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A grand jury has indicted a Johnson City man on charges that he tried to blackmail a gospel singer by threatening to reveal the performer is gay. Walbert Keith Farmer, 39, was arrested by FBI agents earlier this month and indicted last week on federal extortion charges. Farmer is accused of demanding nearly $15,000 from Kirk Talley, a Dove Award-winning and Grammy-nominated singer who lives in Kodak, in exchange for not telling Talley’s recording company about his sexual conduct. Farmer met Talley in an Internet chat room, Farmer’s attorney Scott Pratt said. Talley told the FBI the Internet was the… Read more »

Radio is awesome, isn’t it? It’s free, it’s on whenever you want it, and you can choose from among eight or 10 stations. About the only people who could possibly complain about it, in fact, are people who have to listen to it. They’ll tell you that the music you hear on the radio is mostly the same cloying pop junk, played over and over. That 20 minutes of every hour is ads, played over and over. And that as you drive, the signal comes and goes with the territory. Two years ago, two companies – XM and Sirius –… Read more »

Child molestation charges against Michael Jackson are being driven by “money and revenge,” said defense attorney Mark Geragos, who vowed to derail the alleged victim’s credibility and fight what he called a prosecutor’s vendetta. For District Attorney Thomas Sneddon, whose similar 1993 case against the pop singer evaporated when the accuser reportedly accepted millions in settlement money, the charges filed Thursday represent a second chance to convict the fading pop star before the prosecutor begins his planned retirement. Unlike the 1993 case, Sneddon says, this time he has a cooperative witness who isn’t interested in a piece of Jackson’s fortune.… Read more »

Multi-platinum-selling rapper Juvenile has returned to the Cash Money fold and is set to release his fifth solo album, Juve The Great on December 23. This marks Juvenile’s first release since 2001’s gold certified, Project English. The first single from the CD, “In My Life,” was produced by Cash Money’s in-house hitmaker, Mannie Fresh. The track has already garnered massive early radio airplay in major markets such as Washington D.C., Norfolk, Dallas, Raleigh and Juvenile’s native New Orleans. The video is in regular rotation at BET’s Rap City and will hit MTV2 Friday, December 19th. As a pioneering southern rapper,… Read more »

There’s one drawback to Blink-182’s decision to release “I Miss You” as their next single. “This is the thing, the song’s really hard to play,” singer/guitarist Tom DeLonge said backstage at KROQ-FM’s annual Almost Acoustic Christmas on Sunday. “We’ve never played it before. We might play it in the future, or we might have it on a ghetto blaster onstage and we might do an interpretive dance. It’s one of those things, but it’s gonna be good, though, no matter what it is.” It’s not like the band doesn’t have a good excuse for not having the ballad of sorts… Read more »

The ongoing songwriting credit battle between Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney was recently rekindled when Ono once again left the former Beatles’ name off the song “Give Peace a Chance.” First released by the Plastic Ono Band in 1969, “Give Peace a Chance” appears on the new DVDLennon Legend, and, as per the arrangement the songwriting duo reached forty years ago, it was previously credited to both men, despite Lennon being its sole author. The credits to “Give Peace a Chance” have been in contention for decades. On the 1975 Lennon compilation Shaved Fish, the song was credited to Lennon/McCartney,… Read more »

Australia’s snottiest rock quartet, The Vines have completed their second album, Winning Days, which shall hit the shelves on March 23. Mere hours after the band wrapped up their final show in support of their breakthrough debut Highly Evolved, they hopped on a plane and ended up in a barn in Woodstock, New York, ready to begin recording. Although occasionally known to be slightly, shall we say, intoxicated during their performances, the boys have consistently managed to play to packed venues all over the world. Their defiant and strangely alluring ways have managed to capture the attention of their female… Read more »

Ozzy Osbourne has been many things throughout his multi-platinum career: lead singer of Black Sabbath, successful solo star and a veteran touring artist. But as Ozzy marks the 35th anniversary of his career, there is no doubt that his starring part in MTV reality series “The Osbournes” ushered in a most unlikely role for him: that of mainstream pop-culture icon. Much has already been said about Ozzy and his family in the saturation media coverage that followed the success of “The Osbournes,” which documents the lives of Ozzy; his wife/manager, Sharon; and two of their children, Kelly and Jack (the… Read more »

The members of Fountains Of Wayne were just as shocked as the rest of the world at last week’s Grammy nomination in the Best New Artist category. Lead singer Adam Schlesinger revealed he’s thrilled about the nod, but finds it ironic considering the band has been around for more than seven years. “I was told that it has to do with, defining it as the record that sort of gets you into the larger public consciousness or something,” Schlesinger said. “So I guess, in that sense, maybe it’s a fair definition. Yeah, this is our third record. Our first record… Read more »

The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way on Monday for civil rights icon Rosa Parks to proceed with her lawsuit against OutKast and others over the rap music duo’s hit song with her name as its title. The justices let stand a U.S. appeals court ruling that reinstated Parks’ false advertising and publicity claims against OutKast and three Bertelsmann AG units – LaFace Records, the record producer, and Arista Records and BMG Entertainment, the distributors. Parks made history in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat to a white man and move to the back of a city… Read more »