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He does comedy, writes books, mixes it up with the hottest stars in music and Hollywood. With all this, who needs swimming? Certainly not Michael Phelps – not anymore, at least. But as a presenter at the 2008 Video Music Awards, all that fresh Olympic bling will certainly help. The swimmer who took home a record-breaking eight gold medals from the Beijing Games joins Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan and Ciara as presenters at the Sept. 7 VMAs telecast from Los Angeles. British comedian Russell Brand will host. It’s been a busy week for Phelps, who announced he’ll write a book… Read more »

The first time Arcade Fire performed in Paris, Mathieu Saura stood outside the venue with his girlfriend, holding up a sign that read, “Please, we want to come to the show.” The band’s bassist, Richard Reed Perry, got them in, and ever since, Saura might as well have not left. Under the name Vincent Moon, he’s gone from a fan begging for tickets to an in-demand filmmaker who has revolutionized music video. His films are stripped down, intimate videotaped performances – shot in one take, often of an act simply strolling down a street or playing in a parking lot.… 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 »

Not only have the Jonas Brothers notched the year’s third-biggest debut album, they’ve managed the rare feat of having two albums in the top 10 at the same time. “A Little Bit Longer,” the third album from the trio of siblings, sold more than 525,000 copies to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 album charts, according to figures released by Nielsen SoundScan on Wednesday. Only Lil Wayne (whose “Tha Carter III” sold a little more than 1 million in its first week) and Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” (which topped the chart with 720,000 its first week) have… Read more »

If Malaysian officials’ logic holds, Avril Lavigne is sexier than Gwen Stefani and the Pussycat Dolls and just as potentially morally corrupting as Beyoncé. The Canadian faux-punkette has become the latest Western pop star to face trouble in the Asian country as she was uninvited from performing a planned Kuala Lumpur gig. The Muslim-majority country’s Arts, Culture and Heritage Ministry canceled the show today amid growing protests and claims the singer was, quite simply, “too sexy.” While that, of course, is entirely subjective, the timing of the planned gig–just two days before the nation’s Independence Day on Aug. 29–was not… Read more »

Quiet time is a rarity for the Jonas Brothers these days. Following a special performance for more than 500 screaming tween and teen girls at Apple’s downtown Manhattan store on Tuesday night, the brothers – Kevin, 20, Joe, 18, and Nick, 15 – huddled in a stairwell, trying to find a quiet space to conduct an interview with The Associated Press. Good luck with that. Even as they spoke, their words were almost drowned out by deafening, doglike shrieks from girls still trying to find a way to get at their idols, who have set off a boy-band pop craze… Read more »

One of Australia’s most successful rock exports, the Grammy-winning trio Wolfmother, has been torn apart by “longstanding frictions,” according to a statement published on the group’s Web site on Thursday. Bass/keyboard player Chris Ross and drummer Myles Heskett have resigned, while singer/guitarist Andrew Stockdale plans to find other musicians and begin making a new Wolfmother album. “Please understand that in spite of their best efforts over a long period of time, they just could not find a harmonious way to work together,” the statement said. Wolfmother’s self-titled debut album, released in 2006, sold more than 500,000 copies in the United… Read more »

Among the most notorious on-screen gaffes ever, Janet Jackson’s breast-baring “wardrobe malfunction” on CBS during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show drew a $550,000 indecency fine from the Federal Communications Commission. Now a federal appeals court has thrown it out. A panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that the FCC “acted arbitrarily and capriciously” in issuing the fine for the fleeting image of nudity, which it noted lasted just over half a second. An estimated 90 million people watching the Super Bowl heard Justin Timberlake sing, “Gonna have you naked by the end of this… Read more »

When it was unveiled in June, Apple’s new iPhone didn’t appear to offer anything new for music fans. But thanks to the subsequent launch of the App Store on iTunes, iPhone users can download a host of applications to add new functions to the device. Many of them are music-oriented and all are made specifically for the iPhone. The weekend after the new iPhone’s release, more than 10 million applications were downloaded through the App Store. Some are free, some carry a fee, and most also work on the Wi-Fi-compatible iPod Touch. Here are some of the more notable music… Read more »

When the culture began to change in the late 1960s – when the old one-liner comics on the Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the War in Vietnam – George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it’s hard to think of Carlin as one of America’s most radical and courageous popular artists. But he was. Carlin started doing stand-up… Read more »