Last night, former Idolator editor Brian Raftery threw a book party for his brand-new tome Don’t Stop Believin’: How Karaoke Conquered The World And Saved My Life. As you might expect, karaoke was part of the festivities, courtesy The Original Punk Rock Heavy Metal Karaoke Band (which features Rob “YC” Kemp on bass). The night ended with a big sing-along of “We Are The Champions,” but earlier in the evening, Spoon’s Britt Daniel joined the band on a version of Wire’s “12XU”; it’s above. MORE »
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idolator book club
Britt Daniel Goes Out On A Wire
idolator book club
Sanjaya Isn’t Going Away Quite Yet (Give Him Another Month, Maybe)
If the news that crazy-haired American Idol also-ran Sanjaya Malakar was finally releasing his first EP, the singer also has a book about himself and his time on Idol. Thankfully, the fine people at ABC News have offered an extended excerpt from Dancing To The Music In My Head, so as to spare you some of the effort of thumbing through its 256 pages in a cafe at Borders with zero intent of purchasing it. MORE »
idolator book club
A Psychic’s 732-Page Proof That She Can Mediate Conversations With Jim Morrison And Michael Hutchence
Medium Jacqueline Murray claims that she’s the “channel” for the beyond-the-grave musings of the Doors’ Jim Morrison and INXS’ Michael Hutchence–clearly, her aura is attractive to lead singers with nice cheekbones–and she’s discovered so many interesting things about them that she’s decided to put them all down on paper. And someone decided that all 732 pages of those findings were worth publishing, which is why the two-volume set A Tale Of Two Brothers: Jim Morrison And Michael Hutchence is available for you to purchase now. The books claim to not only reveal how each frontman really died and the coverups involved, they promise shit-talking about the remaining members of INXS, postmortem gossip from Morrison paramour Pamela Courson and Hutchence babymama Paula Yates, and lots of cameos from other psychics who have Web sites. Break on through the jump to see the full press release! MORE »
idolator book club
Liz Phair Reviews Dean Wareham’s Memoir, Reaffirms “Blowjob Queen” Status
Dean Wareham’s Black Postcards is a very readable memoir that may ironically accrue a larger audience than his bands Galaxie 500 and Luna, whose careers the book chronicles. It’s both touching and amusing, but one thing I didn’t find it was melodramatic, possibly because I kept hearing the words spoken lackadaisically over Velvets-like guitar. Not so for Liz Phair, who hypes the rock’n'roll angle pretty strongly in her NYT book report review, opening with a late-’80s Queen lyric and focusing on more rough-and-tumble than you’d expect in a piece about an indie rocker with “an elective reading list to rival Art Garfunkel’s.” MORE »
idolator book club
“Whitney Got Me High!”: Bobby Brown To Release The Male <i>What’s Love Go To Do With It?</i>
“I never used cocaine until after I met Whitney!” cries thug lover Bobby Brown in his autobiography, Bobby Brown: The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But, out next month. Turns out his marriage to comeback hopeful Whitney Houston may have been a sham from the word go: “I think we got married for all the wrong reasons. Now, I realize Whitney had a different agenda than I did when we got married. … I believe her agenda was to clean up her image, while mine was to be loved and have children.” It seems the male Tina Turner (”she hits me more than I hit her,” Brown told Today in ‘03) may also be the male Nicole Kidman. MORE »
idolator book club
Shock G Reveals That Tupac Was Into Orgies, Basketball, Putting the Satin On Your Panties
Noz of Cocaine Blunts has unearthed news of what has the potential to the best autobiography since Jose Canseco’s Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big*. The book in question is Producing a Genius, a still-in-progress work by Shock-G, a.k.a. Humpty Hump, a.k.a. the leader of seminal ’90s rap group Digital Underground. According to Shock’s MySpace blog, “the book will chronical [sic], my 6 years, 4 tours, 19 studio sessions, 7 video shoots, 13 house parties, 2 courtroom cases, 5 basketball games, 3 streetfights, 4 arrests/police run-ins, dozens of tag-team girl trade-off experiences inwhich [sic] I was side by side with Tupac, and what it was like to record the young genius in the early years of his career, a time that he himself called the best time of his life.” MORE »
idolator book club
Bret Michaels is releasing his autobiography this fall, and as MetalSucks notes, it will be sure to not be as interesting as either The Dirt or anything Poison guitarist C.C. DeVille would commit to paper. MORE »
idolator book club
“Let’s Talk” About One Of The Most Interesting Music Books You’ll Read This Year
Many moons ago (i.e. in March), former Idolator Brian Raftery launched a broadside at the snooty/reactionary response Stereogum had to the idea of the 33 1/3 series of books publishing Carl Wilson’s critical journey into the heart (will go on) of darkness that is Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love. The irony, as a few readers noted in the comments section, was that the book was hardly an ass-licking paean to a terrible album, written for a series that should have been focusing its energies on, I dunno, Wowee Zowee. MORE »
idolator book club
“Margrave Of The Marshes” Keeps It Peel
In the interests of promoting writings that aren’t necessarily found online, we bring you the Idolator Book Club, in which we look at music books that may be residing in a bookstore near you. In this installment, Idolator intern Cortney Harding gives a once-over to the recent memoir/biography John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes. MORE »
idolator book club
Taking A Trip Through “Babes In Toyland”
In the interests of promoting writings that aren’t necessarily found online, we’re proud to introduce the Idolator Book Club, in which we look at music books that may be residing in a remaindered pile near you. In our first installment, Idolator intern Cortney Harding gives a once-over to the 1994 biopic Babes in Toyland: The Making and Selling of a Rock Band, by Neal Karlen; it’s currently available for less than a dollar at Amazon. MORE »
