Robbie Daw presents a weekly pop music update here on Towleroad! Robbie runs his own site called Chart Rigger.
"One early evening during the first week of February in 1969 I visited Otis Tilson. He was an incredibly comely and tragic homosexual queen with whom I had been acquainted for most of the twenty-five years that I had been a black pimp in Chicago, Illinois."
Thus begins Robert "Iceberg Slim" Beck’s classic and long-out-of-print 1969 novel, Mama Black Widow, a fictional memoir of a "black queen adrift with his brothers and sisters in the dark ghetto world of pimpdom and violent crime." In addition to Mos Def and Macy Gray, Rihanna has been cast in the film adaptation, due out in 2009. Mama Black Widow will be her acting debut.
Darren Grant, director of music videos by Destiny’s Child ("Bills, Bills, Bills", "Survivor") and Jewel ("Standing Still") is directing the film. As for "comely and tragic" Otis, Brian J. White is cast in that role. White previously played gay in the 2005 Sarah Jessica Parker flick, The Family Stone, and the leader of a step-dancing fraternity in last year’s Stomp The Yard.
Want a second chance at tickets to Yaz’s sold-out Reconnected Tour?
Katy Perry’s One Of The Boys. Her single "I Kissed A Girl" is currently the top download at iTunes.
Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace, the eighth studio album from The Offspring.
Remixes for Alanis Morissette’s single, "Underneath," featuring turns by Josh Harris, Morgan Page and John Dahlback.
Nostradamus, a concept album revolving around said prophet, by Judas Priest.