Moments before the opening curtain of “American Idiot,” the musical theater debut of the punk band Green Day, a t-shirted house manager took the stage at Berkeley Repertory Theater for the tradition of reminding audience members to turn off their cellphones and unwrap their candies. This being a musical by Green Day, though, it wasn’t your typical curtain speech. “Are you ready to rock tonight?” shouted the house manager, John Gay. And sure enough, the crowd roared back, “Yeah!” Such is the rowdy mood surrounding “American Idiot,” a rock opera drawn largely from Green Day’s multiplatinum 2004 album of the… Read more »
The history of rock is full of “Eureka!” flashes of brilliance. Chuck Berry had the idea to fuse country with the blues. Bob Dylan took folk music electric. Nikki Sixx realized that the line “I’d say we’ve kicked some ass” could rhyme with “I’d say we’re still kickin’ ass.” For the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner, the big light bulb idea came in 2005: Get huge by thinking small. Write scrappy little Brit-punk tunes about the humdrum town you’re stuck in, the pissy little pubs you can’t get into, the local girls who aren’t desperate enough to dance with you. Give… Read more »
Lenny Santiago has a rich history in the rap game. His hands have been in almost all Roc-A-Fella Records releases (sans Kanye West’s), and now he is running things over at Def Jam as vice president of A&R. He signed DJ Khaled and also spearheaded the A&R work on Jadakiss’ The Last Kiss and Fabolous’ upcoming Loso’s Way (due July 28th), and his big fall project is the new one from Ghostface Killah. But hold up: There’s been some controversy over whether Ghostface will really live up to early descriptions that the record that will be an R&B album. Tony… Read more »
In early 1984, when Epic Records executives presented their slate of upcoming releases at the convention in Hawaii of parent company CBS Records they couldn’t resist playing up the success they were experiencing. So between the pitches for new albums, Epic inserted stock footage of semi trucks and a voice-over that thunderously announced, “There goes another load of Michael Jackson’s Thriller albums!” Trucks weren’t really leaving the warehouse every few minutes, but Thriller was still shattering expectations more than a year after its November 30, 1982, release. Epic was selling more than 1 million copies per month in the United… Read more »
As Internet reports suggested, Pearl Jam was indeed recording a Target commercial under the direction of Cameron Crowe last week at Seattle’s Showbox theater. But there is more to the story than an exclusive retail relationship. It has been known that Pearl Jam is no longer under contract after 18 years of recording for Sony-affiliated labels, and there has been a good deal of speculation about who would release the rock act’s next album. Kelly Curtis, who has managed Pearl Jam since its inception, conducted a wide-ranging interview Sunday night, confirming that the band’s next album — rumored to be… Read more »
The 2006 suicide of Megan Meier, which came after the girl was harassed online, spurred a flurry of new state laws aimed at cracking down on “cyber-bullying.” Now some members of Congress are pushing for a federal law against the practice. The Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act was first introduced last year. But it died in committee. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., introduced the measure again last month and says she believes she has enough support to make the bill law. “Schoolyard bullies – at least when you went home for the day, you could escape that,” Sanchez… Read more »
At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke. Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment. She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by. “I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort… Read more »
These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort… Read more »
Rolling Stone magazine is shrinking with the times. After more than four decades of standing out with a larger format than other magazines, it will step back and look like everyone else starting with the Oct. 30 issue, due out this week. The adoption of a standard format could boost single-copy sales and reduce production costs for advertising inserts such as scent strips and tear-out postcards. The magazine says any cost savings, though, will be offset by the inclusion of more pages and the shift to thicker, glossier paper. Like other devoted readers, Eddie Ward, 35, said he will miss… Read more »
Not that their tween legions needed any more fuel for their obsession, but the Jonas Brothers have just come up with a foolproof way of ensuring the loyalty of their minions: promising to marry their biggest fans. Of course, Kevin, Joe and Nick (who happens to be celebrating his Sweet 16 today) no doubt meant the biggest fans of their respective, private, individual selves–alas, the finer points of semantics have never been the forte of the young and hormonal. “The answer is YES,” the brothers collectively wrote in a post on their MySpace page in answer to fan-generated questions of… Read more »
