Taylor Swift's songs suggest she has a big, open heart, and now her actions prove it. They also indicate a recognition of human suffering beyond her years. The 20-year-old GRAMMY Album Of The Year winner made a $500,000 donation to the Nashville flood relief efforts last Friday. The flooding has caused as much as $1 billion in damages, including damage to music landmarks and potentially millions of dollars in equipment and other losses for thousands of musicians. Nashville-born Ke$ha announced she will host a charity concert on June 16 with 100 percent of proceeds going to flood victims. VIP ticket packages will also be available, which will include a chance to meet Ke$ha and maybe even blow her speakers up.
Go ahead, stand so close to him. Sting, the former teacher who famously sang about the dangers of teacher/student liaisons, told reporters in Mexico City Saturday that teacher salaries must be raised to attract the best talent into the classroom. Sting, currently on the Learning For Life tour to help raise funds for education in developing countries, clearly wants teachers who can teach kids more than their de do do dos and de da da das.
According to a Huffington Post story, Courtney Love revealed on Fuse's "On The Record" why, according to her, she's so good in bed: "I'm better because I was never pretty. Pretty girls just lie there. Us girls who grew up a little more homely have to try a lot harder." Or as Jimmy Soul once sang: "If you want to be happy for the rest of your life/Never make a pretty woman your wife/So from my personal point of view/Get an ugly girl to marry you."
The Go-Go's are going bye-bye, as the female quintet announced summer concert dates for their Happily Ever After: The Farewell tour. In related news, lead singer Belinda Carlisle will release her tell-all autobiography, Lips Unsealed: A Memoir, on June 1. So much for that "Our Lips Are Sealed" philosophy.
I don't want to hold your hand? The only known recording of a 1966 Beatles press conference in Toronto will go up for auction in June. During the conference, the Fabs muse about an eventual breakup. "We're obviously not gonna go around holding hands forever," John Lennon says, to which Paul McCartney adds "...it would be a bit, you know, embarrassing at [age] 35..." The tape is expected to fetch $20,000.
In tech news, Google displaced Apple and the iPhone to claim the runner-up spot for the most popular provider of smartphone software in the United States. Smartphones featuring Google's Android operating system accounted for 28 percent of U.S. smartphone unit sales in the first quarter, according to NPD Group, behind top-ranked Research in Motion Ltd, maker of the BlackBerry, which had a 36 percent share of the market.
According to a PayScale.com study, music ranks fourth on the list of worst-paying college degrees. The starting annual salary is listed at $34,000, and mid-career salary at $52,000, unless of course you have that big hit. In fairness, music sits alongside some pretty noble company on the list including fine arts at No. 9, education at No. 7, elementary education at No. 2, and the evergreen of low-paid professions, social work at No. 1.
Eminem's "Not Afraid" is tops on the Billboard Hot 100 this week, becoming the 16th song to bow at No. 1 in the chart's 52-year history. Meanwhile, Katy Perry's new single "California Gurls," featuring Snoop Dogg, is currently No. 1 on the iTunes singles chart.
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