Did You Hear?
:: Suge Knight was reportedly involved in a fatal hit-and-run in Compton yesterday (January 29), where the former Death Row Records CEO was behind the wheel. The city’s law enforcement is now on the lookout for Knight, who is wanted for questioning for murder. More »
Perhaps realizing that a good chunk of the people who still care about its brand wouldn’t know a 3OH!3 from a GaGa, MTV has added a new, retro-tastic category to this year’s Video Music Awards: Best Video That Should Have Won A Moonman, in which an overlooked clip from years gone by gets its space-statue due. (I do wonder if the presentation of said award will be shown on VH1, if only because it can then be blown out into an hour-long special about Loving The Videos That Lost At The Video Music Awards or somesuch.) There are 10 clips up for this honor, and they hail from eras as long-ago as MTV’s earliest days and as recent as the YouTube Age. My biases in this category are probably given away by the above screen grab, but you might think* differently! More »
John Mayer’s cover of “Free Fallin’,” as covered on his Where The Light Is CD/DVD, just missed the Hot 100’s top 50 in its first week as an iTunes download. Between this and that cheesy Bucket List song, it’s clear Mayer isn’t going to stick solely to Da Blooze any time soon, for better or worse. More »
And the festival announcements and rumors continue to pile up: Radiohead, Jack Johnson, and Tom Petty are rumored to be headlining the Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, which is slated to take place Aug. 22-24. More »
Ed. note: Chris “dennisobell” Molanphy, our resident chart guru, looks at the upward, downward, and lack of movement on this week’s Billboard charts:
You won’t find one of the biggest-selling artists of the past week on the Billboard Hot 100, because chart rules make him and his band ineligible. But one week after Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers brought their unassuming live act to the Super Bowl halftime show, they’re all over the lists that count everything.
As we’ve explained before, Billboard segregates albums and singles that are more than a couple of years old from its flagship charts. But even if songs like “American Girl” aren’t allowed to appear on the Hot 100, Petty had a very big week.
Raise your hand if you thought Tom Petty’s halftime show was, well, fine, although the momentum of it was killed by stacking two midtempo songs right in the middle. (Perhaps Fox nixed “Refugee” for being too political?) More »
