The outdoor Glastonbury festival is a cornerstone of Britain's music calendar. But this year's festival has yet to sell out, in contrast to past years when tickets were snapped up within hours.
Gallagher, whose band headlined the festival in 1995 and 2004, said rap was to blame.
The 70-year-old has recorded a hip-hop album set for release next month. “Cosby Narratives Vol. 1: State of Emergency” blends the comedian’s concepts and stories with a hip-hop, pop and jazz soundtrack.
“I do not rap on any of these things,” Cosby said Monday. “I wouldn’t know how to fix my mouth to say some of the words.”
“I wrote that song in the 9th grade for a talent show,” said the 18-year-old Swift, who won the night’s top honor over Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley and Sugarland. “I never thought it would be on an album, never thought I’d record it, never thought it would be a single, never thought it would be No. 1 and certainly never thought it would win video and female video of the year.”
The Flamingo Las Vegas says Braxton’s show will remain dark this week while the 40-year-old Grammy winner has more medical tests following her April 7 hospitalization for chest pain. Braxton was released the following day, but last week’s shows were canceled.
Flamingo President Don Marrandino said her Tuesday-through-Saturday shows are also off, and Braxton will take advantage of a previously scheduled two-week break.
The U.S. Coast Guard rescued Irioska María Nodarse, Elvis Manuel’s mother, who manages his musical group, and 13 other people in the Florida Straits on Wednesday, two weeks after they left Pinar Del Rio seeking to make the passage to Florida. Five others, including Elvis Manuel, 19, one of Cuba’s biggest musical stars, could not be found and were presumed dead after rescue efforts were called off over the weekend.
Twelve of the 14 survivors, including Irioska María Nodarse, were returned to Cuba on Saturday; the two others, believed to have been the group’s U.S.-based smugglers, were in custody.
But then the onstage DJ spins “Crazy Bitch,” the signature hit from resurgent rock band Buckcherry’s third album, “15.” For three minutes and 22 seconds, the Kid Rock partisans have only Buckcherry on the brain, singing every word while dancing and pumping fists with such ferocity you’d think the band itself was onstage.
It’s a moment of pure rock ‘n’ roll transcendence — and a clear illustration of the transcendence Buckcherry has made from what manager Allen Kovac calls “beyond dead” to a return-to-platinum status with 2006’s “15.”
The joint venture with be called Tag Records, a nod to Procter & Gamble's's Tag body sprays. It will be run by Island Urban president Jermaine Dupri, who helped produce the latest sales disappointment by his girlfriend, Janet Jackson.
Tag Records will unveil its first signing in May, and is promising a marketing budget 10 times the going rate of $1 million or so for most artists.
The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter tells Blender magazine: “‘Gangsta rap’ was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other. ‘Gangsta rap’ didn’t exist.”
Keys, 27, said she’s read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck “to symbolize strength, power and killing ’em dead,” according to an interview in the magazine’s May issue, on newsstands Tuesday.
Backed by music mogul Clive Davis, the budding British diva has already drawn endless comparisons to Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston for her booming voice. No less than Oprah Winfrey fawned over her talents on a recent show. She even managed to win over Simon Cowell, who fell in love with her talent when she won “The X Factor,” the British version of “American Idol.” Cowell and Davis both executive-produced her debut album, “Spirit,” which was released in the U.S. this week.
“It was blindingly obvious when this girl came on the show that this wasn’t just someone who had the potential to be a good singer, this was someone who had a potential to be a star,” Cowell said.
That decision tells you a lot about Cloud Cult, a ragtag crew of musicians and painters who put more value on their unique brand of DIY environmentalism than on record sales; and who fill their records with painfully sincere songs about grief and loss, and then set them to raging hard rock guitars, soaring strings and weird studio trickery.
Somehow, it all works. While still far off the mainstream radar, Cloud Cult has earned acclaim and a growing audience for their passionate rock. They did show up at this year’s recent South by Southwest, and staged several well-attended performances for their sprawling live show (which features two artists painting onstage the entire time). An anticipated new album will be released April 8.
She quickly found some possibilities, and set out on what she figured would be a two-week vacation.
Instead, it turned into an adventure of more than three months that refreshed her personally and professionally. The results can be heard on her new disc, “Another Country,” made up of songs written on a piano in a Paris apartment.
"I've had an idea for a long time, which might sound a little crazy, but I really want to look into holographic touring," Tankian told Billboard.
"I think we could reduce our need to travel if we could project ourselves into meetings and concerts. We have the technology, and we're not using it right now."
The Purple One will be the featured act on day two of the giant summer music festival, a three-day affair that runs April 25-27 in Indio, Calif.
He joins a lineup that includes Jack Johnson and Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd singer-songwriter who will close the festival.
On Monday, they celebrated their upcoming 65-city North American tour, which starts May 17, with a private performance at the famed Houdini House in the Hollywood Hills. The Grammy-winning band performed a tight, 30-minute set, and it felt like the ’90s as they rocked hits including “Plush,” “Vasoline” and “Big Empty.”
The quartet — singer Scott Weiland, guitarist Dean DeLeo, bassist Robert DeLeo and drummer Eric Kretz — each took on solo projects during the band’s split. Weiland’s group, Velvet Revolver, was arguably the most successful. That group, which includes former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, announced on April 1 that Weiland was no longer a member: Slash claimed Weiland’s “increasingly erratic on-stage behavior and personal problems have forced us to move on.”
“We’re going to go ahead and cancel her shows tonight and for the rest of the week,” Flamingo Las Vegas hotel-casino and Harrah’s Entertainment Inc. spokeswoman Deanna Pettit said Wednesday. “We expect she’ll return to the stage next Tuesday.”
Pettit says the 40-year-old Grammy winner is recovering at home following her release Tuesday afternoon after precautionary tests at a Las Vegas area hospital.
The singer made the announcement in a big-screen broadcast at the Boston Red Sox home opener Tuesday, during the traditional eighth-inning sing-along of his “Sweet Caroline,” which has become an anthem for Boston fans.
The Red Sox unveiled a new scoreboard video of Diamond in a Red Sox jacket singing his 1969 hit. Red Sox owner Tom Werner also appeared in the video.
Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”
It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favored classical music, and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive.
The festival will open Aug. 1 in Chicago’s Grant Park, near Lake Michigan.
Festival founder Perry Farrell calls this year’s lineup “a gorgeous array of talent.”
“Eyeeeeee feel Good!” Dora Morrow shouts into a microphone, then growls her best James Brown. "Like I knew that I would …”
If it’s not loud enough to wake the dead, it's loud enough to show that she isn’t among them, even though Dora and her 25 friends in this rehearsal hall have a combined age of 2,000 years.
The late tenor’s manager said Monday the bitter cold made a live performance impossible at the 2006 Winter Games.
The conductor, Leone Magiera, reveals in a book that the rousing rendition of “Nessun Dorma” (“Let No One Sleep”) was prerecorded because “it would have been too dangerous for him to give a live performance in that physical condition.”
Feist, who records by her last name, earned Junos for best artist and songwriter Saturday during a nontelevised industry awards show in Calgary.
The following night, she grabbed three more trophies for single (”1234”) and album and pop album (”The Reminder”) during a nationwide telecast on the CTV network.
The new material recently surfaced on Los Angeles-based music blog Pretty Much Amazing. The four songs — “Close Your Eyes,” “Ready,” “One Day,” and “With a Little Bit of Luck” — have varying sound quality, indicating that the tracks are in different stages of the recording process.
“I write all the time — lots of stuff not meant to ever be released, just working on ideas,” the inaugural “American Idol” champ told Billboard.com of the leaked work. “The fact that people have heard music that’s not ready yet sucks, but I hope they like it.”
“Exene (Cervenka) and I are talking about trying to write some X songs,” Doe tells Billboard.com. “We’re going to take it a step at a time, see how this (tour) goes, and if we’re all enjoying ourselves and feeling creative, then we’ll continue. We’ll just have to do it when we have the time.”
Doe says that even though the band — which also includes original guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer DJ Bonebrake — sounds hot these days, the notion of new material, X’s first since “Hey Zeus!” in 1993, is still intimidating.
“Exene (Cervenka) and I are talking about trying to write some X songs,” Doe tells Billboard.com. “We’re going to take it a step at a time, see how this (tour) goes, and if we’re all enjoying ourselves and feeling creative, then we’ll continue. We’ll just have to do it when we have the time.”
Doe says that even though the band — which also includes original guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer DJ Bonebrake — sounds hot these days, the notion of new material, X’s first since “Hey Zeus!” in 1993, is still intimidating.
Best Buy Co. was ranked behind Wal-Mart and iTunes, with Amazon.com and Target tied for the fourth spot in January and February, according to consumer surveys conducted by The NPD Group.
The firm tabulated units sold, counting every 12 digital downloads as one CD. It did not count sales revenue, nor mobile music sales.
The announcement came two days after Weiland was ousted from Velvet Revolver, the all-star band he ditched Stone Temple Pilots for in 2003.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, Velvet Revolver cited his “increasingly erratic on-stage behavior and personal problems.” Weiland angrily countered the next day that his bandmates were “discontents” engaged in a “a blatant and tired excuse to cover up the truth,” which was that the band had not been getting along for some time.
They’re no longer kids, and they were dressed more like very cool professionals than adolescent heartthrobs, but the reaction of the crowd showed that they haven’t lost any of the visceral appeal that launched the archetypal boy band to superstardom 20 years ago.
Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group Corp. are participating in the new venture, dubbed MySpace Music, which will roll out gradually in coming months.
