Search Results for: decade

The annual three-ring circus that is Ozzfest has become a perennial summer celebration of all things loud and abrasive over the last decade – and this summer’s lineup will not disappoint. Black Sabbath and British metal stalwarts Iron Maiden – who will be playing material exclusively from their first four albums – will share headlining duties, and they’ll be joined for the 26-city ride by Rob Zombie and a host of young metal bands, starting on July 15. Along with Sabbath, Maiden and Zombie, the main stage will also include Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall and Ozzfest regulars Zakk Wylde’s Black… Read more »

New York – Rappers 50 Cent and former protege The Game are calling a truce. The Game has a foundation, Black Wall Street, which empowers the community through business development. 50 Cent said he’s launching a new foundation, G-Unity, to help people overcome obstacles. The two will donate to the Harlem Boys Choir and Compton Unified School District Music Program. “I realized that if I’m going to be effective at that, I have to overcome some of my own. Game and I need to set an example in the community,” 50 Cent said in a statement. It comes a week… Read more »

New York – There are several good reasons why Motley Crue didn’t play the halftime show at this year’s Super Bowl, and most of them were on display as the reunited ’80s rockers assaulted Madison Square Garden for the first time in 21 years. Having reigned as the Bad Boys of Rock ‘n’ Roll for most of the decade, the California quartet saw their decadence crown snatched away in the late ’80s by Axl Rose and Guns ‘N’ Roses. Motley’s own fortunes ebbed, the victim of substance abuse, supermodel divorces (drummer Tommy Lee managed to lose both Pamela Anderson and… Read more »

You can’t get the question right. You’re fumbling for the right words but all you can hear are the lyrics to “Age of Consent” over and over and over again in your brain… It’s almost too easy to toss the word “influential” in front of a band to hype up its place in the pop-music pantheon. Few acts deserve it, and the word is so damn relative. But the culture mill spits out thousands of new bands each year and inevitably even the most wanly creative gets the “influential” stamp if it can hang in there long enough. So, then… Read more »

Los Angeles – California pop-punk trio Blink-182, famed for its practical jokes and disdain for clothing, has gone on “indefinite hiatus,” with no plans to work together again, its Geffen Records label said Tuesday. Singer-guitarist Tom DeLonge, singer-bassist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker want to “spend some time enjoying the fruits of their labors with loved ones” after a decade of working together nonstop, the statement added. “While there is no set plan for the band to begin working together again, no one knows what tomorrow may bring,” it said. San Diego-based Blink-182, cast in the same mold as… Read more »

Classic-rock fan George Petersen doesn’t need another copy of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” or Cream’s “Disraeli Gears.” He has spent the past four decades buying and re-buying his favorite music in a succession of new formats: vinyl, 8-track, cassette, compact disc, Super Audio CD, DVD-Audio. Enough is enough. The basement is full. “We as consumers have been trained by the music industry to go out and buy a new piece of plastic every few years,” said the 51-year-old Petersen, editorial director of Mix, a San Francisco-based magazine that covers professional sound recording. “Why do we keep buying… Read more »

Los Angeles – Welcome to the best sales week of this still-young 2005. Contributing to this buoyant frame are historic chart accomplishments by Tina Turner, the fastest start for the 10-year-old “Grammy Nominees” line of releases and, nestled between those two albums, a not-too-motley week for Motley Crue. Album volume for the week stands at 11.4 million, and 6.9 million of those units sold were current titles. Both figures are high-water marks for the year. The volume of digital tracks, which slipped to less than 5 million last week for the first time since the week ending Dec. 19, is… Read more »

Forget the stage, it’s been almost a decade since Jerry Cantrell, Sean Kinney and Mike Inez – a.k.a. 75 percent of ’90s grunge icons Alice in Chains – have even been in the same room. Sure, they’ve jammed with each other in various permutations since Alice last played a show together (a 1996 taping of MTV’s “Unplugged”), but never all three together. So when they announced that they’d be taking the stage again this month, it had to be for a good reason. “We all saw what happened with the tsunamis in Southeast Asia. It was such an overwhelming tragedy,”… Read more »

In the grand scheme of things – or in the recording industry, for that matter – six years isn’t exactly a long time. But for the guys in Thrice, who just marked their sixth year as a band, the occasion meant only one thing: time for the career retrospective! So they’re releasing “If We Could Only See Us Now,” a DVD spanning their just-a-little-longer-than-half-a-decade-long career. It might seem like a bit of overkill for a band that just two years ago was still releasing albums on tiny indie labels, but lead singer Dustin Kensrue sees it a little differently. “We… Read more »

Tripoli – An American rock band hoping to be the first Western group to play in Libya since Muammar Gaddafi came to power 35 years ago could not perform because of an administrative glitch, government officials said on Saturday. The Heavenly States, a little-known group based in Oakland, California, had arrived in Libya on Feb. 1 to play three concerts, including one in the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna. Government officials said there had been a problem with the group’s visa. “They came with a tourist visa,” an official said by way of explaining the failure to grant them permission… Read more »