The hilarious juxtaposition of a stiff white person and—can it be?—rap music?! Happy 30th anniversary, awful joke that never ceases to make me cringe! More »
News of an imminently launching “Google Music” burned up the Twitter this morning, but as with many topics that are popular on the microblogging site, this one probably won’t be as awe-inspiring as its name lets on. Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports that the search-engine titan’s musical efforts, which will be announced at an Oct. 28 press conference, won’t amount to a celestial jukebox as much as they’ll result in a streaming-enhanced search engine for digital-track stores: More »
Looks like the next big demographic to be exploited is “youngish parents with hard-rock pasts who don’t want to kill their cool factor with Raffi CDs”: A company called Rockabye Baby has just released Lullaby Renditions Of Guns N’ Roses, a 12-track album that transforms the hedonistic hits of the notorious band into songs that can help quiet children. Fortunately (or not?), concerned parents won’t need to explain what “with your bitch slap rappin’ and your cocaine tongue, you get nothing done” means, since all the lullaby versions have been stripped of their lyrics and transformed into “gentle renditions of GNR’s metal classics” that are all-instrumental. The track listing (which does include “You Could Be Mine,” oh yes): More »
Monday on Idolator: “On the comeback trail and underappreciated? Well. Expect a Slate piece on how [Creed has] always been underrated any day now!” Wednesday on Slate: “It’s time to give Scott Stapp’s nu-grunge foursome another listen. Seriously.” I can’t tell if I’m a clairvoyant genius, or if someone in the Slate editorial matrix decided to just take the bait. Either way, I guess it’s officially time to Let The Healing Begin. Get ready for some critical darling to do a drugged-up cover of “Higher” as a blog-baiting MP3! [Slate] More »
Last night, friend of Idolator Marah Eakin broke the news that there was a new restaurant opening near her home in Chicago—and it was called, oddly enough, the Pitchfork Saloon, even though it has no relation to the tastemaking music reviews-and-news site that’s also based in the City Of Big Shoulders. From the looks of things, the place looks like your typical neighborhood joint—chili and chicken-finger apps, half-price bourbon on Tuesdays, something called the “Pitchfork Build-A-Burger.” But the coincidental nomenclature just begged for a few one-liners to be tossed off, what with the combination of food-borne jokes and music geekery being irresistible. So I decided to open the floodgates of our Twitter account to the best Pitchfork-as-restaurant-related jokes. And the laughter flowed through! After the jump, the top 9.4 one-liners. More »
The video for Adam Lambert’s bombastic 2012 tie-in “Time For Miracles” is full of computer-generated chaos, as one might expect from a power ballad that’s a tie-in with a movie fetishizing this planet’s apocalyptic destruction. I get that he’s really feeling the plight of all the scared-to-death people who’ve been digitally dropped in around him, and I guess any video concept that took the restraint of, say, “More Than Words”* as its guiding principle would be more appropriate for Kris Allen’s debut clip. But all the super-cheesy CGI I’ve had to watch lately has been giving me serious eye-fatigue. (And after catching Taylor Swift’s clip for “Fifteeen” on MTV this morning, I can tell you for sure that the images thrown up by these clips don’t really look much more convincing on a biggish screen than they do in a YouTube window.) When will we stop the computer-generated madness? When all the machines responsible for this imagery finally crap out, and Big Entertainment’s corporate brethren realize they only have the scratch to replace them with used PCjrs? Clip after the jump. More »
Like the Timex Social Club, I spend a lot of time lamenting the rumors that surround me every day. How do they get started? And where do they get crazy? In Truthmonger, I’ll try to suss out the kernels of truth in the rumors that are taking up airspace in gossip columns, blogs, and our tips inbox.
THE RUMOR: Kanye West is dead, killed in a “bizarre car crash in Los Angeles.”
TRUTH THRESHOLD: Sigh. You guys. More »
Today Chris Brown posted a collage of photos from the video shoot for his new, aggro single “I Can Transform Ya” to his blog, which is a strange hybrid of news about the image-rehabilitating singer and odd, non-Brown-related celebrity tidbits. (Whatever gets the pageviews, I guess.) After the jump, the preview image in full, and five possible conclusions about the video that can be drawn from it. More »
You’d think that someone would have told Akon, the go-to hook man of the mid-’00s, that starting his apologia “Sorry, Blame It On Me” by saying that he intended “to apologize for things I have done, and things that haven’t occurred yet, and things they don’t want to take responsibility for” probably wasn’t the best way to come off as a sincere guy. Then again, you’d think that someone would have told him the old “the dog ate my Internet while I was on tour with Gwen Stefani” excuse wasn’t really going to fly, either. More »
The Roots’ How I Got Over has been pushed back to early 2010, according to a just-Tweeted missive from ?uestlove. “sorry yall. i know its a pain in the ass,” he added. “but i know you guys want this album RIGHT as opposed to RIGHT NOW!” [?uestlove/Twitter] More »
