The music industry wants to know: Are you ready for the most rocking Thanksgiving ever?! A bunch of big names — including 50 Cent, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Timbaland, and Britney Spears — will be releasing new albums on November 23 (yes, a Monday) and 24, in hopes, we assume, that befuddled consumers might accidentally purchase plastic discs for unlucky loved ones during panicky lapses of judgment on Black Friday. Complicating their plans slightly is the fact that most of these are just cash-grabby reissues or new records of presumably bad material.
Gaga’s album, The Fame Monster, is just a re-release of her debut, The Fame (albeit one with eight hastily written new songs, including the SNL-premiered “Bad Romanceâ€). Britney’s is a greatest hits collection with one new track, the previously leaked “3.†50 Cent’s Before I Self Destruct is all new, which would be big news if this were 2005. Timbaland’s is original material also, though it’s called Shock Value 2, which is bad news for anyone who remembers 2007’s Shock Value (also, his new single, he promises, “fits everything with Twilight“).
That leaves Rihanna, who earlier this week cryptically announced “the wait is ova†on her website, with a countdown to November 23. A new Rihanna album would be both exciting and commercially viable, but who knows if that’s really what we’re waiting for here? Maybe she just really likes Thanksgiving!