Well, now we have word from two of the band members themselves.  However, it looks like they haven’t exactly talked to each other to get on the same wavelength.

Here’s what drummer Joey Jordison had to say, according to Blabbermouth:

“There WILL be another record, no matter what.  We already have kind of a  timeline…We kind of know when we’re going to start.  It isn’t going to be too long.”

And here’s singer Corey Taylor’s take on the matter (again, thanks to Blabbermouth):

“It’s too soon right now, but we’re still talking, all of us are talking and everything’s good but we’ll see.”

That’s two drastically different responses to the same question, no?  In the end, I think it’s inevitable that Slipknot will continue on as a band, but with Stone Sour and Murderdolls occupying some of the band members’ time right now, any new music probably won’t come until 2012.

-Sam

M.I.A. really knows how to piss people off these days. 

Most recently, the Sri Lankan rapper has managed to target both Oprah Winfrey and Lady Gaga — two powerful ladies who you probably shouldn’t be hating on; unless of course she’s just looking for some publicity. 

Speaking of Lady Gaga, M.I.A. said, “Is it about numbers?  About how much you’re selling?  Is it truly the journey?  Because Lady Gaga’s journey isn’t that difficult: to go from the fucking Upper East Side to a fucking performing arts school and onto a stage at the museum of fucking whatever.  That journey’s about four miles.” 

Yeah, it’s Lady Gaga’s journey that is making your album plummet 25 spots on the Billboard 200. 

And then speaking of her encounter with Oprah, “Oprah seemed to be giving me the cold shoulder.  She was dancing with Imaa.  Imaa was always dancing with me, hugging and kissing me.  Oprah seemed really pissed off with me.”

But hey, at least M.I.A. apologized for the fucking disaster of a show in New York City the other week.  As a sign of her apology, she’ll come back to New York, after her tour, and perform a free concert. 

Sorry for the language; it just seemed all too necessary.

This comes from Kings of Leon drummer Nathan Followill, in reference to the band’s recent show in St. Louis:

“So sorry St. Louis. We had to bail, pigeons shitting in [bassist] Jared [Followill]’s mouth. Too unsanitary to continue….Don’t take it out on Jared, it’s the fucking venue’s fault. You may enjoy being shit on but we don’t. Sorry for all who traveled many miles.”

Yummy!

That really sucks for both the band and the fans.  It’s too bad there weren’t any umbrella hats on hand that the guys could have strapped on to protect them from the fecal showers.  I wonder if, in the future, the venue will consider doing what the Cincinnati Bengals considered when they had a similar problem a few years back.

-Sam

Whatever your thoughts are about Lady Gaga, I can’t see any rational human being siding against her in this particular instance.

You see, according to Rolling Stone, this past weekend Gaga had a show in St. Louis which was protested by the Westboro Baptist Church.  If you don’t know who the WBC is, they are the people who picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard (with signs that said things like “AIDS Cures Fags”) along with multiple funerals of soldiers killed in action.  They’ve picketed the funerals of Michael Jackson and Dio.  They’ve protested outside the Holocaust Museum, calling the Holocaust “minuscule” and saying “Jews are the real Nazis.”  A few years ago, after the Sichuan earthquake in China, they released a press release praying “for many more earthquakes to kill many more thousands of impudent and ungrateful Chinese Communists.”  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The Anti-Defamation League has classified this “church” as a hate group.  And it’s sad to say that this group actually is a church because in reality it’s nothing more than the giant inbred family of Pastor Fred Phelps.  And yet it still receives the tax exemption from our government.

Anyways, according to these worthless abominations, everything tragic that happens in the world is directly attributable to homosexuality.  And Lady Gaga is well known for  having a devout following of LGBT fans.  So naturally, as the attention-starved whores that they are, the WBC showed up to her concert to call Gaga a “false prophetess” and warn that she and her “gender-confused, self loathing, tone deaf” fans are headed to hell.

Gaga handled the situation brilliantly, in my opinion.  If attention is what these people want, then you simply have to deny them it, no matter how hard it may be to turn the other cheek.

Preempting the group’s protest, Lady Gaga tweeted a lengthy multi-part message to fans to warn them of potential clashes with the “hateful organization.” She urged concert-goers to ignore the protestors writing, “Do not interact with them, or try to fight. Do not respond to any of their provocation. Don’t waste your words or feelings, no matter what you hear or see.” She encouraged her fans to “Be inspired to ignore their ignorant message, and feel gratitude in your heart that you are not burdened or addicted to hate, as they are.”

Thankfully, the show went off without incident.  Curiously enough, however, this was not the WBC’s first attempt at undermining Gaga.  They’ve actually made a couple “parody” songs of their own hate messages set to Gaga’s hits (warning: these songs are terrible):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

-Sam

According to Gizmodo, there’s a new craze sweeping the interwebs involving teens supposedly getting high…using MP3s.  I’m not making this up.  The process is being dubbed “I-dosing,” and essentially there are sites which will sell you a ten-minute track of droning tones and frequencies which will supposedly “bring about the same effects of marijuana, cocaine, opium and peyote,” but without all of those pesky track marks.

And now the authorities are getting their panties in a bunch over this which is causing parents to freak out (just watch the video below).  I’m not saying music can’t affect how you feel, but come on.  It can’t alter your brain chemistry in the way an actual chemical substance would.  This whole thing just screams “hoax.”  The sites that sell these tracks want you to fork over money to buy a 40-page guide on how to properly get high on their digital sounds.  Does it really take 40-pages to say “Step 1.  Put on headphones.  Step 2.  Listen to track.  Step 3. Realize you’ve been swindled.”  I’m sure anybody who has claimed this has worked on them was either high as a kite already or just under the placebo effect – believing something to work because you’ve been told it does and are consequently anticipating a reaction.

I haven’t listened to this garbage.  Have any of you tried to get all spaced-out on your MP3s, and if so what happened?

Click here to view the embedded video.

-Sam

I recommend you give them a listen if you’re into Avenged Sevenfold, Atreyu, Nightwish etc

But wait, there is hope once again!

The New York Post is reporting that the seminal MTV show Beavis and Butt-head will be returning to the airwaves with all new episodes!  The new episodes will still feature the boys as high-schoolers, but instead of flinging their cynical and moronic critiques at music videos from the 80s and 90s, their old cracked television will now feature current videos.

Some people might say that Beavis and Butt-head was the first step in MTV’s movement away from featuring music videos.  That’s fair and it may be true.  But couldn’t it also then be the first step in reversing that trend and leading the station closer to its origins?  MTV is never going to be a 24/7 music video station again – the economics just don’t support it.  But I’m sure they can get away with showing some, and if so, the return of Beavis and Butt-head is a sneakily awesome move in that direction.

And can you imagine what kind of comments those two will have while watching the “Alejandro” video?

-Sam

The hubbub started because during the show, Eddie Vedder read the following statement in Portugese from a piece of paper: “Thank you for coming to our last show. Not our last ever, but our last in a long time.”

Major media outlets then ran with the “news.”

The only problem?  As PJ’s publicist Nicole Vandenberg noted, “He says that at the end of all tours, because the tour has ended. The remark may have gotten a little lost in translation.”

So there you have it.  Straight from the horse’s mouth.  Kind of.

-Sam

Linkin Park isn’t quite on the Tool-schedule of releasing albums, but they are close enough – taking three to four years in between each album release.

We knew that LP was hard at work on a new album, but prognostications had its release date pegged sometime around the end of the year or early next year.  Thankfully, we won’t have to wait that long.

According to the band’s official site (which hopefully will be getting a make-over ASAP as it’s still stuck in their iPhone game phase), the group’s fourth album will be released on September 14th and has the title A Thousand Suns.  The first single will be a track called “The Catalyst” and that will be released on August 2nd.

They also announced a pretty cool contest in connection with the album:

From their site:

Beginning tomorrow, July 9th, we’re teaming up with MySpace for “Linkin Park, Featuring You,” a contest which gives you the one-of-a-kind opportunity to be on our new album. We’ll be giving you some audio from “The Catalyst,” and you get to take it from there; you can remix the parts, write something over them, or mute stuff and write something totally new. We may choose a remix of the song, and put it on the album…or, we may choose an amazing keyboardist, string quartet, guitarist, percussion group, or other musician, and invite them into the studio to play on one of our songs.

If only I could play a damn instrument!

As far as the album title goes, it would appear to  be a portion of a line from the Bhagavad Gita, later quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer in reference to the atomic bomb: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.”  LP’s last album, Minutes To Midnight, similarly featured an atom-bomb-related title.  It would make sense that the “minutes to midnight” nuclear countdown clock would lead to the explosion of “a thousand suns.”  But while the two albums may be thematically linked in some small way, I don’t think they’ll be considered a pair.  In fact, early word is that the new record will only continue the band’s distancing from their earliest nu-metal days.

Whatever it sounds like, I’m excited to hear it.

-Sam

Yeah, that was pretty low.

But if anyone could top (drop?) that, it’s Courtney Love.

I’m just going to step aside and let Rolling Stone explain what went down during a recent Hole concert in Washington D.C.:

“Do you really like rock music?” Love asked one young woman earnestly during the show. “Because you’re African American. That would be like me being into Lil Wayne.”

“Hole performed roughly 30 songs…but the songs were mainly just fragments and only a handful were actually completed.”

“She also stumbled through several other songs, admitting that she had forgotten how to play them — yet still played them regardless.”

“Later, one of her handlers announced that in order to coax Love back for an encore, the crowd would have to cheer loudly because, the Post reports, “there was someone who was waiting to have sex with Love and it would take lots of applause to get her to delay that appointment.”"

And from the Washington Post:

“Three-quarters-filled at the start, the club was no more than a quarter packed by the excruciating end.”

“She also introduced an assistant, Lisa, who was onstage for the entire show filming Love on an iPhone. Not on the side of the stage. Not filming a few songs. The entire show, onstage, often directly in front of Love.”

“She played a new song, “Pretty Your Whole Life.” It was bad. Half an hour later, she played it again. It was worse.”

Oh yeah, and during the set’s closer, she decided it would be a good idea to go topless.  Here’s the video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s a smattering of the fans’ opinions of the show afterwards:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I think the girl sitting against the wall says it best: “Courtney Love needs to stop taking fucking opiates.”

Ho-lee-shit, that was a train wreck.

-Sam