Whatever happened to none of your business?

It works for all those people clamoring to know what exactly caused the death of Kanye West's mom, Donda. It works for everyone demanding to know the sexual orientation of this singer or that one. And it works for everyone who wanted to push Jennifer Lopez and Christina Aguilera to announce their pregnancies before they were ready.

No matter how much the tabloid press and the celebrity gossip shows want, things haven't changed that much. Journalists have the right to ask anything they want. Celebrities have the right not to answer.
The idea that celebrities (and, especially, their families) forfeit the right to any privacy the moment they first seek out publicity is ridiculous. Even crazier, though, is the notion that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Actually, there is.

Amy Winehouse, for example, has become a tabloid star, even though most people haven't heard any of her music - aside from the snippets from "Rehab" that play whenever her stints in rehab are discussed. Never mind that her "Back to Black" album is one of the year's best or that she is one of pop music's brightest new talents, the Winehouse story became one of boozy failure even before she received the success due her.

What happened to Lopez's album "Brave," however, was even stranger.

Released last month, "Brave" debuted at No. 12, with 53,000 copies sold, making it the first of Lopez's seven albums not to reach the Top 10. Even her Spanish-language album, "Como Ama Una Mujer" from earlier this year, fared better. ("Brave" has already fallen to No. 80 after only a month on the charts.)

Though it's hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, it wasn't from a lack of publicity. Lopez was seemingly everywhere the week her album came out, with a high-profile appearance at Madison Square Garden and a Times Square concert for "Good Morning America."

The problem is that very few people were talking about the catchy single "Do It Well" and the stylish video that came with it. Nearly all people were concerned about was whether or not Lopez was pregnant and why she refused to confirm it.

The result was that almost everyone knew that she was pregnant, which she has since confirmed, but relatively few knew that she had a new album out. Some have even ventured to say that Lopez angered her fans by not sharing the pregnancy news with them immediately and that they responded by not buying her album - which sounds a bit far-fetched.

"It would have been different if she had an album with songs about wanting to be pregnant," says one industry insider. "In her case, like a lot of megastars, the music almost doesn't matter. It almost has more to do with what people think about her and her persona at any given time."

That puts Lopez and other stars like her in a lose-lose situation. Aside from the fact that the decision on when to announce a pregnancy is a personal one for all women, especially those who are a little older, Lopez was stuck no matter what she did - accused of using her pregnancy to drum up publicity for her new album if she announced it and, as it turned out, accused of trying to hide something from her fans if she didn't.

Given the lukewarm response to the album's second single "Hold It, Don't Drop It," it seems likely that her record company, Epic Records, will simply move on and stop trying to promote it further, even though it's actually her strongest album in years.

Count "Brave" as another artistic casualty in the crazed pursuit of celebrity news - a list sure to grow until "None of your business" becomes a mantra and fans get weaned from the idea that they have the right to know whatever they want whenever they want to know it.

news source : http://www.newsday.com/news/