Aside from holidays where major news events happen, thus disrupting one’s chance to actually get away from her laptop and have a life, April Fool’s Day is probably the most annoying 24-hour stretch on the professional blogger’s calendar, thanks to everyone on the Internet thinking they’re funny. Despite that not really being true! After the jump, a running tally of pranks from various music-related entities; it’ll be updated throughout the day, because Lord knows I need to do something with all the “comedy” clogging up my RSS reader right now.
So as you may recall, the three non-Chris Cornell members of Soundgarden played behind Tad Doyle last week at a benefit thrown by Tom Morello. Well, the frontman-in-exile opened his U.S. tour over the weekend in Dallas, and the Spin reviewer charged with covering the show noted that his set not only included “Spoonman” and “Jesus Christ Pose,” it incorporated “Gun,” one of the more menacing tracks from the band’s 1989 major-label debut Louder Than Love. And no, to answer the question Mike posed when I informed him of this development, the song’s scary-monster riffs were not interspersed with baby noises and tablas. A clip of him performing the song last week—in Chile, not Dallas—after the jump. Compare and contrast!
The video for Chris Cornell‘s “Part Of Me” made its way to the Internet a month ago, but I just happened across it today; it’s a Timbaland-produced track that sounds like a wan take on Nelly Furtado’s way superior “Say It Right,” and its lyrics tell the tale of a man who’s had many a regrettable impulse. Those lyrics, by the way, employ the phrase “that bitch ain’t a part of me” approximately 22 times. The video shows hard-luck scenarios in clubs that specialize in hot Dirty Dancing Havana Nights-style hotness (in San Juan), line-dancing (in El Paso), and good old-fashioned New York bootyshaking (in Queens!), I guess for the purpose of universalizing the song’s lyrics. (Or just to answer the “who’s going to buy this record?” query one of our commenters posed in an earlier discussion of the album.) Clip after the jump.
The new issue of Billboard has a rundown of albums that are coming out in the coming months, and nestled among the usual suspects—Franz Ferdinand, 50 Cent (haha), Kelly Clarkson—is one album that I thought had come and gone from the consciousness long ago: Chris Cornell’s Scream, his much-maligned collaboration with Timbaland that somehow hasn’t been released yet despite cell phone company-sponsored minitours and New Yorker writeups and watery OneRepublic-ish balladeering.
Last month, the former Soundgarden wailer Chris… More »
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I’ve so far enjoyed ABC’s adaptation of the BBC “detective sent back to the ’70s for the dual purposes of solving crimes and wearing awesome outfits” show Life On Mars, in part because I am a sucker for a well-done, well-cast cop show. (Hey, it’s nice that someone figured out a good way to use Michael Imperioli. Here’s hoping this keeps him away from Law & Order for good.) And it’s also in part because the show’s use of music has been pretty great. The pilot scored a chase scene with the Sweet’s “Little Willy,” while last week’s episode started and ended with Mott The Hoople’s “All The Way From Memphis”–a use that was effective enough that I bought the song from iTunes about five minutes after the episode ended, and thought to myself, “This show is so going to fill the ‘as heard on TV’ slot that’s been vacant on Idolator since Veronica Mars got canceled.”
