Search Results for: pop will eat itself

When Good Charlotte wrote “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous,” the song that vaulted their last album into the mainstream, they were neither rich nor famous. These days, after selling more than 3 million copies of 2002’s The Young and the Hopeless, the guys in Good Charlotte are, to say the least, in a higher tax bracket. So their latest video – for “I Just Wanna Live,” off The Chronicles of Life and Death – skewers the fact that Good Charlotte are now in the precarious position of being rich people singing a song that complains about rich people complaining,… Read more »

Green Day will toast the release of American Idiot on Tuesday, but perhaps an even bigger cause for celebration these days is the 10-year anniversary of their breakthrough LP, Dookie. The modern-day classic not only launched the Bay Area punk trio into the mainstream, it opened the door to a mid-’90s wave of popped-up punk and provided a launching pad for the current crop of melodic pop-punkers. “[Dookie] changed my life,” confessed Good Charlotte’s Joel Madden. “It made me want to start Good Charlotte…. Right after that record came out, we were like, ‘We have to start a band in… Read more »

Some might call New Found Glory’s Steve Klein a nitpicker. Others may view the way he adds consequence to a person’s seemingly minor quirks as insightful. “If there’s something about someone that bothers you, and you keep on noticing it every time you hang out with that person, it’s like a snowball effect,” the band’s guitarist explained. “Every time, it keeps getting worse and you keep on noticing that one thing and you can’t deal with it. You have to just stop it before it gets too far along.” Such was the inspiration behind “All Downhill From Here,” the first… Read more »

Randy Jackson is a hero. And it’s not just because the music-industry veteran – who is a judge on “American Idol” – has given a lot of great advice in his Hyperion book, “What’s Up, Dawg? How to Become a Superstar in the Music Business.” He is not afraid to rock the boat by criticizing the music industry, even though he could easily coast on his success. The industry, Jackson tells Billboard, is “in the toilet” and does not seem to know how to pull itself out of it. “I think record companies are so out of touch with the… Read more »

On Jan. 6, San Francisco’s Moscone convention center pulses with all the energy of a rock concert. A crowd sprinkled with hip-hop teenagers, digerati, and aging hippies streams in to hear the annual state-of-the-Mac keynote from Apple Computer Inc. Chief Executive Steven P. Jobs. Every facet of the event bears the fingerprints of the obsessive Jobs – right down to the music that fills the air. This year, it’s the King himself, Elvis Presley. Later, Jobs rolls the tape of Apple’s famous “1984” ad that ran on Super Bowl Sunday that year – and hasn’t been broadcast since. Only this… Read more »

A classic Bentley, owned by Michael Jackson and featured in a music video, will be sold at the Barrett-Jackson classic car auction this weekend unless company executives hear from the pop singer himself. Craig Jackson, president of Barrett-Jackson, said that his firm entered into a contract to sell the vehicle in October – prior to the child molestation charges leveled against the singer – but are unsure as to whether the pop icon still wants to sell it. “We just want to do what he wants us to do and we don’t know what that is,” Jackson said. Jackson, who… Read more »

A dispute over royalty rights on copy-protected CDs and other types of music discs is helping to stall the release of some new music technology, and could result in record labels owing tens of millions of dollars in back payments to music publishers. At issue are “double session” CDs that include two versions of each song on a disc, formatted for playback on different kinds of devices. The most widely distributed type are copy-protected discs that prevent CD tracks from being copied to a hard drive, but that also include a digital version of the songs, often in Microsoft’s Windows… Read more »

The future of the music industry is being held, quite literally, in the palm of a twentysomething’s hand. Not the “business” side of the music industry – you know, the folks you’ve perhaps heard weeping into their bowls of caviar over the 31 percent decrease in album sales over the course of the past year, a downturn the suits pin on the advent of digital music downloading and CD burning. No, the “art” side of music business is being forceably changed. Artists are either coming to terms with changes in the ways their music is distributed – or doggedly railing… Read more »

In their 13 years together, the members of P.O.D. have never denied their faith. And frontman Sonny Sandoval says the group never will. “It’s going to come out, whether I build houses or collect garbage,” he says. Spirituality and positivity have saturated the band’s material to date and have helped turn P.O.D. into a multiplatinum-selling act in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. With the new Atlantic effort, “Payable on Death,” both band and label hope that the faith of the 2.7 million U.S. fans who bought P.O.D.’s previous album also remains intact, as the new set – the group’s… Read more »

Coming soon to a Windows PC near you: Apple Computer Inc.’s. popular iTunes online music store, which analysts say will join an already crowded market that could mute its chances of repeating the success of the Macintosh-only version. The computer maker is set to unveil this week the long-promised Windows-compatible version of its online music service. Last week, it sent invitations to reporters for an event on Thursday in San Francisco proclaiming, “The year’s biggest music story is about to get even bigger.” An Apple spokesman declined further comment. Yet now, some analysts say that while iTunes for Windows may… Read more »