood really challenging," and implies pushing the bounds of their wholesome, juvenile aesthetic while still operating as The Jonas Brothers might not have been pretty: "If we had continued to try to push things forward the way we were operating, it might have been difficult. Perhaps we would have had to make bolder statements... shocked people into understanding who we are. I think the world is more accepting of us as adults than they would have been if we insisted, 'This is who we are now, accept us.'"

If they hadn't abandoned their spot at the top, and taken the time to grow up and chill out, avoiding many of the more excruciating personal and professional pitfalls of young pop stardom, The Jonas Brothers might have found themselves somewhat tragic figures in 2019, doomed to a career mired in nostalgia. Instead Nick, Kevin and Joe are having the time of their lives on their prodigal pop homecoming. I doubt they'd have this moment if they'd staged their return, however, by attempting to make the world see them as more than "just a boy band." With no ambitions beyond "trying to bottle happiness" and bringing "positive vibes to the world," as Nick explains of the album title inspiration, The Jonas Brothers, against the odds, have plucked themselves out of our "Week in 2009" column and earned a place in the living, breathing cultural fabric of 2019.

Maybe the key is simply prioritizing what's always been at the core of The Jonas Brothers: the fans — their palates and desires, giving them new lyrics to tattoo on their ankles, Easter eggs to mine for the details of their lives, and concerts to scream at with their friends.

"The reunion... felt like getting my best friend back after a long time," one fan, whose handle is @jonasbr0, says on Twitter. Another, whose display handle reads "Kat LOVES the Jonas Brothers," claims "I'm the most excited that anyone has ever been about anything," revealing "When I graduated high school I decorated my cap to say "I'd rather be at a Jonas Brothers concert." "Their music has brought some of my best friends into my life. We've all grown up together with the boys" says @taylaxo, whose pinned Tweet is a photo of herself in a sweatshirt printed with a Tweet from Joe announcing the reunion.

Nick muses, "The best part of this go around, is the fact that those fans have lived with our records for so many years that they're part of their lives, and they're really meaningful to them. We can feel that energy. All those years of fearing it was going to disappear are now kind of..." he trails off. 

Source: PAPER Magazine

[bccity]

JUNE 2019 BC ENTERTAINMENT SCHEDULES & REVIEW

Members may earn 3 points each (up to 6 points) for writing, by the end of June 30 KST:

A solo para of 400+ words based on their monthly schedule (does not count toward your monthly limit).

A thread of six posts (three per participant, including the starter) based on the monthly schedule.

Threads and solos do not have to take place directly during an important date listed on the schedule, but must be related to what the muse is mentioned to be doing in the paragraph explaining their schedule/the company’s schedule for the month and/or their thoughts on the mentioned activities or lack thereof.

These schedules may be updated throughout the month if new information needs to be added.

Overall Company

There’s still whispers around the company about an end nearing to the Goeun situation, from talk that she’s going to sign with Gold Star due to the article about her meeting with Bang Sunyoung last summer to rumors that BC is going to completely blacklist her and sell rumors about her to the press, but any higher-ups or legal employees who hear people talking are quick to shut them down and give a lecture about gossiping. The retreat could very well serve as a good distraction for everyone in the company. Still, everyone under the company being encouraged to attend their labelmates’ events (namely Lipstick’s concert this month and WISH’s concert next month) in the coming months to show a united front could be taken as a sign something’s coming.

Important dates:

June 1-6: Hawaii retreat.

Decipher

Now that active promotions for their latest comeback have concluded, this month is spent on preparing for their sold out fan meeting at the end of the month. The fan meeting is awards show themed, so each member will be tasked with working with their managers to come up with a (semi-)comedic award title to be presented to them and a speech that will accompany it. There will also be performances of a handful of their recent title tracks, a cover stage by each member, and an unexpected performance of “Heartthrob” by Decipher V as an unofficial tease of the unit’s newly planned return.

Important dates:

June 30: Decipher Awards fanmeeting at Korea University Hwajeong Gymnasium in Seoul, South Korea.

              ↳ Decipher R & V

This month, Decipher V is called into a meeting announcing BC plans to have them make a comeback this year after after five years, likely due to the company’s decreasing profits, but no one outright says that. Preparations are set to begin next month.

Important dates:

June 15: Meeting with management.

BEE

Their comeback this month does very well, not that BC would have settled for any less. It looks to be the surefire song of the summer (until Femme Fatale comes back and proves to be major competition for that title, that is). Two variety show appearances are also scheduled, where they’ll be asked image-building questions approved by BC about re-signing with BC, their future hopes for the group, their friendship, and show off their special skills and tell cute stories. At the end of the month, they’ll be announced as one of the new Seoul Metropolitan City Ambassadors and attend a ceremony with the other chosen figures.

Important dates:

June 4: Release of “I Swear” & pre-recorded Sweet & Sour mini album showcase, promotions continue until July 4.

June 11: Radio Star filming (to be aired June 19).

June 18: Happy Together filming (to be aired June 27).

June 27: Seoul Metropolitan City Ambassador ceremony at Sewoon Hall in Seoul, South Korea (also attending: 7ROPHY).

Knight

Knight will be staying a few extra days following the Hawaii retreat in Hawaii to film for a group photo book that will be released later in the year. There isn’t much publicly on the schedule this month save for an appearance as the “dream stars” on an episode of Stage K where they’ll serve as the panel giving feedback on cover groups performing several of their songs and give an interview with questions on their favorite Knight choreography, the hardest Knight choreography, and the most memorable choreography to them. Privately, they’ll be spending long hours at the company building finishing album recording early in the month and then going on to learning choreographies for the new songs and doing photo jacket shoots for the album. They’ll film the music video during the last week of the month. Additionally, they’ll be filming a CF for Lotte Duty Free as part of BC’s mission to take full advantage of a potential company partnership with Lotte.

Important dates:

June 7-9: Photo book shoots in Hawaii.

June 11: Filming for Stage K episode (to be aired: June 23).

June 18: Lotte Duty Free CF filming.

June 24: Now or Never M/V filming.

              ↳ White Knight

While the full group records and prepares for their comeback next month, the White Knight members are also recording for a Japanese single release at the end of the month. They already recorded an initial version to perform the song on their Japanese tour last month, but management wants to re-record parts before it’s officially released, so they’ll be in the studio to fix parts. After this single release, it seems White Knight won’t have any schedules for the foreseeable future, another sign of BC’s shifting focus to their junior group.

Important dates:

June 28: Release of “Paper Cuts” Japanese single.

Lipstick

Their tour kicks off in Seoul mid-month, which means the two weeks leading up to it are busy with rehearsal. The concerts will also include their first performances of their new single a few days before it releases on top of their greatest hits from throughout their career. They’ll also be filming a CF for Lotte Department Store, who is helping sponsor their tour, this month. On top of that, word has passed down that the company plans for Lipstick to release a new Japanese single around October, the music video for which will have a brief nostalgic flashback to First Love era with a pole dancing intro, so the members are back into pole dancing lessons a couple of times this month to reteach them that skill in case they’ve forgotten.

Important dates:

June 15: Prima Donna tour concert at Olympic Handball Gymnasium in Seoul, South Korea. 

June 16: Prima Donna tour concert at Olympic Handball Gymnasium in Seoul, South Korea. 

June 19: Release of “Lil’ Touch” & single album, promotions continue until July 19.

June 21: Lotte Department Store CF filming.

              ↳ Lip Gloss

No schedules.

CHARM

Members are allowed to begin moving out on June 17 after returning from their main schedule this month (though they’ve only been trainee debt-free for about six months thanks to their size), a fan sign in Kuala Lumpur as part of their group deal with The SAEM. Said fan sign won’t go as smoothly as BC had hoped thanks to a delay in getting through the airport leaving the group arriving two hours later than the scheduled start time, but once they’re there, they’ll go through normal fan sign duties and be asked questions by the event’s MC about their skin care routines, which member has the best bare face/skin, and do their best fan service to apologize for their late arrival. Next month, they’ll become BC’s next group to embark on a 2019 Japan tour (before a Japanese release in the third quarter of the year), so rehearsals for that are underway as well.

Important dates:

June 15: The SAEM x CHARM fansign at Pavilion Kuala Lumpur in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

WISH

The general public and fanbase may not see WISH’s latest comeback as a complete failure, but WISH’s team is in emergency mode and jumping on the performance of their latest single as a glaring warning sign. They may have outsold themselves physically, but “Fancy” was their first promoted single not to go number one in three years and also only achieved one music show win, a low only slightly above their debut song and “Dream Girls”. Their team is cracking down with stricter diets and curfews and more practice time, seemingly punishing the members for results most other girl groups spend their whole careers wanting to achieve. Rumors of summer comebacks from WISH’s biggest competition isn’t helping things either, and may explain BC’s rush to sign onto a new contract with Estèe Lauder and get a CF filmed. This month, behind the scenes work is the name of the game as most days are spent either rehearsing for their world tour, including special unit stages doled out by BC, which begins next month or recording for their next Japanese release, which is scheduled for August.

Important dates:

June 12: Fansign in Gangnam, Seoul.

June 13: End of music show promotions

June 20: Estèe Lauder CF filming.

[omdaily10]

WRAPPED UP

Guest Artist: Travie McCoy

Writers: Olly Murs, Claude Kelly, Steve Robson, Travie McCoy

Producers: Steve Robson

Album: Never Been Better

Release Date: 16/11/2014

B-Side: ‘Wrapped Up (Cahill Radio Mix)’ (Credits as above)

Chart Positions: #3 (UK), #1 (Japan), #2 (Scotland), #3 (Belgium), #7 (Ireland), #9 (Czech Republic), #11 (Germany), #15 (Australia), #15 (Poland), #16 (Finland), #16 (Slovakia), #17 (Netherlands), #18 (Switzerland), #18 (Spain), #21 (Austria), #21 (Sweden), #40 (USA)

Sales: 600k (UK, Platinum), 35k (Australia, Gold), 40k (Sweden, Platinum)

A lot can happen inside a year, particularly in a world so fickle and trend dominated as pop music. Hence having been everywhere and anywhere for much of the previous year, 2014 was, by comparison, a very quiet time indeed for Olly. In fact, the only signs of him still being present in the public eye came in the form of a couple of one-off charity appearances, and also that June, at his now bi-annual venturing out onto the pitch at Old Trafford for Soccer Aid, a celebs and pros football match raising money for UNICEF (Olly has played five times in total for the England team now, and captained them to a win at the 2018 match).

For the first time since the start of his career, he was able to go take time out purely to focus on music (and in his words 'grow a beard and get fat'), hence the first nine months of 2014 were spent cooped up in the studio, writing and recording the songs that would go onto make his fourth album. Things certainly changed in a big way, for during the time Olly was away, there seemed to be a sudden explosion of solo male competition in the charts.

Ed Sheeran was now the biggest popstar on the planet, having just released his multi-platinum second album 'X' and huge hits like ‘Sing’ and ‘Thinking Out Loud’, and Sam Smith and George Ezra both released their debut efforts this year. It was clear that whatever Olly decided to come back with, it would have to make as big an impact as possible to remind people he was still at the top of his game despite being away for the best part of a year.

So already there was a lot riding on 'Wrapped Up' even before he unveiled it with a world exclusive first play on national radio at the beginning of that October. Coming off the back of the biggest selling album of his career to date, it made business sense on paper to repeat the formula of that album's trajectory again - launching the album with a killer floor filling pop stormer that just so happens to have an international guest star on it, even if some critics suggested it was a lazy move.

Owing sonic motifs to disco classics by Evelyn 'Champagne' King and - in a spooky forbearing of his future work, though he didn't know it then - Nile Rodgers and Chic, 'Wrapped Up' was a guitar driven dance pop funk workout with a stormer of a chorus and a cheekily placed double entendre involving locks and keys that screamed chart topper from the first play. The appearance of a guest rap from Travie McCoy, the lead rapper and founder of Gym Class Heroes, who had also scored big success with Bruno Mars on his worldwide hit 'Billionaire' in 2010, enhanced its credentials further.

One thing that Olly had also quietly achieved in the UK - without anyone realising it at the time - was the unique distinction of being the only British male solo artist to notch up a number one single with each lead release from a brand-new album. It surely stood to reason then, that 'Wrapped Up' would be joining that list and making it four in a row. However, several changes of circumstance meant this didn't go according to plan.

International promo was the focus from quite early on in the campaign, with the single being released and promoted in Australia first before we got it here in the UK. It meant that no thanks to an administrative error at Sony Music - who'd been slowly releasing select tracks off the new album as 'Instant Grat' teasers - that 'Wrapped Up' was mistakenly available for a couple of days to download off the UK store of iTunes two whole weeks before its official UK release date. One can only speculate what might have happened had they corrected the error sooner - but then this was compounded by another turn of events.

With just over a week to go until release, Olly then recieved a call from music legend Sir Bob Geldof, the man who'd put together the historic Band Aid single 'Do They Know It's Christmas' and subsequent Live Aid concerts to raise money for those living in developing countries. Olly was asked if he wanted to appear on the 30th anniversary recording alongside the likes of Bono, Chris Martin, One Direction, Rita Ora and Ed Sheeran, and he duly obliged.

As he returned to The X Factor live shows to launch 'Wrapped Up' proper with a homecoming performance on its release date of 16th November 2014, Sir Bob was there too to give the first play on terrestrial TV of the video for the Band Aid 30 recording of 'Do They Know It's Christmas'. He jokingly apologised to Olly on air after his interview with Dermot O’Leary, who now knew full well that 'Wrapped Up' was set to miss out on the top spot.

Seven days later, and this is exactly what happened. Even outsold by 'Real Love', the then new single from contemporary dance pop outfit Clean Bandit, who'd had a phenomenal year with their hit 'Rather Be' with Jess Glynne (and whose then violinist, Neil Amin Smith, was incredibly vicious about Olly on social media at the time, stating he was only fit for a low rent musical theatre career. He left the band over a year later and hasn’t been heard from since. Go figure), 'Wrapped Up' had to be content with a #3 debut and peak - still a great chart position, but by no means what was needed at this point.

It meant that Olly was on the UK's number one single that week, but just not the one he intended, with Band Aid 30 selling over a quarter of a million copies to top the chart, despite a heft of negative reviews and feedback from music critics, social commentators and soapbox preachers alike for the new version of 'Do They Know It's Christmas' on Twitter. Along with ‘Wrapped Up’, it was absent from the top 10 by the time Christmas came.

Despite the chart topping success of the parent album, and being a top 20 hit in thirteen other countries (including Japan, where it gave him his first chart topper), it was clear from the performance of ‘Wrapped Up’ that things had slipped a bit compared to the mammoth fanfare that had greeted ‘Troublemaker’ two years previously, and it wasn’t unfair to say that Olly suddenly had something to prove five years into his career. Fortunately, another huge single was waiting in the wings to quell those doubts...

OTHER THOUGHTS

A remix from top dance DJ and producer Cahill was the main B-side on both the digital bundle and the Europe only CD single. UK fans were also treated to the non-rap version of ‘Wrapped Up’ and a special acoustic rendition of the track recorded for the website of Fabulous, the free glossy magazine that comes inside the Sunday edition of British national newspaper The Sun. Olly has appeared on its cover more times than any other male star to date – since 2011 he’s made a total of seven appearances.

[oracles]

"kindaaaa wanna do this but i don't have enough kpoppies following me .. sad" *rubs hands together* alright here we go, challenge time. EXO, NCT, BTS, Red Velvet

kendra omg … I APPRECIATE YOU 😤💖 thank you! most of these will be under the cut probably

▷EXO

my first bias: kai. he was the first one that stood out to me in call me baby

your current bias and why: honestly i don’t really know. i love their music but don’t really stan the group like that. chanyeol maybe? he’s really talented and i admire that. perhaps kyungsoo for the same reasons

favorite song: oh boy …. they actually have a TON of amazing songs, so it’s really hard to pick. ‘promise’ and ‘sweet lies’ are just two examples of faves

favorite mv: i’m gonna be biased and say ‘call me baby’ since that was my first song that i heard by them (back when it came out too actually)

otp: i don’t ship members in groups, and also i feel like i don’t know the members well enough to say who has my favorite dynamic. maybe baekhyun/sehun?

member you think has the best smile: generally, i love all smiles but if i had to pick one … maybe i’ll be biased and say chanyeol?

favourite choreography: part of me wants to say call me baby since i’m biased, but overdose and growl are also pretty iconic

favorite era: call me baby. im 100% biased and what about it?

do you own any merchandise?: nope

have you seen them live?: i haven’t

favorite voice/singer: chen and kyungsoo, probably, if i had to pick

favorite dancer: kai

SEND ME A KPOP GROUP!

▷ NCT

my first bias: different from the first members i knew, but lucas

your current bias and why: if i had to pick one person, still lucas. frankly, lucas was the reason i really started properly stanning nct in the first place. i watched the knowing brothers episode he was on and i kinda caught feelings since then. he’s so kind-hearted and hard working while also making me laugh and being just a general ray of sunshine, i love he ;-;

favorite song: this is IMPOSSIBLE to choose … considering the fact that there’s so many subunits to the group too omg … but here’s just a few per unit (and by no means a complete list of my faves). ummm a few include limitless, the 7th sense, 1 2 3, la la love, dream launch, no longer, back 2 u, and like a Ton more

favorite mv: i have to say cherry bomb because it was the song that got me into them (musically) in the first place. i saw the teaser pics for cherry bomb and that was what got me intrigued

otp fave dynamic: there’s a lot to name (considering there’s 21 members) but can i just say that overall wayv is my emotional support nct unit

member you think has the best smile: i wanna say ALL of them, but because i know answers like this can get exhausting i will give a special shoutout to mr nakamoto yuta . the healing smile king himself

favorite choreography: idk why cherry bomb keeps coming to mind again, but the way that they did that death drop and the leg splitting move? im shaking so hard just thinking about it dhdbjdg baby don’t stop and boss also get special shoutouts bc im biased

favorite era: this is hard …. this being such a huge group makes things infinitely harder but some of my faves include: go (nct dream), boss (nct u), cherry bomb (nct 127) but i pretty much love them all, even though firetruck was … a mess stylistically

do you own any merchandise?: i don’t, but i’ve been thinking of getting an album or two someday. idk which one though

have you seen them live?: no, but i hope to one day! hopefully with envi

favorite voice/singer: all of vocal line? hghghdfg but i will give a special shoutout to jaehyun for absolutely hurting my feelings with ‘try again’ and his cover of a whole new world 

favorite dancer: ten and jisung

▷ BTS

my first bias: yoongi! the first significant foray i made into bts was actually having agust d sent to me by envi

your current bias and why: haters envi will say it’s hoseok and i will deny those rumors. im ot7 biased ONLY. if i had to narrow it down a bit, MAYBE i will let bein rapline biased slide. but honestly, all of the bts members are not only so amazingly talented but also good people in general so it makes it hard for me to put one person over the others bc it makes me feel bad (though i know there’s no reason to be, since having a bias doesn’t mean you like the other members any less)

favorite song: i absolutely cannot and will not pick just one song. but i will put it out there, for the record, that baepsae was the first song of theirs i heard so it’ll always be special to me for that reason

favorite mv: if i had to pick, i have a soft spot for spring day and blood sweat & tears

otp fave dynamic: because they’re a group with so much good synergy, i could name any duo, but from the beginning, i’ve been especially partial for yoonseok

member you think has the best smile: ALL of them but in the spirit of being less indecisive, special shoutout to hoseok and taehyung

favorite choreography: again, this is hard. in part bc suddenly my brain decides to go proper blank. it’s not my favorite per se, but baepsae deserves a spot here because of how hype that song and its choreo is till this day, years later

favorite era: run era will have a special place in my heart bc of the Looks but the sheer power that bs&t had ….. can she ever even be topped truly?

do you own any merchandise?: i do! officially, i have all of the love yourself albums (two are from kendra) and i have a bt21 mang doll (from envi). unofficially, i also have a 2018 bts desk calendar (also from kendra)

have you seen them live?: no, but one day i really hope i can!

favorite voice/singer: ALL . but if i remember in my early stanning days, i had a special spot for taehyung’s voice. if you listen to singularity, then you know

favorite dancer: hoseok (give him more choreo in the center) & jimin

▷  RED VELVET

my first bias: joy

your current bias and why: still joy, but rotating through all of the other members now as well except for wendy. i honestly don’t even know why joy is a bias, but i guess she just chose me (also me gay)

favorite song: there’s quite a few honestly. i can never really pick just ONE song for any group, unless i barely listen to them. two of theirs that i’ve been listening to quite a bit is ‘cause it’s you’ and ‘kingdom come’ 

favorite mv: peek-a-boo. it was my first music video/comeback with them and the concept of it really changed my life and was what motivated me into stanning them in the first place

otp fave dynamic: i’m biased so i just wanna say joy/seulgi. but also, i feel like while i listen to them a lot, i also am not super knowledgeable in the group’s dynamics to definitively say

member you think has the best smile: im biased so i’m saying joy. irene too bc she’s just so beautiful so how could i not

favorite choreography: not necessarily THE favorite one for me, but be natural’s choreo? i kinda felt that

favorite era: peek-a-boo, bad boy or red flavor. honestly probably some of their best recently comebacks as well. the others have fallen kinda flat for me

do you own any merchandise?: nope

have you seen them live?: i have not

favorite voice/singer: sad to say it .. but wendy has some pretty great vocals. also i really love seulgi’s voice

favorite dancer: seulgi, by far. her stage presence outsold as well

[studentsofshield]

Marvel's Captain Marvel: A Legacy of Failed Relaunches

This piece is about the history of the Captain Marvel name in superhero comic books. First we have to start with the originator, then how it was shut down, then we can get to how it was stolen and how it's been handled since. I will not be getting in to Miracleman/Marvelman, since that is a whole other layer of convoluted.

Fawcett Publications was a publisher of magazines in the 1920s and 30s. They wanted to break into the comic book business after seeing the insane success of Superman starting in 1938. So in 1940 writer Bill Parker and artist CC Beck came up with a superhero for this purpose. The character was to be called Captain Thunder and debut in Flash Comics #1. However, All-American Periodicals beat them to the punch with their own Flash Comics #1 with a cover date of January 1940, debuting the Flash, Hawkman, and other characters. So Fawcett switched the title to Thrill Comics. Which they couldn't use either when Standard/Nedor launched Thrilling Comics #1 with a cover date of February 1940. I guess even the "ing" was too close for trademark comfort. January 1940 also saw the first issue of Fiction House's Jungle Comics, which had a minor backup feature starring Captain Terry Thunder. So when their character was finally unveiled to the public, he was Captain Marvel and appearing in WHIZ Comics #2.

The parallels to Superman were there off the bat and intentional. The first cover features Captain Marvel throwing a car, in reference to the iconic Action Comics #1, but one-upping it. Their powers, costumes, and adventures were somewhat similar. Captain Marvel arguably improved on the Superman formula. Instead of the grown, nerdy Clark Kent, Captain Marvel's secret identity was the child Billy Batson. Rather than looking up to Superman, kids could put their selves in Billy Batson's shoes. The art of CC Beck and others was also more cartoony and the stories more outlandish and fun. While Superman was dealing with corrupt politicians and domestic abusers, Captain Marvel was fighting the moon and hanging out with anthropomorphic tigers.

Captain Marvel replicated the success of Superman, and for a while even outsold the poster boy of comic books. The character's success led to Fawcett creating a whole line of comics and superheroes like Bulletman, Spy Smasher, Minute-Man, Ibis the Invincible and so on in the titles Nickel Comics, Wow Comics, Master Comics, etc. Captain Marvel started multiplying himself with spinoff characters Captain Marvel Jr. and Mary Marvel (before DC created Supergirl). The publisher experienced great success through the 1940s.

This success bothered some people, namely competitor National (today's DC Comics). They had success earlier shutting down Fox Feature Syndicate's character Wonder Man for being too close to Superman. They even did the same thing to Fawcett with their character Master Man. Starting in 1941 National took Fawcett to court over Captain Marvel. The lawsuit and all its subsequent appeals lasted all the way to 1951. Meanwhile Superman was ripping off elements of Captain Marvel along the way, like starting to actually fly, Lex Luthor becoming a bald mad scientist (like Dr. Sivana), and introducing the adventures of Superboy akin to Captain Marvel Jr. The long legal struggle and the waning superhero popularity of the 1950s led to Fawcett giving up on the case and shutting down their entire comics line in 1953.

Of course, having won, DC took the opportunity to pull over Fawcett's talent and put them to work on Superman. DC then ended up licensing Fawcett's characters in the 1970s. Captain Marvel has been fully integrated to the DC Universe through the years, for better or worse.

There is just one ironic hiccup though. While Captain Marvel lay dormant in the 1960s, the trademark lapsed. Another comic publisher by the name of Timely Comics had went through a few eras and name changes to Atlas Comics and then to Marvel Comics. Marvel was becoming a major force in the early 1960s thanks to Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko. Publisher Martin Goodman demanded that they snatch up the trademark to Captain Marvel. Fitting I suppose given the name of the company.

So in December 1967 Marvel's version of Captain Marvel debuted in Marvel Super-Heroes 12. Rather than a Superman-like character, this version was Mar-Vell, an alien warrior who was tasked to spy on Earth but then decided to protect humanity. The stories were light science fiction fare.

This Captain Marvel would not become a sales juggernaut like Fawcett's. Marvel has to maintain their right to the trademark at least every two years though. So this has lead to dozens of relaunches and different characters under the Captain Marvel name. 

This is their legacy of failure.

After two appearances in Marvel Super-Heroes (12-13) Captain Marvel received his own self-titled comic in May 1968. From the first appearance through the fourth issue of the series, Gene Colan drew the character and Roy Thomas wrote him. Then not even a year in new creative team Arnold Drake and Don Heck hop on. Other creators like Gary Friedrich, Dick Ayers, and Archie Goodwin rotate through. The original green and white costume has a simplistic design that has become retroactively classic, but is really not too special.

With issue 17 in October 1969, Roy Thomas comes back and is joined this time by Gil Kane. The pair introduce a new costume and the unique dynamic of Captain Marvel playing switcheroo with perennial sidekick Rick Jones. The quality of the book vastly improves, but it only gets the chance to show it off for three issues.

After a six month hiatus, Captain Marvel resumes with issue 20 and the same creative team from before. This time they only get to pump out two issues. The book will now be bimonthly for the most part from here on out.

The character would feature prominently in the classic Kree/Skrull War storyline in Avengers, also written by Roy Thomas. This kept him relevant through 1971 even without a book.

And Mar-Vell is back again two years later in 1972 (recall the trademark rules). This time we have three uninspired issues written by three different writers. The only notable piece here is that they're drawn by Wayne Boring. Who was one of the definitive Superman artists of the 1940s and 50s in comic books and strips. In 1967 DC kicked him out, as they had done with most of their iconic Golden Age artists. Super fan and historian Roy Thomas hired him to do a few jobs for Marvel in the 70s. It's cool to see, but his style honestly was out of date by this point. The irony of these past two relaunches is that both returning issues use the cover text "the hero who wouldn't die!" The irony will become evident in a bit.

By this point DC has licensed the original Fawcett Captain Marvel. Due to Marvel's trademark usage, DC has to title the comic Shazam (the catchphrase Billy Batson uses to transform into the hero). Shazam runs from 1973 through 1978 and then the character moves to anthology backups. Superman even introduces the Big Red Cheese on the cover of the first issue. Within the pages of the comic, the character is still allowed to be called Captain Marvel. This alleged confusion has caused anxiety over the years for DC and with the New 52 reboot in 2011 they tried to officially change the icon's name to Shazam.

With issue 25 in 1973 Captain Marvel finally becomes a must-read comic when a young Jim Starlin jumps on board as artist. He had previously written and drawn fill-in issues of Iron Man that introduced the characters Thanos and Drax the Destroyer. He brought those characters with him and began writing as well, giving fans the iconic Thanos War arc. Starlin sticks around for less than a year. His final issue is 34, where Mar-Vell fights Nitro and the infamous cover text describes him as "the man who killed Captain Marvel." It's originally just supposed to be a sensational lie as is the tradition.

With Starlin gone, Captain Marvel still continues to issue 62 in 1979. Al Milgrom and Pat Broderick draw most of this run. Steve Englehart, Scott Edelman, and Doug Moench handle the writing. Nothing truly memorable or relevant happened, though by this point there were Mar-Vell fans who surely enjoyed it.

Supporting character Carol Danvers also got superpowers and got a spinoff title that ran two years. Mostly written by Chris Claremont. Ms. Marvel would have her own too-late creative reinvention in issue 20 thanks to artist Dave Cockrum. This book was arguably better than the book it spun out of at this point. Carol Danvers will become important again in this saga, but for the time being Claremont pulls her way to be an occasional presence in his vast X-Men run.

Captain Marvel was cancelled prematurely, so Marvel launched a new volume of Marvel Spotlight to pump out inventory issues. Captain Marvel appeared in Marvel Spotlight 1-4, and 8. Of curiosity is that Steve Ditko and Frank Miller drew the last two issues.

Outside of a few appearances, Mar-Vell doesn't make a major appearance between September 1980 and April 1982. When Jim Starlin was offered to write and draw the first installment of the Marvel Graphic Novel series and kill off a major character. One can presume he wasn't allowed to choose Spider-Man. He went with Captain Marvel, following up from his final issue on the series and revealing that the fight with Nitro gave him cancer. He died surrounded by all his fellow heroes and the book is a genuine emotional classic. It solidifies Mar-Vell as a legend, even if his original series never truly got him to deserve that reputation.

Mar-Vell would be featured in a reprint series titled The Life of Captain Marvel in 1985 focusing on the Starlin run. A three issue flashback series to his green and white era was published in 1997.

They need to maintain the trademark though, right? Enter Monica Rambeau in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #16 the same year. Her connection to Mar-Vell was nonexistent, but she took on the Captain Marvel name regardless. Creator Roger Stern carried her over to his legendary Avengers run and she even lead the team for a period. Monica has had tons of memorable appearances since, such as the brilliant Nextwave: Agents of HATE.

Monica would receive solo one-shots in 1989 and 1994. Both by the creative team of Dwayne McDuffie and M.D. Bright.

The third Marvel character to go by Captain Marvel was Genis-Vell. Originally introduced in Silver Surfer Annual #6 as Legacy, Genis is Mar-Vell's bastard child. Genis gets his father's Nega Bands and even is linked to Rick Jones. He got his own series written by Fabian Nicieza in late 1995 that was cancelled prematurely after six issues. In Avengers Unplugged #5 Genis officially takes the Captain Marvel name from Monica, who then suffers through several code names over the years.

After disappearing for about two years, Genis pops up again prominently in the Avengers Forever maxiseries. This launched a 2000 series written by Peter David and drawn by ChrissCross. The series was a critical darling and cult hit, but sales weren't perfect.

To try and boost sales, the book was relaunched in 2002 as part of the U-Decide Campaign. Which was a (marketing ploy) bet between David, Bill Jemas, and Joe Quesada. Fans helped to decide which of three books would survive. It helps that the other two books (Marville and Ultimate Adventures) were absolute trash, but Captain Marvel handily won. It lasted another 25 issues to bring the entire run to 60 issues. During the run, the fourth Captain Marvel Phyla-Vell is introduced as Genis' sister/clone. She uses the name briefly and then becomes Quasar and then Martyr in other stories. Genis eventually goes crazy, then dies.

In 2008 as part of the Secret Invasion crossover, Mar-Vell seems to come back to life in a self-titled miniseries. However, it's revealed that this character is a Skrull with fake memories.

The Skrull fake dies, but is able to pass on his wishes to the Kree hero Noh-Varr. Who was previously known as Marvel Boy, but then becomes Captain Marvel during the Dark Reign era. After discovering he's being manipulated, he abandons the Dark Avengers and takes on the Protector identity.

While the Avengers stock is rising in the 2000s thanks to Brian Michael Bendis, Carol Danvers is back as Ms. Marvel and her mission is to become the prominent hero she thinks she can be. To really promote her, in 2012 Marvel gives her the Captain Marvel name, redesigns her costume, and launches a new title. Kelly Sue DeConnick will shepard the character for the next few years. This series only lasts 17 issues.

By 2012 Marvel has now entered their relaunch trigger happy era. So in 2014 Captain Marvel is relaunched while keeping the same writer. This volume is even shorter at 15 issues.

As a tie-in to the alternate reality event Secret Wars in 2015, Carol Danvers gets her own miniseries still by KSD.

Coming out of Secret Wars, Captain Marvel gets another volume. This one lasts only 10 issues. Marvel brings in TV writers Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas. They leave halfway through and are replaced by Christos and Ruth Gage. The character is significantly entangled in the divisive crossover event Civil War II around this era.

In 2017 another relaunch is due and Carol gets the slight title change to The Mighty Captain Marvel. Prose writer Margaret Stohl is the writer. This series lasts nine issues before being renumbered/retitled as part of Marvel's Legacy initiative. Still with Stohl, renumbered for only five issues.

A soon to be released one-shot tie-in to Infinity Countdown promises Carol adventuring with Monica and possibly Mar-Vell. Marvel has been subtly teasing Mar-Vell's genuine return again recently.

With a Captain Marvel movie starring Carol Danvers just around the corner, Marvel obviously needs to relaunch again (SIGH). July 2018 will bring The Life of Captain Marvel #1. Still written by Stohl, the series promises to retell Carol Danver's origin. So maybe they'll decide to relaunch it again after the origin arc is over.

It's unclear whether DC would have been able to quickly grab the trademark back in the possibly free periods of 1984, 1987, 1992, 1998, and 2006. I don't know if the publication of collected editions fulfills the trademark requirements. If so, Masterworks and other collections could tick off some of those possible open spots.

To summarize, here are all of Marvel's Captain Marvel titles and relaunches:

Mar-Vell Marvel Super-Heroes 12-13 (December 1967-March 1968) Captain Marvel Vol 1 1-19 (May 1968-December 1969) Captain Marvel Vol 1 20-21 (June-August 1970) Captain Marvel Vol 1 22-62 (September 1972-May 1979) Marvel Spotlight 1-4, 8 (July 1979-September 1980) Death of Captain Marvel (April 1982) Life of Captain Marvel Vol 1 1-5 (August-December 1985) Untold Legend of Captain Marvel 1-3 (April-June 1997)

Monica Rambeau: Captain Marvel Vol 2 1 (November 1989) Captain Marvel Vol 2 1/2 (February 1994)

Genis-Vell: Captain Marvel Vol 3 1-6 (December 1995-May 1996) Captain Marvel Vol 4 0-35 (November 1999-October 2002) Captain Marvel Vol 5 1-25 (December 2002-September 2004)

Skrull Fake: Captain Marvel Vol 6 1-5 (January-June 2008)

Carol Danvers: Captain Marvel Vol 7 1-17 (September 2012-January 2014) Captain Marvel Vol 8 1-15 (May 2014-July 2015) Captain Marvel and the Carol Corps 1-4 (August-November 2015) Captain Marvel Vol 9 1-10 (March 2016-January 2017) Mighty Captain Marvel 0-9 (February-November 2017) Captain Marvel Vol 1 125-129 (December 2017-April 2018) Life of Captain Marvel Vol 2 1-? (September 2018-?)

*Dates used are cover dates.