Kick out the jams

Singer Mary J. Blige performs onstage in Irvine, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

No sound check required. Let’s get to it....

January

Electronic musician Richie Hawtin — born in Oxfordshire, England, raised on Ontario’s border with Michigan, where he became a lead player of Detroit techno’s second wave — collaborates with Italian choreographer Enzo Cosimi to create 9.20, an ethereal composition for the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympic Games.

BabyShambles  singer Pete Doherty is arrested three times in a single day for suspicion of drug possession. The addled rocker — a.k.a. Doperty, for his long-running, well-documented struggle with heroin and cocaine abuse — is punished with a fortnight in jail for the combined offences. “I’m sorry if my order will affect your fans and people who go to your concerts,” says the London judge who sentences him. Doherty will be arrested at least five more times before the year is through.

R.I.P. Lou Rawls, Wilson Pickett.

February

Sly Stone during his brief performance at the 48th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

U2 are the top dogs at the 48th annual Grammy Awards, collecting five trophies. Mariah Carey, John Legend and Kanye West tie for second, claiming three awards each. Carey’s wins halt a 15-year Grammy drought for the pop diva. But Sly Stone steals the show. The “J.D. Salinger of funk” joins a star-studded (and suitably uneven) Sly & the Family Stone tribute medley. He plays a keyboard for a moment and sings part of his Family Stone classic I Want to Take You Higher before fleeing the stage. Still, it counts as his first major public performance since 1993.

The Rolling Stones draw more than one million fans to their free concert on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach. It’s among the biggest rock crowds of all time, though no match for the estimated 3.5 million people who came to Copacabana to hear Rod Stewart on New Year’s Eve 1994.

Apple’s iTunes Store, which has been operational for less than three years, sells its billionth song. The milestone download is Coldplay’s Speed of Sound, purchased by Michigan resident Alex Ostrovsky.

R.I.P. J Dilla.

March

Three 6 Mafia becomes the first hip-hop act to perform at the Academy Awards , and the second (after Eminem) to win an Oscar. Their composition It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp, from the Terrence Howard vehicle Hustle & Flow, gets the nod for best original song. Group members Juicy J and DJ Paul include shout-outs to Jesus, Oscars producer Gil Cates, Ludacris and George Clooney in their acceptance speech. “We bringing the house. We out of here. Memphis, Tennessee!”

Bon Jovi become the first rock act to top Billboard’s U.S. Hot Country Chart: the band’s single Who Says You Can’t Go Home spends two weeks at No. 1.

R.I.P. Ali Farka Touré, Pío Leyva, Buck Owens.

April

Singer Michael Bublé holding his hardware backstage during the 2006 Juno Awards ceremony in Halifax. (Donald Weber/Getty Images)

Halifax hosts the 2006 Juno Awards on the weekend of March 31 to April 2. Bruce Cockburn wins the Junos’ first-ever humanitarian prize during Saturday’s non-televised ceremony. Sunday’s soiree includes boos for host Pamela Anderson when she riffs on the local seal hunt: “One of my favourite artists couldn’t be here tonight, Seal. He was afraid he might get clubbed to death.” Montreal rockers Simple Plan are tapped for the Juno Fan Choice Award, but Michael Bublé is the weekend’s big star. The Vancouver crooner collects four trophies, the most of any winner, including artist, single (Home) and album (It’s Time) of the year.

Keith Richards suffers a mild concussion while vacationing in Fiji. Media reports claim he sustained the injury by falling out of a coconut tree; months later, the Rolling Stones guitarist confirmed it to be true.

Neil Young makes his newest album, Living With War, a bitter rant against the foreign policies of American President George W. Bush, available for free streaming on his website.

R.I.P. Gene Pitney, June Pointer, Proof, Keith Bender Jr. (Proof’s alleged shooting victim), Bonnie Owens.

May

Sum 41 lead guitarist Dave (Brownsound) Baksh quits the chart-topping Canadian band to focus on his side project, Brown Brigade . He cites creative differences for the amicable departure: Sum 41 plays pop punk; Baksh is about heavy metal.

Also about metal: Finland’s monster-masked Lordi, whose ditty Hard Rock Hallelujah wins the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest.

Madonna launches her Confessions Tour in Los Angeles. The 60-show, 11-country swing will take in $194.8 million US between now and the third week of September, setting the record for all-time highest-grossing tour by a female artist. Madge gains (a little bit more) international notoriety for the show’s pantomimed crucifixion scene.

Axl Rose and Tommy Hilfiger throw down in a Manhattan club, to the thrill of the New York Post. This is what it sounds like when trees cry.

Taylor (Soul Patrol) Hicks squeaks past Katharine McPhee to win the fifth season of American Idol.

R.I.P. Ian Copeland, Desmond Dekker.

June

Nelly Furtado and Timbaland perform in Universal City, California. (Photo Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Nelly Furtado’s third album, Loose, debuts at No. 1 on Canada’s Top 100 Albums chart and the U.S. Billboard 200. The Victoria, B.C., pop star’s lead North American single, Promiscuous — featuring a diamond-cutter beat by super-producer Timbaland and his current protege, Danjahandz  — becomes her first song to reach No. 1 on the Canadian singles chart and U.S. Hot 100. By early December, Loose will surpass three million copies in worldwide sales.

Toronto’s new opera house, officially named the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, opens to the public. The $150-million building features a subterranean floor filled with sound-absorbing pads, all to prevent nearby subway noise from penetrating the house’s “warm, sensuous womb of a concert hall.”

Police stop Nickelback  singer Chad Kroeger for “excessive speed and erratic driving” in Surrey, B.C. A subsequent investigation results in the hard rocker being charged with impaired driving.

R.I.P. Vince Welnick, Billy Preston, Hilton Ruiz.

July

Pop punk gets a Canadian Barbie and Ken: Avril Lavigne marries Sum 41 singer Deryck (Bizzy D) Whibley in Montecito, Ca.

Paul McCartney files to divorce his second wife, Heather Mills. The couple did not sign a prenuptial agreement before marrying in 2002, although his personal fortune is valued at 825 million pounds. (Really, Macca, how do you sleep?) The months to follow bring a steady drip of outrageous, unproven rumours such as: McCartney physically abused Mills; she was a prostitute before marrying him; he uses illegal drugs; she’s shagging her personal trainer; there are people born after the Baby Boom who care what happens next.

Johnny Cash’s posthumous album American V: A Hundred Highways debuts in the top spot of Neilsen’s SoundScan ratings, the first time the Man in Black has gone No. 1 in 37 years. Nonetheless, the album’s 88,000 sales are the lowest total for a No. 1 debut in SoundScan history.

R.I.P. Syd Barrett.

August

Celebutante Paris Hilton releases her debut album, Paris. Conspicuously absent from its performance credits: Auto-Tune.

Simon Cowell’s relentless search for unknown, telegenic singing sensations at last unearths an all-world, capital-t Talent. Her name is Leona Lewis, she’s competing on British TV’s The X Factor, and she sounds like ... this .

R.I.P. Maynard Ferguson, John Weinzweig.

September

Guitarist Janick Gers (left) and singer Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden perform in San Bernandino, California. (Karl Walter/Getty Images)

A Matter of Life and Death, the 14th studio album of Iron Maiden’s 31-year career, enters Canada’s Top 100 Albums chart at No. 2 and the U.S. Billboard 200 at No. 9. It is the English band’s best-ever opening in both countries; the album ships more than a million copies worldwide during its first week of sales. Ed-die, Ed-die!

Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not wins the U.K.’s Nationwide Mercury Prize for British or Irish album of the year.

Gawker Media launches Idolator, the internet’s 2,206,713rd music blog. OK, that’s probably not true, but it’s the only one with “Pick of the ’Fork,” a weekly feature that includes three passages from Pitchfork Media — arbiter of cool for the indie rock crowd, yet home to some of the most obnoxious music writing committed to binary code — and one decoy passage inserted by Idolator. The challenge is choosing the duck from the geese. Best Idolator fake so far: “With its many Canadian influences, the album is like an Arcade Fire sale.” (Ha!) Worst cluster-’Fork so far: “... intuitive leaps between lo-fi bedroom folk that emphasized monotonous gloom and cacophonous samples to comparatively laid-back country biased toward majestic arrangements and electronic beats.” (Ugh!)

“Never forget the good ... the bad ... and the ugly are always the exact same thing” — Toronto singer Lukas Rossi, winner, Rock Star: Supernova.

Rossi’s forebear, Mississauga-born J.D. Fortune, who became INXS’s replacement singer when he won Rock Star: INXS in September 2005, falls on dark days: Epic Records drops the band 10 months after the release of their under-performing comeback album, Switch. Oh, you fickle fans.

Sept. 13: Owen (Final Fantasy) Pallett’s He Poos Clouds wins Canada’s inaugural Polaris Music Prize , for homegrown album of the year, as determined by a jury of more than 100 Canadian music journos and broadcasters.

Quebec singer Eva Avila becomes Canada’s fourth Idol.

R.I.P. Norman Brooks, Boz Burrell.

October

(Weird) Al Yankovic achieves the first Top 10 single of his 30-year music career. His song White & Nerdy , a parody of Chamillionaire’s Ridin’, peaks at No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100.

k-os blows his cool over a seemingly harmless review of his third album, Atlantis: Hymns for Disco, in Toronto’s NOW magazine. The musician (is he hip hop, pop, something beyond?) blasts author Jason Richards on his MySpace page . The posting by k-os accuses NOW of pushing a racist agenda, and calls Richards “a so-called Trinidadian ... ‘the used!’ ... a fall-out boy ... [who loves] Uncle Tom!” It concludes, “Eat a d---!” The text is deleted in short order. k-os later explains that he removed it after receiving a message from a stress-management expert: “He said, ‘Einstein said intelligence and genius will always be berated by lesser minds.’ And when I read that, I took it down.”

World Container, the Tragically Hip’s 10th studio album, debuts at No. 2 on Canada’s Top 100 Albums chart, halting the Can-rock stalwarts’ years-long slump towards the Tragically Priced to Clear. The album goes platinum in Canada (more than 100,000 sales) within its first month of release.

CBGB, the legendary music club on Manhattan’s Bowery, shuts its doors. Patti Smith headlines the venue’s closing concert, alternating verses of her anthem Gloria and the Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop for her final number. In a followup move that’s either maximum punk rock or a new pinnacle of mediocrity, club founder Hilly Kristal announces that a revamped CBGB will open in Las Vegas next spring.

R.I.P. Freddy Fender, Sandy West, Lebo Mathosa, John Wyre.

November

Britney Spears files to divorce husband Kevin Federline, who: (a) appears to receive the news via text message while being filmed by MuchMusic and (b) immediately gains a new nickname, Fed-Ex.

INXS soldiers on. J.D. Fortune and co. play back-to-back, sold-out concerts in St. John’s, N.L. Per capita, the province has purchased more copies of Switch than anywhere else in the world.

The empire strikes back: To date, just one 2006 hip-hop album — T.I.’s King — has sold more than a million copies in North America. Is this the beginning of the end for music’s sales juggernaut? Perhaps not. In November, the guns come out: new albums by the Game, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, 2Pac (his amazing sixth posthumous release of “new” material) and Clipse begin rap’s end-of-year assault on the charts.

Rapper Jay-Z performs outside of the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. (Karl Walter/Getty Images)

Speaking of Jay-Z, the Brooklyn superstar promotes Kingdom Come, his unretirement album, by performing seven concerts in seven U.S. cities in a single day. In XXL magazine, Jay, who is also the president of Def Jam Records, details the mathematics of selling CDs in the Age of iTunes: “I tell anybody: 150K is 60K now. One hundred fifty was a strong, respectable number. It’s 60 now. I mean, we got to face the reality of what’s going on. It’s not the business — it’s the whole format. We have to find another way.”

A California entertainment lawyer uses his blog, Crazy Days and Night, to float the year’s juiciest rumour: there’s an unknown studio/backup singer, the lawyer alleges, who plans to reveal that she has been secretly singing lead vocals for a well-known pop star since late 2000. The lawyer eschews naming names, but rabid speculation targets Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Hilary Duff and other marquee performers as the possible straw diva. “If this story ever comes out, it would blow the music world up and shake it to its core.... This would put the Milli Vanilli scandal and Ashlee Simpson SNL situation so far down the ladder it would be crazy.”

The Rolling Stones’ A Bigger Bang tour is announced as the top-grossing concert tour in history, collecting $437 million US in 14 months — despite several delayed and cancelled shows stemming from Keith Richards’ concussion and throat problems for singer Mick Jagger.

R.I.P. Gerald Levert, Ruth Brown, Anita O’Day.

December

Jessica Simpson needs cue cards to fumble through her tribute performance of Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 during a Kennedy Center gala held in praise of the Tennessee singer (and four other arts honourees). “Dolly, you make me so nervous I can’t even sing the words right,” Simpson says before leaving the stage, to Parton’s apparent displeasure.

Jazz singer Diana Krall gives birth to twin boys. “We are ecstatic!” reads a gushing statement released by Krall and her husband, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Elvis Costello.

Mary J. Blige leads the field for next year’s Grammy Awards: her album The Breakthrough collects eight nominations. Red Hot Chili Peppers are nominated six times for their album Stadium Arcadium; James Blunt, Rick Rubin, John Mayer and the Dixie Chicks follow with five nominations each. Canadians Neil Young, Sarah McLachlan, Michael Bublé, Nelly Furtado, Diana Krall and polka king Walter Ostanek also make the grade.

With November’s rap releases already pushing weight at sales counters (in consecutive weeks, the Game and Jay-Z both debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200), new albums by Ghostface Killah, Young Jeezy and Mos Def join the fray. As 2006 pulls to its close, all ears point towards Nas, the New York microphone colossus whose eighth studio album figures to address one of the year’s key artistic and financial developments. Its title: Hip Hop is Dead.

Pending holiday sales, Neilsen SoundScan data shows album sales have fallen by almost five per cent in 2006 — the fifth such slide in the past six years. (Overall music sales, which include iTunes and other revenue sources, show the real decrease is actually 0.7 per cent. Phew.) The leading contender for top-selling album of the year: the soundtrack to High School Musical, Disney’s smash hit made-for-TV movie about two young friends who try out for — can you guess? — a high school musical.

R.I.P. Mariska Veres, Ahmet Ertegun, James Brown.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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