Music

2014 was, without a doubt, The Year of the Butt. During 2014 the derrière was celebrated and exploited. It was quite offensive at times and revolutionary at others. Most of the time though we were subjected to more butts than brains. Pop music was obsessed with booty in 2014 – but whose booty was the best?

We review the Year of the Butt and present here our top bootylicious music videos – in order of booty magnificence.

( Just tap any title to watch the video in Creation 5)

1 – Nicki Minaj – Anaconda

An incredible 352,395,870 people have viewed this video since its release on 19 August, 2014. When the cover art for the single was released the world was shocked – but no one knew what was in store for them when the music video came out a few weeks later. It made the cover artwork look like the Disney Channel. Gyrating butt cheeks, small stringy thongs – basically borderline pornographic.

Lyrical Highlights: “My anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns, hun” / “Oh my gosh, look at her butt” / “I got a big fat ass (ass, ass, ass)”

2- Mastodon – The Motherload

Anaconda is the only rival for this butt-tastic visual. There is a staggering amount of butt shaking and close up twerking shots. It’s insane. So. Many. Butts.

Lyrical Highlights: “I can put it right there in your hands”

3- Jennifer Lopez – Booty ft. Iggy Azalea

This bootylicious video is a strong contender for the top honours as it has not one, but two delicious butts! Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea go cheek-to-cheek in this steamy visual. It’s even named Booty for goodness sake! Perhaps it’s a little too much and falls into the ‘more butt than brains’ category..?

Lyrical Highlights: “Throw up your hands if you love a big booty”

4-Beyoncé – Partition

With her classy cheeks on full display Queen B showed us that even music royalty should feel no shame about exposing their derrières – if they’re hot enough, of course. The Sexiest Woman Alive delighted millions who watched her perform this song during her On the Run Tour this summer.

Lyrical Highlight: “Ya man ain’t never seen a booty like this”

5-Jason Derulo – “Wiggle” feat. Snoop Dogg

Jason Derulo begged butts worldwide to do some serious wiggling. Since the videos release, 7 months ago, this butt-filled video has notched up over 429 million views. It has also earned the dubious honour of being one of the Top 5 songs in America this year. A fact that is both spectacular and scary at the same time.

Lyrical Highlight: “You know what to do with that big fat butt”

6-Shakira – Can’t Remember to Forget You ft. Rihanna

Released at the beginning of 2014, this video started the year off in the way it was to continue. With over 455 million views and causing a scandal on release this is one of our favourite booty fests. And who can choose between Shakira and Rihanna’s butt? Impossible. Best thing to do is to have both, right?

Lyrical Highlight: “I go back again /Fall off the train /Land in his bed”

7-Basement Jaxx – Never Say Never ft. ETML

Is it possible to make a bionic butt? Maybe it is, but can it twerk and wiggle in the right way? Does it move in a realistic way when you slap it? Basement Jaxx get scientific and spend a lot of time starring at real and bionic butts in this conceptually brilliant visual.

Lyrical Highlights: “Like a vision of love / You came, you stood / You blew right through me”

8-Meghan Trainor – All About That Bass

While Meghan might not have revealed her butt like everyone else on this list she is bringing booty back, that’s for sure. Trainor created a new kind of booty-self-confidence with her mega-hit. Released in June, it has over 443 million views on YouTube.

Lyrical Highlights: “I’m bringing booty back/Go ahead and tell them skinny b*tches that”

9-Taylor Swift – Shake It Off

Last on our list is Taylor Swift with her magnificent video for the sensational hit of 2014. Like Meghan Trainor, Taylor doesn’t actually expose her derrière but she certainly shakes it enough! Plus, she crawls through a tunnel of twerking butts, so we consider that it’s only fair she has a place on this list. Bouncing booty is just one of the many trends that Miss Swift must navigate.

Lyrical Highlight: “Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake”

The Battle of the Booty 2014

Billboard actually hit the streets to find out what people think in The Battle of the Booty 2014. Watch the video below to see what they found.

Don’t have Creation 5? Download it from the App Store!

iPhone	iPad

Happy Birthday to Elena Jane “Ellie” Goulding (born 30 December 1986). Ellie Goulding is not only a talented singer and songwriter she is also a multi instrumentalist playing drums, guitar and clarinet. She learnt to play the clarinet when she was 9 years old and taught herself guitar at 14 – she said she only learnt to impress a boy! She started songwriting at the age of 15 and while in college she entered a singing competition and won.

Her career started in earnest when she met record producer Starsmith and Frankmusik, and talent scout Jamie Lillywhite, who later became her manager and A&R. Ellie signed to Polydor Records in July 2009 releasing an extended play titled An Introduction to Ellie Goulding. She then went on to become the BBC Sound of 2010 and won the Critics Choice at the Brit Awards in the same year.

2010 was a big year for Ellie – she also released her debut studio album, Lights, and it debuted at Nº1 on the UK Albums Chart and has sold over 850,000 copies in the UK. Her cover of Elton John’s Your Song reached Nº2 in the UK in December 2010 and in April of the next year she performed the song at the wedding reception of Prince William and Catherine Middleton at Buckingham Palace. The album’s title track, Lights, was released in the US in March 2011, and peaked at Nº2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. The rest, as they say, is history and Ellie has gone from strength to strength even performing at Prince Harry’s 30th birthday party.

Ellie’s distinctive voice, with it’s high piercing vibrato, breathy tone and emotive delivery, is really something special. In an album review for Halcyon, Neil McComick of The Daily Telegraph said: “Her tremulous vibrato and slightly hoarse timbre have the feel of something primal and folky, her birdlike high notes conveying a childlike wonder while darker tones imply ancient depths of sorrow. She sings like she is strung out on the melody, warbling from a place of desperate emotion. It really is that rarest and perhaps most accidental of gifts: an original voice”.

Ellie described her voice in an interview with Carson Daily: “I think sometimes it sounds like my voice is like, out of control… I have to really control it because it just kind of goes everywhere. Like, sometimes stuff comes out that I don’t expect. A lot, actually […]. It’s so funny because my favorite thing to do is imitate opera singers, but I’ve never had a singing lesson. Oh, I had a lesson just to teach me how to breathe better, but I never really had a singing lesson.”

Ellie is a vegetarian and a keen runner and enjoys boxing, yoga and gymnastics. In the NY Post Ellie explains that she hasn’t always been into fitness: “When I was a teenager, I smoke and drank a lot — I was a chubby Goth! I was also really into music and, to me, music and sport didn’t really go together. You were either into one or the other. But now I devote my time to both and I’ve figured out how to make the two complement each other.”

Ellie does have a dark side though and battled with this at the beginning of her career. Just when things were taking off for her she struggled with panic attacks, heart palpitations and dark, morbid thoughts. In a feature in the Telegraph she revealed that a therapist suggested the attacks were caused by the pressure of her reinventing herself. “There’s another girl who was meant to go down the bad route: dead-end jobs, drugs, being gobby, not giving a f—. And that’s my dark side, I suppose, and I have to accept it will never fully leave me.”

To open our Ellie Goulding playlist in Creation 5, just tap here.

Don’t have Creation 5? Download it from the App Store!

iPhone	iPad

We continue our Showtime! collection with Kesha at the iHeartRadio’s Ultimate Pool Party at the Fontainebleau in Miami. The Warrior Tour was Kesha’s 2nd headlining concert tour in support of her sophomore studio album, Warrior (December 2012).

Kesha Rose Sebert, known as Kesha (and formerly Ke$ha), draws her musical inspiration from the music of the 80s – Madonna, Queen and Beck – and after trying all sorts of genres from country to pop, rock and electronic music, she settled with the latter. Her “talky” rap technique and excessive auto-tune have become a bit of a trademark but have led to constant scrutiny regarding her actual vocal talent.

Since her debut she has been nominated for 40 awards and won more than 15 of them – including the MTV Europe Music Award for Best New Act in 2010 and several Billboard Awards. As of the end of 2013, she had sold over 35 million records (albums, tracks, and ringtones) in the US and 57 million worldwide.

Her debut album Animal took the Nº1 spot on the Billboard album charts and she also scored two Nº1 singles with Tik Tok and We R Who We R plus a string of Top 10 hits. Tik Tok is one of the best-selling digital singles in history – selling 14 million worldwide. She continues to write songs for other artists, including Till the World Ends for Britney Spears. Her second studio album, Warrior, gave Kesha her 8th Top 10 hit Die Young.

In January 2013, Kesha checked into Timberline Knolls, a Chicago-area women’s inpatient facility, subsequently canceling her spring Warrior tour. In a recent interview with Teen Vogue she spoke out about the problems. “My eating disorder is something I’ve been struggling with for a while. People will make up stories, but I went to rehab for an eating disorder—nothing more and nothing less. Making my last record, Warrior, was a pretty miserable process, and it wore my spirit down. I was fighting like hell to keep my whole irreverent essence and everything raw and visceral that I stand for in it, but in the end I was promoting something that wasn’t the animal I wanted it to be. I decided to face my problem head-on.”

“Things got worse because I’m in an industry where people photograph your body and zoom in and blow it up and put it on the cover of magazines, and other people make terrible comments. It really messed with my head, and I realized I couldn’t do it by myself. The decision to take control of it is the scariest thing I’ve ever done, and this is coming from someone who dives with sharks and jumps out of airplanes for fun.”

“To have a breakthrough you have to have a breakdown, and I definitely went through both of those—in hindsight, it saved my life,” she admits.

Here is Kesha performance at iHeartRadio’s Ultimate Pool Party at the Fontainebleau in Miami- the setlist is as follows:

1-Warrior
2-Crazy Kids
3-We R Who We R
4-Blow
5-Dirty Love
6-Blah Blah Blah
7-Your Love Is My Drug
8-Tik Tok

Encore:
9-Die Young

Tap here to open the video in Creation 5.

Don’t have Creation 5? Download it from the App Store!

iPhone	iPad

The beloved, Grammy Award-winning, blues-rock singer who created nearly 40 albums in a career spanning 6 decades passed away yesterday (December 22nd) from lung cancer at 70 years of age. We miss him already! His agent Barrie Marshall confirmed the news, saying that he was “simply unique” and that “it will be impossible to fill the space he leaves in our hearts. He was without doubt the greatest rock/soul voice ever to come out of Britain – and remained the same man throughout his life.”

John Robert Joe Cocker was born on May 20, 1944, in Sheffield, England where he lived until his early twenties. In 2007 he was awarded the OBE by the Queen of England. He gave his final live performance at London’s Eventim Apollo on May 13, 2013, following a tour in support of his 2012 album Fire It Up.

He is survived by his wife Pam Baker, who he married in 1987. They lived together on their ranch in Crawford, Colorado.

Here’s our Top 10 Joe Cocker songs:

(To open this playlist in C5, just tap here.)

1-With a Little Help From My Friends – Woodstock 1969
This is the song that Joe will always be remembered for. Cocker’s cover of this Beatles track went to No. 1 in the U.K., and then became his most memorable moment from a career-making performance at Woodstock the next year. Paul McCartney said “It’s really sad to hear about Joe’s passing. He was a lovely northern lad who I loved a lot and like many people I loved his singing. I was especially pleased when he decided to cover With A Little Help From My Friends and I remember him and Denny Cordell coming round to the studio in Saville Row and playing me what they’d recorded and it was just mind blowing. He totally turned the song into a soul anthem and I was forever grateful for him for doing that. I knew him through the years as a good mate and I was so sad to hear that he had been ill and really sad to hear today that he had passed away. He was a great guy, a lovely guy who brought so much to the world and we’ll all miss him,” McCartney concluded.

2-Feelin’ Alright
Cocker covered this Dave Mason original with Traffic and gives the song an endlessly funky vista. Cocker’s version hit the charts twice, first in 1969 and then again – finishing at a peak of No. 33 – in 1972.

3-The Letter – 1970 (Mad Dogs and Englishmen)
Cocker’s cover of the Box Tops’ No1 from 1967 rocks the song up, knocks the smooth edges off and mixes a bit of bluesy grit into this big, blaring arrangement. This was Joe’s highest-ever charting US single, until You Are So Beautiful raced to Nº5 five years later.

4-Delta Lady (Mad Dogs and Englishmen)
Delta Lady was written by Cocker’s future touring partner Leon Russell and was released on the subsequent Mad Dogs & Englishmen. It topped the charts in the UK at Nº10.

5-She Came In Through The Bathroom Window
Another Beatles cover which had just been released on the Abbey Road album but it had a lot less impact then With a Little Help From My Friends, and didn’t even chart in the UK. However, it was one of Cocker’s highest charting singles in the US at the time. It was taken from the album Joe Cocker! and released in 1969.

6-Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood
Written by Bennie Benjamin, Gloria Caldwell, and Sol Marcus for the jazz singer/pianist Nina Simone, who first recorded it in 1964. Cocker’s version was taken form his 1969 debut album and played over the ending credits of the 2004 film Layer Cake. Future Wings guitarist Henry McCullough plays the closing guitar.

7-When the Night Comes
Taken from Cocker’s 12th studio album One Night of Sin (1989) this track has a sleek, modern sound and peaked at Nº11 on the Billboard hot 100 – it was his last US Top 40 hit.

8-You Are So Beautiful
This great song was first recorded by Billy Preston and is from Cocker’s album I Can’t Stand The Rain (1974). In Cocker’s hands this song is impossibly gorgeous. It was a slowed-down arrangement, courtesy of producer Jim Price, which just worked so well. Beginning in quiet contemplation the strings sweep in and just carry you away.

9-Up Where We Belong
This platinum-certfied, Grammy-Award winning hit duet with Jennifer Warnes was Nº1 in the US, and held the position for 3 consecutive weeks, plus Noº1 in Australia and Canada and a top 10 hit in the UK. It featured in the heart-melting climax of the hit movie An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). The song sold over two million copies in the US.

10-You Can Leave Your Hat On
Written by Randy Newman this song appears on Cocker’s 1986 album, Cocker. Released as a single it peaked at Nº35 on the Mainstream Rock Songs chart and was featured in the 1986 Adrian Lyne film 9½ Weeks during the striptease scene. A music video was also released with footage from the striptease scene plus scenes of Cocker and his band performing the song.

Don’t have Creation 5? Download it from the App Store!

iPhone	iPad

The super sexy Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show event brought an all-star cast of Angels including Candice Swanepoel, Doutzen Kroes, and Alessandra Ambrosio and Adriana Lima, who each sported a coveted Dream Angels Fantasy Bra worth $2 million. For the first time in the 19-year history of the event it took place in London and high-profile guests like Olivia Palermo, Ellie Goulding, and Kate Moss’s sister, Lottie, were given a black-tie dress code based on the event’s theme — Truman Capote’s famous Manhattan Black and White Ball in 1966.

It was the biggest show ever in the events history, taking place at the Earls Court exhibition centre and  some 3,400 guests watched the gorgeous Angels strut their stuff on the runway. The show was organised into 6 segments — Gilded Angels, Exotic Traveler, Dream Girl, Fairy Tale, University of Pink, and Angel Ball — and, as tradition has it, all the models congregated on the runway for a huge, balloon filled finale.

This year there were two Fantasy Bras worth 2 million dollars a piece and encrusted in diamonds, rubies, sapphires and 18k gold. They were modelled by Alessandra Ambrosio and Adriana Lima, who have been walking the show longest. Click here to read our feature on the Fantasy Bra.

The show was indeed an entertainment spectacle and it wasn’t just the models stunning bodies that kept the audience clapping and cheering throughout – it was also the elaborate, theatrical costumes in which they were clad and the combination of lights, effects and fantastic musical performances.

Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran and Hozier joined the models and sang as they twirled down the catwalk in huge feathery cloaks and jackets — like giant peacocks. Then there were the wings which looked like architectural masterpieces – some with feathers, some sculpted in gold, others iridescent just like Tinkerbell and others exotic dragonfly-shaped.

Taylor Swift performed Blank Space and Style, Ed Sheeran performed Thinking Out Loud (and naturally, found it very difficult to concentrate), Ariana Grande performed Love Me Harder, Bang Bang, Break Free and Problem and Hozier performed Take Me to Church.

“It’s supposed to be fun, and it’s perfectly appropriate to get off your rich English butts, stand up and enjoy the show,” said Ed Razek, president and chief marketing officer at Limited Brands (Victoria’s Secret’s parent).

Backstage was almost as pretty as centre stage with all 47 models dressed in matching baby-pink satin robes. They spent the majority of the afternoon preparing for the show, although not an awful lot of make-up was used, leaving the girls’ natural good looks to shine. “You don’t book a whole set of gorgeous girls and then change them,” makeup artist Dick Page said. He likened the models to “a genetically gifted group of children.”

Of course, nobody is perfect. “They’re teenagers some of them, so they do have the occasional breakout. We’re lucky in the sense that we’re not stuck in the middle of a whole batch of other shows, so they don’t have the stress of coming late from fittings or other shows, or running through London, and having their make-up taken on and off ten times a day. That’s what really breaks the skin down. They’re a bit more rested — apart from the fact that they all got flown in on the plane yesterday as a special delivery.” Page added.

All the glitter, gold and Angel dust did a lot of good with the event raising more than $2.5 million for charities through ticket sales. Many charities including the American Cancer Society, Pelotonia and Gabriel’s Angels, auctioned pairs of tickets for the show fetching prices in excess of $25,000.

To watch any video in creation 5, just tap on the title.

The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show – Ariana Grande

The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show – Ed Sheeran Performance

Inside Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show with Taylor Swift (Entertainment Tonight)

Victoria’s Secret Angels Lip Sync “Shake It Off”

To watch the full 2014 show – visit the CBS website