There are actors who sing and singers who act, but throughout pop history few entertainers have successfully balanced those twin careers. Neither could Hilary Duff, though not due to lack of effort. While her career as a pop diva skyrocketed – she released two platinum albums and a best-selling greatest-hits disc in just three years – the former Disney child star found her acting career stalling. Despite her considerable star wattage, Hollywood had difficulty seeing Duff beyond her past sugary sweet roles and good girl persona (no rehab or pantyless partying here). “It always shocks me the lack of openness,… Read more »
U.K. rock act Fiction Plane will release its second album, “Left Side of the Brain,” May 22 via Bieler Bros., just before it begins its run as the opening act for the North American leg of the Police’s reunion tour. The album is the follow-up to 2003’s “Everything Will Never Be OK,” Fiction Plane’s lone release for MCA. Since being dropped from Geffen last year, the band has “had tons of tunes swimming about without a home,” frontman Joe Sumner tells Billboard.com. “When we scheduled this album we basically picked our favorite songs from the whole period. Then we took… Read more »
Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz is far more recognizable than the average rock band bassist. With jet-black asymmetrical bangs, slightly smeared eyeliner and a toothy grin, Wentz certainly makes for a memorable image, but it’s his public antics that have created such an unforgettable impression. “I honestly don’t care what the perception is of me to the world,” says the 27-year-old, while sipping on a Starbucks’ vanilla latte on a rainy day in New York City. “It’s a weird thing to have come to, but after you’ve gone through the ringer so many times you don’t care. But I do… Read more »
Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz is far more recognizable than the average rock band bassist. With jet-black asymmetrical bangs, slightly smeared eyeliner and a toothy grin, Wentz certainly makes for a memorable image, but it’s his public antics that have created such an unforgettable impression. “I honestly don’t care what the perception is of me to the world,” says the 27-year-old, while sipping on a Starbucks’ vanilla latte on a rainy day in New York City. “It’s a weird thing to have come to, but after you’ve gone through the ringer so many times you don’t care. But I do… Read more »
Season 2, Episode 4. Pat and Seb chat with Joey Cape, making up sdrow, planning parties, and Seb gets blown with Chuck… Originally Aired November 16, 2006 on idobi Radio. Music from Bad Astronaut, Beastie Boys, Heavens, Unwritten Law, The Postal Service, Black Eyed Peas, The Weakerthans, and Tenacious D.
Few things are sadder than aging punk rockers attempting to cash in on their misspent youth, especially their desperate act of trying to recapture the glory days of fickle preadolescents with disposable incomes. Such is the lot of Good Charlotte and Simple Plan, purveyors of a Splenda version of pop-punk so lightweight that only Top 40 radio will touch it. Not that the bands resemble glossy pop stars, per se: GC’s members look like thugged-out suburbanites who overdosed at the tattoo parlor, and the Plansters are the mischievous skater kids hellbent on crashing keggers thrown by the football jocks. Good… Read more »
Drummer Derrick Plourde – a founding member of Southern California punk band Lagwagon – and Hideaki Sekiguchi – who slapped the bass for Tokyo garage-punk band Guitar Wolf – both died Wednesday, news that sent shockwaves throughout the underground punk rock world. Plourde was 33, and Sekiguchi was 38. Fat Wreck Chords, which released Lagwagon’s earliest material, confirmed Plourde’s death in a statement posted to the indie label’s Web site, which read, in part, “March 30th was a sad day for the Fat Wreck Chords family, as we learned about the passing of Derrick Plourde. We consider him one of… Read more »
BAGHDAD, Iraq – While Saddam Hussein spent a second New Year’s Eve in a jail cell, a Southern California rock band known for such albums as “Hitler Bad, Vandals Good” and “Look What I Almost Stepped In” played in the heart of his former empire. The 3rd Brigade of the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division got a one-hour show by punk perennials The Vandals during a modest Friday night party in the Green Zone. The show was one of the few entertainments provided for U.S. troops in Iraq on New Year’s Eve, a day marked chiefly by a relative lull in… Read more »
Just like in professional wrestling, a band’s entrance music provides a pretty good forecast of what’s to follow. When Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” filled an arena, Hulk Hogan’s irrepressible fortitude wasn’t far behind. The sound of glass shattering typically prefaced a Stone Cold-style beat-down. And this past summer, when Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best,” off “The Karate Kid” soundtrack, rained down upon an unsuspecting rock club, it meant that one of the most immodest bands around was about to deliver its musical equivalent of a jump-front kick to the head. “We thought it was the funniest thing,” explained Fall… Read more »
New York – If there was an increase in the number of people who took the day off from work or stayed home from school Tuesday, it may not have been the flu that kept them at home and on the couch. “Halo 2,” the long-awaited sequel to the 2001 game that set the standard for first-person shooters, went on sale Tuesday (November 9) at midnight, and thousands of people around the country waited in line for hours, just to be among the first to get their hands on what promises to be the biggest video game of the year.… Read more »
