Get ready for another wave of Boomer nostalgia to crash over our collective shores during the dog days of late August. The one-two punch of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock and the run-up to the release of The Beatles: Rock Band just happen to coincide with what are traditionally super-slow days in the music press, thanks to a large number of factors that include the waning days of the summer shed season, record labels’ decision to hold off on putting out anything “important” until back-to-school season starts, and the fact that any reporter who actually has to work in the weeks leading up to Labor Day not feeling all that inspired. (Cough.) More »
In case you can’t wait to get in your orders for the Beatles CD remasters and the band’s branded version of Rock Band—and you are totally fine with paying $17.98, plus $3.97 in shipping costs, per compact disc—you can place your order for all the remastered albums today via the shop-at-home mecca QVC; just be warned that the orders for games and CDs won’t ship until the official release date of Sept. 9. QVC’s Beatles-branded shop also has some curios available, and while most of the offerings are pretty standard (sweatshirts, lunchboxes, etc.), there’s one thing that’s so breathtakingly “for the fans,” I had to share it: More »
Forty years ago tomorrow, photographer Iain MacMillan took the photo that would be the cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, spawning Paul McCartney death rumors in the immediate and a Webcam in the Internet-enabled years. It also inspired a bunch of “homages,” one of which sticks out above all the rest: More »
On Monday in New York, Paul McCartney enjoyed a day off before today’s final concert in his three-show stint at Citi Field. Elsewhere in the Big Apple, Harmonix and MTV Games hosted a hands-on demo of the latest build of The Beatles: Rock Band. (Ringo’s whereabouts were unknown.) I went in the hopes of getting my hands dirty and my voice raspy with a 90% finished version of the game, which comes out on Sept. 9. Sadly, no screaming teenage girls were provided. More »
Last night, Paul McCartney appeared on Late Show With David Letterman, which is broadcast from New York’s Ed Sullivan Theater—home, of course, to the site of his old band’s barnstorming of America via the country’s small screens. In honor of that little bit of history, the CBS braintrust arranged to have him play a show on the theater’s marquee for the faithful gathered outside (as well as those people who were just trying to get to the 1 train); the full set is streaming on CBS’ site in a video quality that’s probably higher than the maximum resolution achieved by The Ed Sullivan Show all those years ago. (There’s also an embed of the show after the jump.) More »
I’m coming to this after pretty much everyone else on the Internet, but I do have to mention that the opening cinematic for The Beatles Rock Band makes the game look like it’s going to be pretty fun to play. As does the gameplay trailer, in which the in-game versions of the Fab Four actually look like themselves, thus escaping the whole Uncanny Valley thing that makes most computer-generated people somewhat unnerving to look at. [The Beatles Rock Band] More »
Judging by the number of times it showed up in my RSS reader this week, the biggest music news of the past five days was the announcement that the Beatles‘ catalog would be remastered and reissued, with new versions of every one of their studio albums (as well as a couple of other titles) being made available on Sept. 9, the same day that their version of the Rock Band game comes out. (The date’s full of the number nine, don’t you know.) While the popularity of this particular story was no doubt due in part to the Beatles’ status in the classic-rock pantheon, which allows them to be well-known enough to transcend the “got arrested and/or pregnant” standard for making the wires, there was one question that was nagging at me every time I passed through another breathless announcement of the release. And that question is: Who, exactly, is going to buy these CDs?
ARTIST: The Beatles
TITLE: “Revolution 1 (Take 20)”
WEB DEBUT: February 2009
Earlier this week, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) caused a worldwide ripple when it started a podcast series called “Our Daily Beatles,” which was based on a 2007 radio series in which each song in the Beatles’ 212-track catalog was paired with a story for a sixish-minute package; the songs were played in full, thus making the Fab Four’s catalog digitally available for the first time in forever—for free. There were a few legal loopholes that made NRK think this setup was A-OK: the downloads would only be available for 30 days, and the shows were “less than 70% music,” so everything would be hunky dory. Well, if you can believe it, the International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry wasn’t too keen on the whole concept for a few reasons. NRK explains after the jump!
