It began with a benign four-minute ferry ride through calm waters to a little-trafficked landmass in the Upper New York Bay, but Saturday night at The Beach on Governors Island proved to be anything but gentle.
Faulty tires led to the plane crash that seriously injured Travis Barker and DJ AM and killed four others, federal safety investigators report.
Summoned to success by President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled Congress approved historic legislation Sunday night extending health care to tens of millions of uninsured Americans and cracking down on insurance company abuses, a climactic chapter in the century-long quest for near universal coverage.
Green Day played the biggest show of its week-long tour of the San Francisco Bay Area April 14th, performing its upcoming album, 21st Century Breakdown, in its entirety. After only eight full rehearsals of the opera and those two club dates, the six-piece Green Day – Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool with guitarist Jason White, keyboardist Jason Freese and guitarist Jeff Matika – had the Quadrophenia-like hang of 21st Century Breakdown’s classic rock melodies and lifetime-punk drive down solid. “I”m not fuckin’ around,” Armstrong crowed in “Horseshoes and Handgrenades,” and there was no insecurity in the way… Read more »
The lead singer of Australian rock band INXS J.D. Fortune, who was picked to replace the late Michael Hutchence in a contest on a reality TV show, said he has been fired without warning from the band. Fortune, 35, a Canadian rock singer was living out of his car when he won the CBS network’s 2005 reality TV series “Rock Star:INXS.” He became the frontman for the six-man band, taking the place of 37-year-old Hutchence who was found dead in a Sydney hotel room in November 1997 with a coroner ruling he had committed suicide. With Fortune, INXS released the… Read more »
The RIAA is telling us they’re going to stop suing and get internet service providers to help them stop illegal file sharing. The RIAA says that it’s worked for the movie industry (sort of) and their talks with ISP’s have been going well. Here’s what they’re not telling you: While a few ISP’s have said they’ll send warning notices to RIAA identified abusers, not one has yet agreed to actually cut anyone off. Shut off without due process leads to lawsuits. More importantly, ISP’s know that attacking customers is bad for business. Just look at how well punishing people has… Read more »
LOS ANGELES — The group representing the U.S. recording industry said Friday it has abandoned its policy of suing people for sharing songs protected by copyright and will work with Internet service providers to cut abusers’ access if they ignore repeated warnings. The move ends a controversial program that saw the Recording Industry Association of America sue about 35,000 people since 2003 for swapping songs online. Because of high legal costs for defenders, virtually all of those hit with lawsuits settled, on average for around $3,500. The association’s legal costs, in the meantime, exceeded the settlement money it brought in.… Read more »
Michael Roberts: For all of the articles that have been written about you guys, very few of them have very much biographical information. It’s as if you were born at Columbia when you were twenty. So I thought I’d try getting some actual facts. Where are you from originally? Ezra Koenig: Well, originally, I was born in New York. My parents lived on the Upper West Side. But I have no memory of living here, because I almost totally grew up in Northern New Jersey, in the suburbs of New York. MR: Tell me about your parents. What jobs did… Read more »
One ticket to the Super Bowl: $2,000. Thirty seconds of advertising during the Super Bowl: $2.7 million. Five seconds’ worth of Madonna in a Super Bowl ad: A heck of a lot more than that. Sources tell E! Online that the Material Girl was paid $10 million to appear in a new advertising campaign for Sunsilk hair-care products, including a commercial that will premiere during the the fourth quarter of Sunday’s game between the New England Patriots and New York Giants (most of whom do not make $10 million in an entire season). In the 30-second spot, old stock footage… Read more »
Rap musicians and top record label executives defended the hip-hop business Tuesday, telling lawmakers it is wrong to single out the genre for congressional reprobation. Lavell Crump, who goes by the name David Banner, told the house consumer protection subcommittee that picking on rap unfairly singles out the black community. “When it comes down to it, it’s just a song,” Crump said. “Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of California, but in his movies he killed half of Cambodia and he went to Mars and blew up Mars . . . but that’s OK because he’s a white man and he’s an… Read more »
