The folks at industry rag Hits have a handy chart of the albums coming out in the last months of the year, which, who knows, may be the last one in which a chart like this is even necessary! But even though we’re a long way from the days of 50 Cent and Kanye West squaring off on the anniversary of 9/11, it’s still sort of fun to see what CDs will be landing at America’s retailers on the same day. After the jump, five of the best battles that could arise from the coming release-date schedule. (Marketing departments, get your beef stew recipes ready!) More »
Do you go to Chili’s for the music? Do you sometimes hear a great song while enjoying a Fajita Trio, and wish you knew who that artist was? Well, the chain restaurant has created an online radio network that allows listeners to have some semblance of the restaurant experience in their own home, which mostly involves discovering what passes for bar rock in 2008. (The answer: white reggae.) Full disclosure: my disrespectful tone toward Chili’s may have something to do with the awful 21st birthday I spent there, for reasons too embarrassing to detail.
Aat this point, you’re probably so sick of festival news (although the lineup for the London Auto Show has been announced!) that a festival un-announcement at least represents something of a reprieve. So! More »
That’s the word from Jeff Leeds at the New York Times, who penned a story on the fact that there may be something of a summer-rockfest glut hitting the U.S. over the coming months. With the lousy economy putting the hurt on potential cabana sales and the overlapping lineups making each festival less of a destination, can America handle “more than a dozen” parties based around the consumption of music? The answer seems to be “it depends on the lineup”–apparently the jam-band-heavy Mile High Festival is selling like gangbusters, while the promise of two Radiohead shows isn’t helping tickets to the New York-adjacent All Points West festival move as quickly as one might have hoped.
The Foo Fighters, Jack Johnson, Kanye West, Nine Inch Nails, and Stone Temple Pilots will headline 1999’s this year’s Virgin Mobile Festival, which takes place at the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore on Aug. 9-10. More »
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the next big thing among music artists from the Arcade Fire to Michael Stipe to Jack Johnson is enviromentalism, which means we can expect to hear the word “green” prefacing nearly everything we used to enjoy for the foreseeable future, as well as a number of cryptic metaphors trying to explain complex issues.
When you wake up at six in the morning (right around the time the freaks in the living room get their stuff and leave) and roam the Web for news items to make pithy comments about, your sense of humor can be a bit compromised. So, when I saw an article titled “Johnson Steps Up Green Efforts On Tour”, the immediate options were either “homicidal rage” or “snappy blog post”. Guess which option won out, friend-o?
