Titling an album is tough, especially in the era of people being averse to giving a hoot about new music. How do you sum up your artistic intentions in a few words that will look good on a five-inch-square piece of cardboard jammed into a big-box retailer’s rackspace? Unfortunately, some artists have been tripped up by the process so badly that we had to step in and gently tell them that they may not be rocking such a great look, word-wise. After the jump, five examples of really bad album titles that are on the way to a music retailer near you. (NB: Mew’s No More Stories Are Told Today I’m Sorry They Washed Away No More Stories the World Is Grey I’m Tired Let’s Wash Away gets a pass today, because their set at the Pitchfork Music Festival last night was absolute bliss.) More »
If there’s one thing you can be absolutely sure of, it’s that Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” will never, ever die, thanks to awesomely crappy early-oughts pop-punk, bad rom-coms, and silly world record attempts. So it’s no surprise that rumors are now surfacing about Thriller: The Musical!
Tokio Hotel, the “famous on the Internet” band of German mope-rockers, have had a clean-cut image… until now, anyway. No, pretty boy singer Bill Kaulitz hasn’t revealed that he’s actually an animatronic Real Doll: The drummer, Gustav Schafer (he’s the one on the left), went on something of a driving spree in Germany yeterday, crossing lanes and crashing into trams in a blaze of… well, something:
Parody is a tricky form. Do it just right, and you’re a keen cultural observer with a razor sharp critical eye. But get it wrong and you look pathetically out of touch. Not surprisingly, Microsoft has gone the latter route, coming up with a fake boy band called 4 Softies and a Pizza Guy (what?) to promote Windows 7. They even have a silly music video! It looks like a rejected MadTV segment from 1999!
Earlier this week, MTV Europe announced the nominations for the European Music Awards, and I got halfway through a post about the nods before I got completely, utterly bored. Duffy’s Rockferry as a potential Album Of The Year? A shoehorned-in nod for the huge-in-Europe 30 Seconds To Mars? Well, apparently I wasn’t the only person on the Internet to be a bit underwhelmed by the nods, because in an effort to rally the troops via the employment of a meme that died six months ago, MTV has decided that Rick Astley–he of the Internet gotcha known as the “Rickroll”–should be one of the potential winners of the “Best Act Ever” award. And to further ensure that Internet attention would be forthwith, one of the other nominees is the way-more-popular-online-than-in-real-life German act Tokio Hotel. Yes, that’s for the best act ever, and not of that three-month period during sophomore year when you wrote in your journal a lot and thought hard about life’s unfairness. The full slate of potential all-time winners after the jump.
