If you're a fan of Collective Soul, this should be an exciting week. When we heard their new album, Rabbit, is slated for an August 25th release, we went straight over to Y! Music's own New This Week to see what they had to say!

Um. 

Well, New This Week said this: "Even when you thought (Third Eye Blind) had shuffled off downcast, following...Collective Soul down into the heart-wrenching Valley Of Playing County Fairs..." 

The Valley Of Playing County Fairs? Why, we oughta! We'll take this up at next week's all-expenses-paid, seven-days-and-six-nights Y! Music Blogger Late Summer Symposium, which--once again!--is at the Four Seasons luxury resort on Lana'i.

That's next week, though! This week, we're talkin' 'bout Collective Soul! And what a collective they are! Hailing from a small town in Georgia, these exciting quasi alt rockers have had great success since their 1993 debut, scoring four platinum albums and landing six #1 hits on Billboard's rock chart. And, this week, we're happy

Hello, readers from all the points of the compass, and welcome to Framed, America's Friendliest Blog. It is here and only here that you'll get photo captions to music videos that are so riotous, so timely and so outrageous that you'll swear you have died and gone to caption-readin' heaven!

Ahem.

This week's Framed features Belinda Carlisle, formerly of the Go-Go's, the "first all-woman band that both wrote their own songs and played their own instruments to top the Billboard album charts," according to Wikipedia. After the Go-Go's split up because of insert your own reason, Belinda embarked on a solo career and, for awhile there, it was rockin'. She had three Top Three singles in a row, and five straight in the Top 20. And it is here that her life intersects the world of Framed.

This week's video, "Summer Rain," was the first of her solo singles to not chart in the Top 20. To be honest, it was a big flop, hitting only #30 in the U.S., and she hasn't had a single on the Billboard charts

Happy 6th of July, everyone, and welcome to Framed, the reddest, whitest, and bluest blog in all of blogdom!

This week, to help wrap up your Independence Day celebrations, we're offering the greatest showman of the 20th century, James Brown, singing one of our favorite patriotic songs, "Living In America." The late, great Brown, whose career ran from the mid-1950s into the new century, was known as both "The Godfather of Soul" and "The Hardest Working Man In Show Business," titles he certainly earned. A litany of his hits--"Papa's Got A Brand New Bag," "Please, Please, Please," "I Got You (I Feel Good)," and "It's A Man's Man's Man's World," among others--is a list of essential soul music.

"Living In America" is from the great Rocky IV, certainly the finest installment in that series, and most of the video is also from the classic film. The 1985 song was Brown's first Top 10 hit since "Say It Loud (I'm Black And I'm Proud)" back in 1968 and won him a Grammy Award for Best Male R&B

We were having our usual day, examining hundreds of music videos minutely, not even stopping to eat, when we had an idea: What if we featured a music video that showed people actually performing music? No script! No actors!  No fancy sets! It was the most radical idea ever! Excited, we ran it past Toy-Bot, The Good Cat, but--frankly--he seemed indifferent to the whole idea. Then again, his people, the cats, aren't a musical race. But ours is!

We considered the consequences. Would Framed's readers embrace the notion that human beings sometimes make the music that makes music videos possible? Would our captions be as razor-sharp as ever? And what about Gummo, America's beloved Sentient Bubble?

Damn the consequences, we said! This is a nifty idea! We'll simply pick a video that shows real musicians playing a real song in front of appreciative real people and we'll do the best we can! It's that can-do attitude that's made America great, after all!

It's our pleasure, therefore, to present