Former Kerrang! writer Howard Johnson has figured out a way to make money in this current crazy word-hostile age: T-shirts! Hey, everybody needs to be clothed, right? Sadly, he doesn’t have a replica of this top at his online store SaltyRockz, but he does have lots of other options for people who like to have passerby staring at their chests. The “Home Taping Is Killing Music” shirt at left—which seems so quaint now!—is but one of the items available at Johnson’s self-funded “labour of love”:
Perhaps spurred on by the first lick of recorded music from the Sammy Hagar/Michael Anthony project Chickenfoot making its way to the Internet, Eddie Van Halen has told AOL’s Spinner that he’s not averse to maybe possibly someday perhaps entering a recording studio with David Lee Roth sometime in the eventual future. And yes, he means the real guy, not the virtual version!
Gene Simmons getting territorial, alternate theories of the alternative era, Assteroidz, and the British band that’s probably more excited about Superchunk’s inclusion on the Coachella bill than anything else, after the jump.
The Diamond Dave Edition of Assteroidz, in which… More »
A few months back, a vocal-only take of Van Halen’s “Runnin’ With The Devil” made the Internet rounds, and as you might imagine, listening to David Lee Roth’s exclamations and interjections without the counterpoint of Eddie Van Halen’s guitar was a surreal experience, one that made you wonder just what sort of karate moves he was contorting himself into in order to hit the perfect “WAUUU!” Well, some nice person has decided to gift the Internet with another vocal-only Roth track—and this time it’s “Hot For Teacher,” which means that if you ever felt the urge to try and make out the mumbly conversation underneath Roth’s between-verses jeering, today is your lucky day. Oh, and if you missed “Runnin'” when it was all the rage, it’s after the jump. (Hell, even if you didn’t miss it, it’s still worth listening to again.)
In the portable-media player era, one of the common gambits for “getting to know” an artist is the celebrity playlist, in which famous people purport to reveal to the world the contents of their digital-music library. Whether these lists of tracks are real or fake or just highly massaged is frequently up for debate, given the sheer number of public-relations types in desperate need of something to do who are still employed by the music industry. But I kind of want to believe in the latest one of these to cross my transom because it comes to us courtesy of American Idol runner-up David Archuleta, who showed the contents of “his iPod” to USA Today as part of the runup to his album’s release next week. If it’s real, it shows just how much the kid has grown since he was annoying the crap out of me every Tuesday night last winter. Sure, some of the songs listed are the sorta-treacly material that made him so annoying during Idol‘s seventh season (hello, Wilson Phillips!), but other tracks are really good! I swear! Five examples of this after the jump.
Whatever you think of the man, it’s fair to say that John McCain has not been able to catch a break in this election. I’m not talking about the self-inflicted wounds, but about all the things over which he genuinely had no control, like the economy tanking, a hurricane hitting New Orleans on the first day of the Republican convention, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki agreeing with Obama’s pullout plan. The campaign has been a sort of running joke of failure for McCain, and one of the best was how musicians kept objecting to his campaigns’ use of particular songs. Heart, Bon Jovi, the Foo Fighters, Survivor, John Mellencamp, and half of Van Halen were among the musicians who objected, and the campaign has largely given in to their terroristy demands. This would seem to be another strategic (tactical?) blunder, but the results of a study done by my partner Rachel Arnold and me suggests, rather, that politicians aren’t just uninformed about music–they don’t care about music. And as long as that’s true, these sort of musical gaffes are going to continue.
Halloween is only four days away! Although the fun is rapidly being sucked from the whole holiday thanks to church-sponsored “Harvest Festivals” and the jackass who thinks a “FBI: Female Body Inspector” t-shirt is a costume, we hope to help you, the reader, inject a bit more excitement into the celebration with some costume ideas from your favorite music videos.
Sure, right now, God might be killing dogs because he has to, but the world keeps on turning, and Sammy Hagar has a new album to promote. When you’re dealing with weighty issues like the fashion of the universe (cosmically), not to mention the release of Cosmic Universal Fashion, there’s only one way to broadcast that to the masses: A sequel to the “Right Now” video.
