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Looks like Avril Lavigne can prove she’s “The Best Damn Thing” in Kuala Lumpur after all. The Malaysian government has given the go-ahead for the wannabe punk rocker’s gig on Aug. 29 as scheduled, despite scrapping the concert last week for being “too sexy.” The decision was reversed after Lavigne’s promoters assured the performance wouldn’t corrupt the mainly-Muslim country’s youth or disrupt its independence day celebration on Aug. 31. “In giving the approval, the cabinet also instructed the (arts and cultural) ministry to monitor the concert to ensure that the performances do not clash with the Malaysian culture and values,”… Read more »

Madonna kicks off her “Sticky & Sweet” world tour at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium on Saturday, the latest test of her enduring appeal just a week after her 50th birthday. The “queen of pop” will be hoping to eclipse her last trot across the globe in 2006. “Confessions” became the top-grossing tour ever by a female artist, with ticket sales of $195 million. “Sticky & Sweet,” featuring hits that span nearly 30 years in pop music including her latest album “Hard Candy,” includes 49 dates and is due to wrap up in Sao Paulo on December 18. As of Thursday, roughly… Read more »

Blink-182 and Morrissey producer Jerry Finn has been taken off life support after suffering a massive brain hemorrhage last month. According to a post on the Prosoundweb forum reprinted on Morrissey-Solo.com, Finn’s family made the decision on Saturday. “Even though he did make snail-like improvement these past 31 days, he is not any better for words and has not had any consistency in the tests that the medical team have done for him,” a close Finn friend wrote on the forum. “At this time the hemorrhage has done massive damage to his body which will leave him severely disabled and… Read more »

They have lyrics such as “Tequila makes her clothes fall off” and “Breakin down the good weed, rollin’ the blunt/Ghetto pimp tight girls say I’m the man.” U.S. popular music is awash with lyrics about drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Medical researchers have reviewed the words of the 279 top songs of 2005 to estimate just how common they are. Their report on Monday showed a third of the songs had explicit references to substance abuse. And two-thirds of these references placed drugs, alcohol and tobacco in a positive light by associating them with sex, partying and humor, according to the… Read more »

There wasn’t a Thursday fan alive who wasn’t floored by last month’s announcement that the New Jersey emo innovators will be working with Victory Records on a retrospective CD/DVD package that, as a press release noted, will “tell Thursday’s 10-year-career story from the beginning to the present.” After all, Thursday’s 2002 split from Victory – which issued the band’s landmark 2001 LP, Full Collapse – was the very definition of cantankerous. Mud was flung from both sides when the band joined Island Records, and lawyers were eventually called in to clean up the mess.At the time of the band’s break… Read more »

Some of the world’s biggest names in music were all about Saving Our Selves this weekend. SOS, of course, referring to the campaign being touted Saturday across the globe at the seven-continent, 24-hour Live Earth concert extravaganza, a worldwide shout-out to individuals, political leaders, corporations and every other entity capable of helping put a stop to the environmental scourge that is global warming. In a partnership with Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection and other U.S.-based and international organizations, Live 8 executive producer Kevin Wall put together a bill that included the Police, Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica,… Read more »

Spinal Tap is back, and this time the band wants to help save the world from global warming. The mock heavy metal group immortalized in the 1984 mockumentary, “This is Spinal Tap,” will reunite for a performance at Wembley Stadium in London as part of the Live Earth concerts scheduled worldwide for July 7. The original members of Spinal Tap will be there: guitarist Nigel Tufnel (played by Christopher Guest), singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) and bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer). Rob Reiner, who both directed “This is Spinal Tap” and played the fake documentarian Marty DeBergi in the… Read more »

Live Earth concert organizers have revealed the lineups for both the U.S. and London legs of what will be a worldwide series of Live Aid-like concerts, scheduled for July 7. The U.S. portion of Live Earth, announced early Tuesday (April 10), will take over New Jersey’s Giants Stadium, and feature an all-star lineup led by Kanye West, Fall Out Boy, AFI, Akon, Kelly Clarkson, Ludacris, Rihanna, and the reunited Smashing Pumpkins. The Police, Bon Jovi, Dave Matthews Band, Roger Waters, Alicia Keys, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, John Mayer, KT Tunstall, and Melissa Etheridge are among the other artists confirmed… Read more »

Like Al Pacino in “The Godfather Part III,” just when eco warrior Al Gore thinks he’s pulled himself free of Washington, D.C.’s partisan politics, he gets pulled right back into the muck. Former Democratic Vice President Gore, one of the organizers behind the July 7 global-climate-crisis-awareness concert Live Earth , has run into opposition from Senate Republicans over his plans to have one of the eight worldwide shows take place in D.C. And, depending on who you believe, the objection to the concert is either a matter of simple parliamentary procedure or just politics as usual. Oklahoma Republican Senator James… Read more »

Panic! at the Disco went from a group of teenagers who’d written only three songs and never played a live show to the biggest new rock band in America. Their secret: Put together a band the way you’d create a MySpace page and let the kids run wild Ryan Ross bought his C55 Mercedes three months ago, but it’s been parked in his Las Vegas garage ever since. When the Panic! at the Disco guitarist climbs behind the wheel, cues up Tom Waits’ new Orphans collection and starts pushing buttons on the navigation system, he’s still not sure how it… Read more »