Utada Hikaru, Ne-Yo: Do You
Ne-Yo is collaborating with Utada Hikaru on a song called Do You. It was released on Nov 21 to digital outlets in Japan. This is part of Ne-Yo’s worldwide initiative; other collaborators include Natasha Bedingfield (UK), Sarah Connor (Germany), and Mary J. Blige (U.S). Ne Yo sez, “She has great voice and I’m sure it will work perfectly.”
I was originally quite excited; now you can hear the full song on Youtube, still no downloads in US iTunes or anywhere else I looked:
I just wonder, do you ever
think of me, anymore? Do you?
The song turns out to be pretty boring. They’ve done something horrible to Utada to make her sound less like herself and more like a generic female voice. Also, her breathing comes out very harshly on the track. Ne-yo is stilted and unispiring. Well, listen to yourself–I give it a 1/5.
China Holds Up the Dollar
The USD, our dollar, is falling against basically every currency out there. It’s so bad that Jay-Z doesn’t flash greenbacks, he flashes Euros in latest music video:
The song, by the wildly successful rap artist and businessman Jay-Z, is on an album of songs accompanying/inspired by the Ridley Scott movie “American Gangster,” starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crow. But it wasn’t sex, drugs, violence or explicit language that shocked my conscience. It was the Euros. The Jay-Z video flashed large stacks of €500 Euros. When I start seeing rap stars flashing euros instead of U.S. dollars, I know our economy is in trouble.
So who is coming to the rescue? China, of course. Since they control about 1.4 trillion dollars of our currency, it’s important that they don’t liquidate it:
“Beijing is not about to shoot itself in the foot by carrying out a mass sell-off of greenbacks,” Stratfor, a private US intelligence firm, said in a bulletin to clients. Such a move would wipe out much of China’s foreign reserves “in less than the blink of an eye”, it said, adding that Beijing wanted “just to slow or stop its purchase of new batches” of the greenback.
I wonder how much of the yuan is owned by the United States. My feeling isn’t that much, so we definitely need China on our side or our economy will continue to plummet.