Artist To Watch: Lianne La Havas

Anyone have TheCoolTV?  It's just a music video channel, what MTV was while I was growing up and is so not now.  It's one of those "subchannels" that local TV stations can operate now that we've gone from analog to digital.

It's great when you're trying to watch TV and there's nothing on.  Sometimes I get to watch videos from long ago that I haven't seen in years.  Sometimes I finally see a video to a song that I like a lot.  And sometimes I just watch and am transfixed by a someone I have never heard of.

I was said that sometimes in the afternoon of Friday, August 31, TheCoolTV was apparently taken off the air.  The subchannel was operated by the local CW affiliate, which in turn is owned by the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the biggest owner of local TV stations in the country.  They are also a bunch of a right-wingnut teabaggers, where they are notorious for airing extreme conservative propaganda specials on their bigger network (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) affiliates nationwide from time to time.

So when I heard the news, I thought that they suddenly took TheCoolTV off the air because they finally had it with the racy material and imagery prevalent on many of the videos that run on the subchannel.  But the reality is less political, and much more reasonable: It looks like the owners of TheCoolTV have not been keeping up with payments to Sinclair for broadcasting the subchannel.

That's too bad.  Like AOL Music about a decade ago, I could switch to TheCoolTV and watch experience music I've never heard before.  And from time to time I could hit paydirt and find someone who blows me away.  One of those artists is Lianne La Havas, an indescribable singer from London.  And I think the music bookers at Late Show With David Letterman have noticed, too: She was the featured musical guest on their Thursday show.

Unfortunately, she played the title track to her latest album, "Is Your Love Big Enough?" instead of the one I saw on TheCoolTV; while the former is good, this is much better -- "Forget":

ETA: The video I saw on TheCoolTV is the upper one.  I think the lower one is a "new official" video cut for Stateside audiences.  La Havas was recommended on Entertainment Weekly for those who like Sade's "Soldier Of Love" (also a great tune and video) more than a month ago and its website had a link to the below vid, and I prefer the other one because I think the one above is trippier.

This ensures that she'll be in the States soon enough.  Hopefully I'll have the foresight to plan to go to her show, and that I'll have the money, the time, and the car to see her concert.