At the conclusion of his assessment of the July Vibe last month, Keyboard Krybaby asked whether something was distracting the magazine's EIC, Danyel Smith, and her staff. Based on the August issue, which in current parlance could charitably be described as a "hot mess," his question still stands.

Before he jumps into the specifics regarding the exceptionally poor packaging extant, he should mention that this particular issue, "The Real Rap Issue," is the first in the mag's history in which hip-hop is featured exclusively. Smith says in her editor's letter that "many think of Vibe as a hip-hop—all rap, all the time—magazine," and that this is not correct. But she feels that the various obituaries for the genre offered recently warrant this issue.

Smith also mentions that next month's issue will celebrate the magazine's 15th anniversary. Over the past year, each issue of Vibe has included photo compilations focusing on images of hip-hop and R&B personalities from then and now, as well as countdowns of the best or greatest this or that. This issue, in the V-Mix front-of-book section starting on page 57, vintage photographs of the likes of Salt & Pepa and Remy Ma are contrasted with images from the past year or so.

But 16 pages beforehand, as this issue's V15 Rewind, comes "Dropping Gems," in which verses from Nas, Scarface and Lauryn Hill are hailed as the best that have been spit in the magazine's lifetime. In between comes an article listing 19 reasons hip-hop isn't dead at the moment; "Because the King of the South (T.I.) isn't getting dethroned yet" is No. 1, while "Because Nicki Minaj" (a Lil Kim-esque MC) "raps...and loves to play dress up" is the list's final rationale.

What KK is getting at is that it's self-evident that Vibe's staff should place content regarding the present together, and the stuff concerning the past as such. He would have thought it only logical to abut the two aforesaid retrospectives, then follow 'em with "Diggin' in the Crates: 24 Lost Rap Classics." KK learned quite a bit about records he never heard of, but he also thinks that, notwithstanding Ms. Smith's keen desire to emphasize the genre's health, it doesn't say much for Vibe's estimation of hip-hop in the here and now when this throwback piece appears as the sum total of VRevolutions, which is nominally devoted to reviews of new music. It may be that Vibe just can't get their hands on upcoming hip-hop and R&B records, which in any case seem to be produced and manufactured without much regard to the needs of entertainment magazines.

He also would have placed "Bringing '88 Back," a survey of records and movements that rendered 1988 "the greatest year in hip-hop history," next to those pieces. KK thinks that the article's assessment of that year's importance to hip-hop is about right, and is pleased that 2 Live Crew's Move Somethin' and Too Short's Life is...Too Short are placed alongside Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back. (He's somewhat embarrassed to admit that he doesn't like the latter very much.) But he's also confused as to why Geto Boys' album from that year, Making Trouble, makes the cut. As he's a fan of music with lots and lots of cursing (Blowfly, G.G. Allin), KK loves him some Geto Boys, but Andrew Nosnitsky's piece "Most Known Unknowns" fails to describe why anyone should have cared about the then-Scarface and Bushwick-free crew, other than the dubious claim that sampling Tony Montana's dialogue from Scarface was a "major innovation."

It seems like all of these retrospectives not only could have benefited from a greater unity in packaging, but perhaps should have been saved for the big 15th-anniversary blowbang next month. Did Smith conclude that there were not enough ads being sold for the August issue, and dump the longer pieces here?

The cover subject of The Real Rap Issue is reputed Keyshia Cole suitor Young Jeezy. KK has to salute writer Benjamin Meadows-Ingram, for his feature Q&A "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" manages to evolve from a customary exercise in braggadocio ("you can go to any club, anywhere in the United States, and probably motherfucking Pakistan, you gonna hear a Jeezy record") to a very candid interview with a guy who would rather labor mightily to keep the focus on his upcoming album, The Recession. Jeezy admits that he did not (and still does not) have insurance and paid cash for an operation on his damaged vocal cords; that Ms. Cole did not deny strenuously enough in public that she was pregnant by him, and that she asked him to marry her and bought him a ring; and that he is mindful of the absence of his father during his childhood when he reflects upon how his profession keeps him away from his son. Good stuff.

KK was also interested in A sidebar to the Jeezy story, Linda Hobbs' "Southern Hospitality," wherein we learn that Antonio "L.A." Reid's move from Arista in Atlanta to Def Jam in New York was viewed with suspicion; the subtext is that there's a lingering resentment among the New York hip-hop cognoscenti that Southern artists and execs have success that is perpetually and rightfully due them. And Chris Yuscavage's "I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T" explores the online strategies that rappers like Soulja Boy and Flo Rida, as well as comers like Crooked I, Mickey Factz, Blu, and Jay Electronica, rely on in place of altogether fucked major labels.

Vibe hasn't been sucking all over the place, but the way this issue was produced indicates distraction and sloppiness on the part of the staff. KK certainly wouldn't blame anyone in the print business for feeling a little insecure, but he does think that as long as one has a job therein, one should evince greater care than is evinced in this issue.

What more is there to say, except "here's hoping Sebastian Bach weighs in on all these rumors soon." Sigh.

Shackler info [YouTube]

It's time to see what the most-played songs and artists on rock radio have been from January to June. And surprise, surprise, the drummer/singer/guitarist you can't get away from is in the top 5 of each list—twice. First, the top songs:

1. Seether, "Fake It"
2. Foo Fighters, "The Pretender"
3. Foo Fighters, "Long Road To Ruin"
4. Linkin Park, "Shadow Of The Day"
5. Puddle Of Mudd, "Psycho"
6. Bravery, "Believe"
7. Seether, "Rise Above This"
8. Finger Eleven, "Paralyzer"
9. Paramore, "CrushCrushCrush"
10. Rise Against, "The Good Left Undone"
11. Atreyu, "Falling Down"
12. Weezer, "Pork & Beans"
13. Three Days Grace, "Never Too Late"
14. Linkin Park, "Given Up"
15. Flobots, "Handlebars"
16. 3 Doors Down, "It's Not My Time"
17. Death Cab For Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart"
18. Jack Johnson, "If I Had Eyes"
19. Panic At The Disco, "Nine In The Afternoon"
20. Chevelle, "I Get It"

Almost every song here cracked the top 5 of Billboard's Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart, and the four that didn't—Rise Against, Jack Johnson, Death Cab and Panic—peaked elsewhere in the top 10. But these figures are all about longevity, songs that stay on playlists for months and months, not the ones that make a big splash and then quickly disappear. Therefore, we get plenty of the 2007 hits that refuse to die like "The Pretender," "Paralyzer," and "Never Too Late." And songs that broke in the spring and have been unavoidable ever since, like "Pork & Beans" and "Handlebars," will almost surely rate higher on the year-end list.

"Nine In The Afternoon," which I predicted would be a flash in the pan airplay-wise, has turned out to have substantial legs based on its placement here. That's not to say I'm ready to halt my sophomore-slump schadenfreude for Panic At The Disco—their album Pretty. Odd. has still sold below expectations, and the slightly more tolerable follow-up single "That Green Gentleman" failed to chart at all, which may have helped clear the way for the long radio shelf life "Nine" has had.

Now, let's look at the 20 most-played artists on alternative radio so far in 2008:

1. Foo Fighters
2. Linkin Park
3. Red Hot Chili Peppers
4. Green Day
5. Nirvana
6. Seether
7. Weezer
8. Pearl Jam
9. Stone Temple Pilots
10. Smashing Pumpkins
11. Three Days Grace
12. Offspring
13. Sublime
14. Incubus
15. Nine Inch Nails
16. Puddle Of Mudd
17. Paramore
18. Beastie Boys
19. Alice In Chains
20. Killers

Again, no surprises at the top, where the Foos and Linkin Park take their predictable spots, dominating with multiple singles from their 2007 albums and a comfortable bedrock of earlier hits. And Seether's two big recent hits get them plenty far up, despite a relative lack of airplay for previous singles. But overall you've got an interesting cross-section here, one that demonstrates just how much older recurrents dominate alt-rock radio these days. Less than half of the artists—nine total, four in the top 10—have had new singles out in the last few months. Three of the bands haven't been together for more than a decade, and the fact that those bands are Nirvana, Sublime, and Alice In Chains, all of whom have deceased frontmen, is a little creepy.

Even some of the still-active older bands get a negligible amount of their chart placement from recent material: Smashing Pumpkins have eight songs in the top 500 most played songs of the year, but last year's underwhelming comeback single "Tarantula" is the least popular of those; all 10 of Pearl Jam's entries are from no later than 1994; and even if Stone Temple Pilots came home from their reunion tour
tomorrow and recorded a smash hit, it'd struggle to get as many spins as "Interstate Love Song." Meanwhile, Green Day, RHCP, Weezer and Nine Inch Nails get healthy spins for songs from the '90s as well as those from this decade.

The enduring popularity of first-wave grunge bands makes the presence of umpteenth-wavers like Three Days Grace and Puddle of Mudd unsurprising. But it's impressive that a relatively new band like Paramore has inched up so high on the list—especially since its two big hits were released in '07, and the one single the band released this year, the Idolator fave "That's What You Get," pretty much tanked, barely cracking the Modern Rock chart. And though The Killers' Sam's Town, released way back in 2006, was widely deemed a disappointment, enough of the band's singles, including that album's "When You Were Young," have remained in recurrent play enough to keep them high up on the list. In fact, they're up much higher than bands who achieved comparable success around the same time and haven't had alt-rock hits lately, like My Chemical Romance (59) and Fall Out Boy (74). FOB might wanna keep that "Mr. Brightside" cover in their set for a while, because it might eventually be more familiar to the casual fans in the crowd than any of their originals.

Huggy Bear, "Her Jazz"
Bratmobile, "Kiss And Ride"
Calamity Jane, "Come On"
Slant 6, "Nights x 9"
Tiger Trap, "Supreme Nothing"
Cupid Car Club, "M.P. Skulkers"
Team Dresch, "Hand Grenade"
Mary Lou Lord, "Some Jingle Jangle Morning" (the 7-inch version, not the one on Got No Shadow)
Rancid, "Brixton" (to draw in the "casual" buyer)
Kreviss, "I.O.U." (although you'd probably need to get an extra console for the multi-drumming action)

Kill Rock Stars [buyolympia.com]
Stars Kill Rock [buyolympia.com]
Rock Stars Kill [buyolympia.com]
Earlier: Rock Band To Breed A Whole New Batch Of Riot Grrrls (Maybe)

AC/DC, "Let There Be Rock"
AFI, "Girl's Gone Grey"
Alanis Morissette, "You Oughta Know"
Alice in Chains,, " "Man in the Box"
Allman Brothers, "Ramblin' Man"
Avenged Sevenfold, "Almost Easy"
Bad Company, "Shooting Star"
Beastie Boys, "So Whatcha Want"
Beck, "E-Pro", "
Bikini Kill, "Rebel Girl"
Billy Idol, "White Wedding Pt. I"
Blondie, "One Way or Another"
Bob Dylan, "Tangled Up in Blue"
Bon Jovi, "Livin' on a Prayer"
Cheap Trick, "Hello There"
Devo, "Uncontrollable Urge"
Dinosaur Jr., "Feel the Pain"
Disturbed, "Down with the Sickness"
Dream Theater, "Panic Attack"
Duran Duran, "Hungry Like the Wolf"
Elvis Costello, "Pump It Up"
Fleetwood Mac, "Go Your Own Way"
Foo Fighters, "Everlong"
Guns N' Roses, "Shackler's Revenge"
Interpol, "PDA"
Jane's Addiction, "Mountain Song"
Jethro Tull, "Aqualung"
Jimmy Eat World, "The Middle"
Joan Jett, "Bad Reputation"
Journey, "Any Way You Want It"
Judas Priest, "Painkiller"
Kansas, "Carry On Wayward Son"
L7, "Pretend We're Dead"
Lacuna Coil, "Our Truth"
Linkin Park, "One Step Closer"
Lit, "My Own Worst Enemy"
Lush, "De-Luxe"
Mastodon, "Colony of Birchmen"
Megadeth, "Peace Sells"
Metallica, "Battery"
Mighty Mighty Bosstones, "Where'd You Go"
Modest Mouse, "Float On"
Motorhead, "Ace of Spades"
Nirvana, "Drain You"
Norman Greenbaum, "Spirit in the Sky"
Panic at the Disco, "Nine in the Afternoon"
Paramore, "That's What You Get"
Pearl Jam, "Alive"
Presidents of the USA, "Lump"
Rage Against the Machine, "Testify"
Ratt, "Round & Round"
Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Give it Away"
Rise Against, "Give it All"
Rush, "The Trees"
Silversun Pickups, "Lazy Eye"
Smashing Pumpkins, "Today"
Social Distortion, "I Was Wrong"
Sonic Youth, "Teenage Riot"
Soundgarden, "Spoonman"
Squeeze, "Cool for Cats"
Steely Dan, "Bodhitsattya"
Steve Miller Band, "Rock'n Me"
Survivor, "Eye of the Tiger"
System of a Down, "Chop Suey"
Talking Heads, "Psycho Killer"
Tenacious D, "Master Exploder"
Testament, "Souls of Black"
The Donnas, "New Kid in School"
The Go-Go's, "We Got the Beat"
The Grateful Dead, "Alabama Getaway"
The Guess Who, "American Woman"
The Muffs, "Kids in America"
The Offspring, "Come Out & Play (Keep 'em Separated)"
The Replacements, "Alex Chilton"
The Who, "Pinball Wizard"

Bonus Tracks
Abnormality, "Visions"
Anarchy Club, "Get Clean"
Bang Camaro, "Night Lies"
Breaking Wheel, "Shoulder to the Plow"
The Libyans, "Neighborhood"
The Main Drag, "A Jagged Gorgeous Winter"
Speck, "Conventional Lover"
The Sterns, "Supreme Girl"
That Handsome Devil, "Rob the Prez-O-Dent"

Bikini Kill - Rebel Girl [YouTube]
Rock Band 2 Complete Track List Revealed [IGN]

According to Saul (Buckethead's webmaster), "The basic song structure was written by Bucket and Brain. Big B did a score for a film of the same name (never released) From what I can gather Axl liked the plot/ideas of the story and crafted lyrics behind the music. It's supposed to be a pretty guitar driven rocker of a song with an amazing hook/bridge."

According to Mysteron (a semi-credible, supposed "insider"), "I know nothing of Rock Band 2, but I am 100 per cent sure that Shackler's Revenge is a new GN'R song...Whoever started this rumo(u)r managed to pull the title of a new GN'R song out of the air from somewhere...It will be on CD."

There is a Buckethead song called "Shackler" that is on one of the Dragon Ball Z soundtracks, The History of Trunks.

You can hear that track here, although you have to go through imeem's annoying login process first. Given that "Shackler's" hasn't shown up on any of the 80,000 leaked track lists for Chinese Democracy, and the genesis of the song makes me feel like it's a song that Axl lent the GN'R "brand" to more than anything else, I'm not taking this as a sign that Universal Music Group actually has a release date for the damn thing until I've heard about promo copies going out.

Planned Guns N' Roses Deal Underscores Power of Video Games to Sell Songs [NYT]
Shackler's Revenge [Chinese Democracy]

It's a risky move, because the Billboard Hot 100 is dominated by songs that scale the chart by amassing sales as well as airplay. But the song is so mindlessly catchy, the act's people figure it'll be a big chart hit anyway with radio alone.

I could be talking about M.C. Hammer's 1990 smash "U Can't Touch This," the "Superfreak"-sampling hit that made the Top 10, even as Capitol refused to issue it as a cassingle.

But I could also be talking about Kid Rock's "All Summer Long," a mashup of Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" and Lynyrd Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" that debuts on the Hot 100 this week at No. 80 despite his lack of interest in releasing it digitally.

Can the erstwhile Robert Richie pull off in 2008 what one Stanley Kirk Burrell pulled 18 years ago?

A No. 80 debut might not seem all that impressive for the Kid's insanely catchy song, but it's appearing on the chart with one hand tied behind its back thanks to the lack of any digital single release. Just for comparison, in early May, Weezer's "Pork and Beans" debuted at No. 84, even with iTunes on its side—as well as radio, where the song has been massive, topping the all-airplay Modern Rock list for 10 weeks. (On the Hot 100, "Pork" never went much higher after its debut; it peaked at No. 64 a few weeks back.)

Right now, 99 songs on the Hot 100 are available at retail in some form, virtually all at iTunes. But "All Summer Long" is the only one with the Billboard footnote "PROMO ONLY," which is basically code for "radio can play this, but the consumer can't buy it." Atlantic has even provided a single-length "radio edit" of the song to programmers, but you can't buy that, either.

Kid's isn't the only song this year to make a splash without digital sales. You may recall that in February, Mariah Carey's album-leading single "Touch My Body" appeared on the chart on radio points alone, debuting way up at No. 57. That would seem to minimize Mr. Rock's achievement. But let's get some perspective: (a) Mariah is a massive pop artist who crosses multiple radio genres and treats the Hot 100 as her personal fiefdom; and (b) everyone knew ahead of time that the song would get a digital release eventually—which it did in April, shooting the song to No. 1 on the big chart.

Kid Rock is a different rock n' roll animal. He scores radio hits only every half-decade or so: massively in 1999, with a string of rock hits off his breakthrough Devil Without a Cause; briefly in 2003, with a country-pop crossover track, "Picture." And more important, he doesn't want to release any of his material—albums or singles—on iTunes. So, for radio program directors to play one of his songs, they've got to get great listener feedback; they're never going to have the kind of sales data that tells them when a song's connecting with the public.

So far, it looks like "Summer" isn't having trouble winning PDs' support. It's already more than halfway up the Hot 100 Airplay list and rising fast (No. 45 this week, up from No. 60). And it's got multiple radio formats providing it with a chart boost: Top 40, adult contemporary, mainstream and modern rock, and country stations are all playing it. Assuming it never goes on sale at iTunes or Amazon MP3, this Kid Rock single, more than Carey's "Touch," might prove to be a pure experiment in the reach, and limits, of an all-airplay single with huge listener appeal.

Kind of like "U Can't Touch This."

Beyond the gleeful pillaging of Rick James on Hammer's hit, and Zevon and the Van Zandt brothers on Kid Rock's, "U Can't Touch This" and "All Summer Long" would seem to have little in common. But for those of us who've watched the history of the retail single for the last 20 years, "U" is a pivotal record.

Tapped as the second single from 1990's Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em after the modest R&B hit "Help the Children," "U" was only issued as a 12" vinyl single, a clever tactical move. That allowed "U" to qualify for the Hot 100 (until 1998, all singles had to be released at retail in some form to be eligible for the big chart) but guaranteed that the overwhelming majority of consumers desiring the song would have to buy Hammer's album on cassette or CD. For all intents and purposes, "U" was a grand experiment on Capitol's part, a de facto airplay-only hit on a chart where every other record had a mainstream retail component—cassingle or maxi-cassette, CD-single—providing chart points. And they didn't do it with a low-priority song, either; they did it with a preordained rap-pop crossover smash with huge MTV play.

Long story short: the experiment worked like a charm. "U" made the Top 10 anyway, thanks to its blanketing of the Top 40 airwaves in the summer of 1990. If a cassingle had been released, the song indubitably would have gone to No. 1 and stayed there for months... but what did Capitol care? They made money hand over fist: Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em spent a staggering 21 weeks atop the Billboard album chart and went 10-times-platinum, the first hip-hop album of any kind to see that kind of success. Since 1990, no other album has spent that long on top of the chart (Billy Ray Cyrus, Whitney Houston, and Alanis Morissette have come closest).

In short, "U Can't Touch This" was the song that kicked off the record industry's decade-long campaign to bury the single as a retail medium. (Don't get me started—I could go into a long diatribe about all the other experiments, from deleting singles early to limited releases, the labels used to get out of releasing retail songs over the next 10 years.) By the start of the 2000s, virtually no song on the Hot 100 had a retail component. Billboard caved in '98 in allowing non-retail tracks to chart, and the first all-airplay song to top the chart was Aaliyah's "Try Again" in 2000.

Since the early 2000s, of course, the paradigm has shifted again, thanks to the inclusion of digital song sales on the Hot 100 starting in 2005. Consumer sales once again have a major impact on the chart. In fact, sales skew the Hot 100 more radically now than at any time in the chart's history. The tide has turned against radio: it's now virtually impossible to make the Top 10 without sales—as proved this spring by Carey's hit, which couldn't get higher than No. 15 on airplay alone before iTunes propelled it to the top.

I doubt that quite as much thinking has gone into Atlantic's withholding of "All Summer Long" from iTunes as went into keeping Hammer's hit off mall-shop shelves in 1990. (Mostly, it seems the Kid has a beef with his label's digital-release royalties, or Steve Jobs, or something.) Still, the effect has been the same: this week, Rock's nine-month-old Rock N Roll Jesus disc is back in the Top 10 for the first time since last fall.

Good for Kid Rock and Atlantic—but I think we can agree that this year's anti-single experiment will not prove a Hammer-sized success, even if Jesus does return to No. 1 on the album chart for a week or two, and even if "Summer" does manage to make the Hot 100's upper reaches. If the Kid, as he claims, doesn't care about people illegally downloading or torrenting his music, there's got to be a slew of people too cheap to buy a full-price CD and too savvy to do without his hit on their iPods.

Here's a rundown of the rest of this week's charts:

• It's been eight weeks since Rihanna's "Take a Bow" topped the Hot 100, and it looks like she might claw her way back. The song, which never left the Top Five, moves up two spaces to No. 2 this week, right behind Katy Perry's three-week champ "I Kissed a Girl." In the modern, sales-skewed Hot 100, the chart pattern we've seen by "Bow" is becoming more typical: an explosion in sales, followed by a radio catch-up.

The iTunes release of the song sent Ri hurtling more than 50 spots to No. 1 in May; since then, her sales have cooled, but the song has risen in the airplay rankings to become the second most-played track in the country behind Lil Wayne's "Lollipop." (R&B programmers, in particular, have only recently caught on; "Bow" reaches the Top 10 for the first time this week on the airplay-centric Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs list.) Perry continues to have the top-selling digital song, but if Ri can keep her sales respectable—it's ranked seventh on the digital chart this week—and keep growing her airplay, we could see a coup.

If Ri were to pull off the repeat appearance in the penthouse, the nine-week gap between No. 1 stints would likely go down as the second-largest in Hot 100 history. It's unlikely that any song will ever top the all-time record-holder: Chubby Checker's "The Twist," which went to No. 1 in 1960 and then again, 16 months later, in 1962. (Reportedly, the kids got into the dance first, and then their parents caught on later.)

• I didn't realize this until Fred Bronson told me, but the new song on top of the Hot Country chart this week is actually a remake of a modern-schlock smash. "Home," originally written and recorded by the millennium's New Sinatra, Michael Buble, topped the Adult Contemporary chart in the summer of 2005. Covered by Blake Shelton for a fan-soaking rerelease of his 2007 album Pure BS (man, I'll say!), "Home" is now a Country chart-topper, as well.

Can't wait for the inevitable R&B revamp by Robin Thicke, or maybe Eric Benet... with special guest T.I., of course.

Top 10s
Last week's position and total weeks charted in parentheses (Digital Songs chart includes total downloads/percentage change in parentheses):

Hot 100
1. Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl" (LW No. 1, 9 weeks)
2. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 4, 13 weeks)
3. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 2, 17 weeks)
4. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 3, 21 weeks)
5. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 6, 9 weeks)
6. Chris Brown, "Forever" (LW No. 8, 11 weeks)
7. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 10, 21 weeks)
8. Jonas Brothers, "Burnin' Up" (LW No. 5, 2 weeks)
9. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 7, 15 weeks)
10. Miley Cyrus, "7 Things" (LW No. 16, 5 weeks)

Hot Digital Songs
1. Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl" (LW No. 1)
2. Jonas Brothers, "Burnin' Up" (LW No. 2)
3. Miley Cyrus, "7 Things" (LW No. 6)
4. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 4)
5. The Pussycat Dolls, "When I Grow Up" (LW No. 7)
6. Rihanna, "Disturbia" (LW No. 5)
7. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 10)
8. Metro Station, "Shake It" (LW No. 9)
9. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 8)
10. Chris Brown, "Forever" (LW No. 14)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Keyshia Cole, "Heaven Sent" (LW No. 1, 15 weeks)
2. Lil Wayne, "A Milli" (LW No. 2, 11 weeks)
3. The-Dream, "I Luv Your Girl" (LW No. 4, 19 weeks)
4. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 3, 19 weeks)
5. Alicia Keys, "Teenage Love Affair" (LW No. 6, 21 weeks)
6. Chris Brown, "Take You Down" (LW No. 5, 15 weeks)
7. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 7, 17 weeks)
8. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 11, 11 weeks)
9. Young Jeezy feat. Kanye West, "Put On" (LW No. 10, 9 weeks)
10. Usher feat. Beyonce and Lil Wayne, "Love in This Club, Part II" (LW No. 8, 11 weeks)

Hot Country Songs
1. Blake Shelton, "Home" (LW No. 2, 24 weeks)
2. Alan Jackson, "Good Time" (LW No. 4, 13 weeks)
3. Montgomery Gentry, "Back When I Knew It All" (LW No. 1, 20 weeks)
4. Kenny Chesney, "Better as a Memory" (LW No. 3, 16 weeks)
5. Brooks & Dunn, "Put a Girl in It" (LW No. 6, 11 weeks)
6. Dierks Bentley, "Trying to Stop Your Leaving" (LW No. 5, 26 weeks)
7. Sugarland, "All I Want to Do" (LW No. 8, 7 weeks)
8. Keith Anderson, "I Still Miss You" (LW No. 10, 23 weeks)
9. Keith Urban, "You Look Good in My Shirt" (LW No. 12, 7 weeks)
10. Taylor Swift, "Should've Said No" (LW No. 13, 8 weeks)

Hot Modern Rock Tracks
1. Weezer, "Pork & Beans" (LW No. 1, 12 weeks)
2. The Offspring, "Hammerhead" (LW No. 2, 9 weeks)
3. Foo Fighters, "Let It Die" (LW No. 3, 14 weeks)
4. Linkin Park, "Given Up" (LW No. 4, 18 weeks)
5. Seether, "Rise Above This" (LW No. 5, 20 weeks)
6. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 8, 5 weeks)
7. Disturbed, "Inside the Fire" (LW No. 7, 15 weeks)
8. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" (LW No. 6, 16 weeks)
9. Saving Abel, " Addicted" (LW No. 11, 16 weeks)
10. 3 Doors Down, "It's Not My Time" (LW No. 12, 20 weeks)

Why do I have a feeling that there's going to be a straight remake of this ad by N.E.R.D. in the coming months? Call it a hunch.

Christina Aguilera Rock The Vote [YouTube]
Madonna Rock The Vote Commercial [YouTube]

1. Green Day

American Idiot is their biggest album since Dookie, so the boys probably aren't ready to get back in touch with their inner Gillman St. An Operation Ivy reunion, though? With Rancid now stuck with the drummer from the Used, that shit could happen tomorrow.

2. U2

On a relative scale, that post-Rattle & Hum period was a bit icky. Not that most bands today wouldn't be happy to have been in their cowboy hats.

3. Kid Rock

Oh sure, "All Summer Long" is nostalgic. But not for this.

Beyond that, I'm at a loss! Even old bands with comeback albums like Motley Crue and Def Leppard were still doing better in '89! Journey was on hiatus, but Neal Schon was still making hit ballads with Bad English! Don Henley may not have had the Eagles, but he had The End Of The Innocence! Rod Stewart could do what he wanted, and Janet could rely on the Rhythm Nation. Neil Young may be proud of Living With War, but it's not "Rockin' In The Free World." Elvis Costello had "Veronica," Paul Westerberg had "I'll Be You," Donna Summer had "This Time I Know It's For Real." Rattle & Hum was only barely a flop, but I just cannot think of an act that did worse but is doing fine now. Can you think of a veteran artist today who can say they are in a better state, commercially and artistically, than they were in 1989?

Michael Jackson Plans Comeback With New Kids On The Block [Showbiz Spy]
Green Day live @ Paint Factory 1989 prt1 [YouTube]
Siskel & Ebert review "Rattle & Hum" [YouTube]
Kid Rock - Yo Da Lin In The Valley [YouTube]

Warmup
* If You Wanna Get To Heaven, Ozark Mountain Daredevils
* Gold Lion, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
* Possum Kingdom, The Toadies
* Black Betty, Ram Jam
* Don't Speak, No Doubt
* Black, Pearl Jam
* Drain You, Nirvana
* Farmhouse, Phish
* Santeria, Sublime

Apprentice
* You Oughta Know, Alanis Morissette
* We Got the Beat, Go-Go's
* Float On, Modest Mouse
* Kiss Me Deadly, Lita Ford
* Atomic, Blondie
* Heartbreaker, Pat Benatar
* Piece of My Heart, Big Brother & The Holding Company
* Rock the Casbah, The Clash
* I Wanna be Sedated, The Ramones

Solid
* Panic Attack, The Paddingtons
* Chop Suey, System Of A Down
* Give it Away, Red Hot Chili Peppers
* Everlong, Foo Fighters
* Kids in America, Kim Wilde
* Ace of Spades, Motorhead
* Hello There, John Prine
* Any Way You Want It, Journey
* Pinball Wizard, The Who

Moderate
* Machinehead, Bush
* Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen
* What's The Frequency Kenneth, R.E.M.
* Want To, (?)
* I Write Sins Not Tragedies, Panic! At The Disco
* The Old Apartment, Barenaked Ladies
* When I Come Around, Green Day
* Zombie, Cranberries
* Soak up the Sun, Sheryl Crow

Skilled
* Waiting on the World to Change, John Mayer
* Man in the Box, Alice In Chains
* Ramblin' Man, Hank Williams
* One Step Closer, Linkin Park
* Misery Business, Paramore
* American Woman, The Guess Who
* White Wedding, Billy Idol
* (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, Rolling Stones
* Folsom Prison Blues, Johnny Cash

Challenging
* Our Truth, Lacuna Coil
* Are You Gonna Go My Way, Lenny Kravitz
* Bring Me to Life, Evanescence
* Spoonman, Soundgarden
* Head Like A Hole, Nine Inch Nails
* Aqualung, Jethro Tull
* Double Vision, Foreigner
* Rodeo, ?
* Sultans Of Swing, Dire Straits

Blistering
* Magic Man, Heart
* Bad Medicine, Bon Jovi
* Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, The Police
* Thnks fr th Mmrs, Fall Out Boy
* Testify, Rage Against the Machine
* Kickstart My Heart, Motley Crue
* I Was Made For Lovin' You, Kiss
* Bad Reputation, Thin Lizzy
* Prodigal Son, The Rolling Stones

Nightmare
* The Bleeding, Five Finger Death
* Down With the Sickness, Disturbed
* Hypermusic, Muse
* Judith, A Perfect Circle
* TNT, AC/DC
* Rainbow in the Dark, Dio
* Anna Molly, Incubus
* November Rain, Guns N' Roses
* Comfortably Numb, Pink Floyd

Impossible
* Feed My Frankenstein, Alice Cooper
* Peace Sells, Megadeath
* Fuel, Metallica
* Crazy Train, Ozzy Osbourne
* Forsaken, Dream Theater
* 2 Minutes to Midnight, Iron Maiden
* Hot For Teacher, Van Halen
* Cowboys from Hell, Pantera
* (Ghost) Riders in the Sky, (any number of people)

Rumor: Rock Band 2 Set List Leaked On YouTube [PS3FanBoy.com]

Five weeks ago, Anono-Prick suggested that, after featuring chicks consecutively on the previous three covers, it was time for Joe Levy's Blender to feature a dude on its cover.

Right on time, here's the August 2008 edition, which is fronted not by a comely young woman, but by a guy who shares a physique with a goodly part of the readership Levy and his colleagues desperately want to not to lose to World of Warcraft, Twitter, and a komputah-based distraction that emerged while AP was writing this sentence. Jack Black is thereupon styled in combat gear, as per his role in the upcoming Tropic Thunder: he has enough credibility as a rock figure via his beloved D. that no one should look askance that he's on this particular magazine's cover.

Many months ago, AP alluded to a few words of wisdom offered by a publishing potentate. AP should disclose that said pearls—"in the late spring and summertime, they can see all the tits and ass they want on the street; In the fall and winter, they can't, and that's when you put nearly nekkid chicks on the cover"—were courtesy of Felix Dennis, Blender's former owner. At the time, Mr. Dennis was keen to impress upon the staff that a music magazine risked losing credibility if it went the "pendulous dugs" route too often; that this directive came from a man whose persona and publishing philosophy rebuked American notions of "credibility" amused AP and a few of his colleagues.

And so, in July comes no sweater meat. (Black's pair doesn't count.) It does seem, though, that Blender is overcompensating w/r/t the dude quotient in this issue. The issue contains exactly one piece of significance—by which AP means features, front-of-book items involving the subject's participation, and lead and secondary "down page lead" music reviews—involving a female artist. This would be the four-point "Useful Tips" front-of-book featurette regarding Katy Perry, the Christian music refugee responsible for the most strident song regarding one young woman's aborning interest in another to never appear under the "womyn's music" rubric.

Otherwise, the pieces emphasized in the August Blender go like this: AP's beloved T-Pain will have a new album, THR333 Ringz, ready for the fall; Chris Martin answers what are very likely not real queries from Blender readers; the four members of Motley Crue phone editor-at-large Elizabeth Goodman over the course of a week and disclose their mundane tour preparations; contributing editor Rob Sheffield rhapsodizes over the Hold Steady; Michael Joseph Gross talks with the cover dude; a piece details how games like Guitar Hero and SingStar are proving to be adept at selling downloads; contributing editor Jon Dolan visits the American Museum of Natural History with Conor Oberst...

Alright, let's take a breather here.

Okay.

...senior editor Jonah Weiner awards four and a half stars to Tha Carter III after spending half a year as the mag's Lil' Wayne correspondent; Beck's Modern Guilt, Black Kids' Partie Traumatic, Seun Kuti & Fela's Egypt 80's self-titled album, and the Cool Kids' The Bake Sale are judged to be very good indeed; contributing editor Robert Christgau uses a five-star review of a 2007 compilation to eulogize Bo Diddley and then devotes an "Every Original Album Reviewed" to Funkadelic (but not Parliament) and spends a lot of ink extolling funk, which is kind of funny if you've ever seen the guy move in a most arrhythmic fashion to live music in the NYC area; and finally, senior editor Josh Eells solicits in a "Who Do You Think You Are" interview with G-Unit that 50 Cent fancies Phylicia Rashad rotten.

The next prominent placement of a female "artist" pops up in the review section's "point of entry" item "I Love This CD." Tila Tequila, Blender's June cover girl, has this to say about Madonna's Hard Candy: "...how great does she look for her age? I'd date her." AP suspects that, if queried on merits of of the past five prime ministers of the UK, the ever reliable Ms. Tequila would exclaim, "Margaret Thatcher? I'd hit that!"

Gross' "G.I. Jack" comprises a fairly innocuous conversation: most often, that's all you can expect from a conversation with what appears to be a well-adjusted, talented guy who pretty much everybody likes. But AP is fairly confident that Black's likeability will not amount to a big newsstand gallop. AP wouldn't be surprised if Blender lobbied for a Coldplay cover a few months ago, lost to Spin and Rolling Stone, and had to settle for Black pimping a movie that has produced little anticipation.

As it is, Blender does not have a very wide latitude w/r/t to male cover subjects. Rolling Stone can put Obama and iconic musicians familiar to its aging longtime readership on its cover for a newsstand boost. Spin is now the whistlestop for bands transitioning from the blawg/Pitchfork diaspora to the wider world. But which huge-selling male musical figure or band can a happily commercial, generalist music publication that has historically declined to put baby-boomer faves on its cover rely on these days?

When AP worked at Blender, the answer was always thus: Eminem. Now? Coldplay, sure. AP would think that the mag's staff might have predicted Tha Carter III's first-week sales of a million, so why not him? Might be the old saw that images of black individuals tend to not do well for publications aimed at white people. Why not Nickelback? Might be that New York publishing types still cannot countenance butt-rock. Radiohead? Might be that too many of their fans proudly eschew print. Blender is in a pretty daunting bind here.

But it seems past time for Levy to come up with some new editorial gimmicks. He seems to have thus far abandoned Blender's longstanding reliance on lists, which is perhaps too redolent of the tenure of his predecessor, Craig Marks. His single formal addition has been giving over three pages an issue to crony Sheffield's aforesaid Station to Station column, which this month finds Sheffield chewing over the Hold Steady's new album Stay Positive. He likes it a whole lot, and in saying so, Sheffield grapples with an artist in the here and now instead of crafting hosannas to his '80s faves, which has been his column's tack thus far.

Levy had better get cracking: Blender's August 2007 issue topped out at 136 pages. The page counts of the subsequent seven issues, which concluded Marks' run as editor-in-cheif, would never go under 120. Three of Levy's first four issues topped out at 96 pages; the current mag hits 108.

And so, Rolling Stone devotes its July 10/17 issue to an interview with the all-but-presumptive Democratic candidate for the President of the United States of America, just four months after the mag's endorsement. The MSM pricked up their ears when the mag hit the stands last week: "Ooh, no cover lines for this issue, just like the 1980 Annie Leibovitz-shot image of John Lennon suckling Yoko Ono." We learn, from answers elicited by editor and publisher Jann Wenner's first two questions, that Obama is pleased by the endorsements of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, that Blood on the Tracks graces his iPod, and not much else.

(BTW: This week, a sale of Wenner's Us Magazine to Condé Nast was mooted; the consensus opinion seems to be that he's mystified by that mag's game-changing success and doesn't have much interest in the celebrity culture upon which it feeds. But it's clear that Wenner'd sooner a bear gnaw off one of his feet than part with Rolling Stone, what with it being the instrument with which he administers tongue baths to his longtime heroes and new crushes.)

Mention was also made of another article therein, which concerns another persistent meme of the past two years: Amy Winehouse leads her life in a heedless manner.

But no one in a position to trumpet the contents of any entertainment magazine noted the truly big news. So, with full knowledge that he has been much easier on Mr. Wenner's mag since he revealed his identity and his prior associations with RS, it is Your Correspondent's pleasure to laud the fact that Rolling Stone has published a feature on the Canadian progressive rock trio Rush in this very issue.

YC reckons he's on pretty firm footing when he suggests that Rolling Stone's past and present staffers regard the band the same way as every American woman and non-nerd male: as an abomination. Writer Chris Norris enumerates the qualities that damned Rush in RS' purview, although he describes them as commonplace complaints: "Their hypertrophic musicianship is mocked by critics, " he writes, "their lyrical pedantry spoofed by hipsters, their singer's voice a subject of churlish speculation..." As such, RS has been a bete noire to the trio's fans not only due to the mag ignoring the band for three decades, but also because Jann Wenner's other plaything, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has steadily declined to nominate Rush for induction. Since the 1980s, Rush coverage has been left to the likes of Guitar World, Bass Player, and Modern Drummer.

So YC wonders how this piece came to pass. Did the departure of Joe Levy and the ascension of Eric Bates and Jason Fine as co-executive editors clear the way? Is one of those two a fan of the band? Is Mr. Wenner so cuckoo for Obama that he didn't pay much attention to what else was in the issue? Or did he turn in his interview from wherever it is that he summers, allowing his employees to sneak the Rush piece in? Was the piece intended as an acknowledgment of Canada Day? Or does Norris have mystical ability to pitch the unpitchable? Whatever it may be, drummer Neil Peart generally consents only to speak to the drum press, so it's refreshing to read him interviewed by a journalist who's not invested in the sycophancy of the snare set.

Norris was a staff writer at Spin in the 1990s and early 2000s, and "Rush Never Sleeps" is his first piece for Rolling Stone. His conceit is that the band has created a world with as much immersive detail as the Grand Theft Auto diaspora, the Marvel Comics universe, or J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. Which is to say that a certain kind of nerd digs the fuck out of the band. So, between the MSM's recent interest in geek culture and Rolling Stone's agenda to laud any band that has stood the test of time, Rush can now receive the mag's imprimatur.

And when that imprimatur doesn't involve supplicating to many tropes beloved to Mr. Wenner, this can be a very fine thing indeed. A Rolling Stone writer obviously tends to get a lot of access to interviewees, and indeed Norris gets loads of color: he goes to a Toronto Blue Jays home game with bassist-singer Geddy Lee; he attends a rehearsal for the current tour; and he goes to dinner with the three. We learn that guitarist Alex Lifeson is an oyster enthusiast and that Lee is an oenophile. (YC must confess that he knew that factoid previously.) It is at this time Norris and the band discuss the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's persistent snubbing, a passage YC is frankly stunned was allowed to see print.

But Norris particularly excels at describing common knowledge in engaging language and thus avoiding cliche. To wit: "the very phrase 'Neil Peart' is shorthand for the kind of Olympian accomplishment rarely seen outside genres like classical music." "Lee entered the history books as one of (hard rock's) truly sui generis frontmen: gimlet eyes, ectomorph noted proboscis. Robert Plant may have sung about Mordor: Lee looked like he'd been there." YC believes that what you write about is not nearly as key as how you write, and he would bet that Norris agrees.

As a veteran of five Rush shows, experienced in each New York area venue that can accommodate the band (Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, Jones Beach, Garden State Arts Center), YC can say that Norris' contention that most attendees sing along with every word to every song from every album, even from last year's Snakes and Arrows, is true: Rush fans are the Trekkies trekkers of rock. Since the issue came out last week, there has been much debate on fora dedicated to the band, wherein fans have tended to be defensive w/r/t Norris' characterization along these lines. And yet, YC is surprised that Norris does not make the point that the Rush model—a band that does everything its own ruggedly, individualist way— has found recent adherents in the band's Canadian countrymen like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Wolf Parade and the Arcade Fire.

A few notes:

1. Norris notes only one of the nicknames the Rush dudes have given one another: Lifeson is "Lerxst." YC can reveal that Peart is the "Professor," and Lee is known as "Dirk."

2. Norris also does not mention Lifeson's New Year's Eve 2004 arrest for assaulting two sheriff's deputies, which is the one of the very few "rawk" occurrences to have involved a Rush dude.

3. He alludes briefly to Peart's interest in weirdo philosopher/ponderous prose stylist/right-wing nerd icon Ayn Rand, which manifested itself in many of his lyrics from the 1970s and prompted the band to be tarred as "fascists." YC believes that Peart's worldview has evolved since then, but he would have liked for Norris to get Peart to address this specifically.

4. But Peart's annus horribilis, which found his daughter and wife dying within ten months of each other a decade ago, is accounted for. He went on a motorcycle and biking odyssey, which is recounted in Peart's book Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, which YC read a bit of and found it quite moving.

In any case, Norris has done a superb job, and YC—who, it should be sufficiently clear by now, really really digs Rush, and has watched Peart's instructional videos—is jealous of the quality time he got with the band. His somewhat arch tone, typical of everything YC has read of his work, can occasionally read as if he's condescending to the band and their fans on behalf of RS. But more often, his take on what makes the band unique seems genuine and admiring.

Let's have some more like this, RS! And to you what don't like Rush: reading Norris' article will begin the process by which you will acknowledge how very very wrong you are.

It might comfort you secular festivalgoers that Christian festivals have reunions the public may or may have not wanted as well. This year, it's the return of Sixpence None The Richer, who were a solid female-fronted rock act for awhile, at least until "Kiss Me" came around.

Sixpence's lead singer Leigh Nash went out on her own for a bit, and guitarist/songwriter Matt Slocum recorded with Superdrag frontman John Davis, among others, but now they're back and they have a new album in the works. Between Sixpence, Over The Rhine, and other female singer-songwriters playing the fest, you really could fashion a mini-Lilith Fair from the lineup. As a bonus, it would be free of worrying about accidentally hearing Joan Osborne.

One thing Christian music doesn't do exceptionally well is gangsta rap, partially because it's hard to get all tough and hard in a religion that encourages turning the other cheek. No such issues for Solid State metal act Demon Hunter, who with the title of their new album encourage listeners to Storm The Gates Of Hell.

Side note: Brothers Don and Ryan Clark of Demon Hunter are incredible graphic designers when not acting all metal.

I really like the David Crowder Band, which may be the most uncool admission ever. I have nothing to add, although I'm ready for your mockery. (It's OK. Even my wife rolls her eyes when I mention them.)

Of course, if you'd like to see my favorite band of all time, there's no better place to see the 77's than Cornerstone. As a band, they play twice, and the festival will also have a solo appearance by lead singer Michael Roe, as well as two by supergroup of sorts the Lost Dogs. At this point, my championing of the band is probably tiresome times two, but too bad. Here's two tracks from YouTube.

As featured on hundreds of my creepy high school mixtapes for girls, here's "Nowhere Else":

And because no one can really stop me, "Film At 11":

Of course, a few acts that are actually enjoyable is hardly an endorsement of the festival as a whole, unless you're in high school and just wanting somewhere to wear your Christian t-shirt somewhere and hear a bunch of music. Just like any festival, it's hard to find enough quality material to fill one day, much less five, and acts with names like Death Is Not Welcome Here end up playing twice, which is reason enough not to attend. Still, to me, it's great that this festival exists, if only for its giving some of my favorite childhood acts (no Daniel Amos this year?) a gig to play this weekend.

Lineup [Cornerstone 2008]

There's no dancing around the fact that rock radio in 2008 is ruled largely by pretty much any monsters of 90's alt-rock who are still roaming around the major-label landscape. One need look no further than the current Hot Modern Rock Tracks, the top three slots of which have been filled by Weezer, Offspring and the Foo Fighters for three weeks now, to prove this point. I say some variation of this line every other column, I know, but said landscape is much than it used to be, so the survivors are bigger now almost by default, even as bands of more recent vintage nip at their heels.

Rock programmers must be among the most loyal in their profession, because name recognition seems to triumph over all in their arena; consider that the rock charts have recently seen the return of even more onetime hitmakers, some of whom no one particularly wanted to hear from again, and others who are remembered fondly even though they're indisputably past their peak.

One of the more surprising familiar names to reappear lately is Candlebox, the Seattle hard rock band who got signed and went multiplatinum at the tail end of the early-'90s grunge explosion. The band never got much respect from the alt-rock crowd, lacking the cred of any connection to the '80s Sub Pop scene, and fared better on Active Rock stations. (I remember seeing the video for "Change" on
Headbanger's Ball months before MTV started giving the band heavy Alternative Nation exposure.) But they became frigging huge for a brief moment, and each of their first three albums yielded at least one top 5 Mainstream Rock hit, even the infamous sophomore slump Lucy and 1998's Happy Pills, which I didn't even really know existed. By that standard, the newly reunited Candlebox's current No. 19 single, "Stand," can't quite be considered a comeback—but it's also the chart's airplay gainer this week, so it may be getting there. And it can't hurt that the song's opening riff is so similar to that of the band's breakthrough single, 1993's "You," that when
I first checked the song out on YouTube, I initially did a double take to make sure I didn't click on the wrong search result.

There's a lot riding on Mötley Crüe's Saints Of Los Angeles, the first album by the band's original lineup since 1997's Generation Swine. And while the first-week album sales and the summer tour receipts haven't come in yet, things look good on the radio front, where the title track hasn't dipped out of the Mainstream Rock top 10 since debuting there in April. (It's currently peaking at No. 7.) But that's a little less impressive when you consider that "If I Die Tomorrow," the Simple Plan outtake (seriously!) that the band recorded for a greatest-hits comp in 2005, peaked at No. 4, and Nikki's side project Sixx: A.M. hit No. 2 just a few months ago. And if you're still wondering about the unconfirmed rumors that Mötley cut a 360 deal with concert-promotion giant Live Nation, which would give the company a cut of any of the band's possible revenue streams, there might be subliminal hints in "Saints," which features refrains of "we signed our life [sic] away" and "give it up, give it up."

Over on the Modern Rock chart, one of the format's longest-running dynasties, The Cure, has been back in business as of late. The band racked up four Modern Rock chart-toppers in its heyday, and probably would've had more if Billboard had created the chart earlier than 1988, just before Disintegration came out. Of the band's contemporaries from that era, only U2 and, to a lesser degree, Depeche Mode, are still making occasional runs at the chart. The latest from Fat Bob and co., "The Only One," is one of four advance singles planned for the new Cure album, which won't be out until September and hasn't yet been given a title. The track, a pretty faithful approximation of the band's most radio-friendly Wish-era songs, has only peaked at No. 34 and already seems to be slipping off the charts, while the second single, "Freakshow," has yet to chart since being released earlier this month. I'm pretty curious to see if The Cure's experiment with so many singles in quick succession will have any impact on radio play, or if those songs will end up functioning as early leaks for die-hard fans to snap up. Perhaps one of the singles released in July or August will get a surge of airplay once the album comes out this fall, or maybe "The Only One" will drop off months before its release, never to return. Time will tell.

So who's definitely not staging a comeback, at least on the radio? Filter and the Black Crowes come to mind. Both bands recently reunited and released new albums, but their lead singles peaked at No. 27 and No. 33, respectively, on Mainstream Rock, then quickly fell off the chart. Likewise, Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale's "Love Remains The Same," from his recent solo debut, dropped off the Modern chart after hitting No. 33, which can't be more embarrassing than his song with the Blue Man Group, at least. And Judas Priest, who scored a minor hit in 2005 with their first new single after the return of frontman Rob Halford, "Revolution," have yet to chart with any of the songs off of their admirably ludicrous concept album Nostradamus. But if so-called rock stations can't embrace a seven-minute single about a 16th-century prophet, let's face it, that's their problem.

It has been a long-running meme at this column that mainstream entertainment magazines don't like it much when their competitors run a cover story featuring the same famous people at the same time as they. And so it comes to pass that the July 2008 Spin hits newsstands two weeks after the most recent issue of Rolling Stone. The former comprises an image of the entire lineup of Coldplay, whereas the latter features only the band's front-sissy Chris Martin. RS is clearly observing prevailing publishing wisdom that an image of a single individual will produce better newsstand sales than that of several; Spin goes with the noble concept that "Coldplay is a band."

But Your Boy wonders if the respective muckety-mucks of Spin and Rolling Stone can muster any righteous indignation as to which has the exclusive right to feature the most self-effacing rock band in the history of the world around the release date of Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends. It seems like all concerned would keep their heads down, play ball with one of the few bands to debut in the past decade that can command a consensus among people around the world that have no "oh they're just the Home Depot version of Radiohead" bona fides to prove, and hope that these issues do well in a crumbling marketplace and not worry that the dudes across the street had the same access they did. But Spin's braintrust must be pleased that their issue came out two days before Coldplay's record debuted at No. 1.

In any case, the issue under consideration this week is a Bizarro World version of Spin's June 2007 issue, which perhaps unintentionally featured a three-part examination of what the term "rock star" used to connote: namely, a imperially arrogant, debauched, and extravagantly wealthy individual. This month, again perhaps unintentionally, the mag presents a trisected meditation on how residents of the indie-rock diaspora are often seized by notions of humility.

Spin begins, of course, with Michael Joseph Gross' "Shine On," in which he spends some time in London with Coldplay. Gross presents a woman who works next to the band's rehearsal space: she knows little of the band other than that they are unassuming and that they are probably "crap at what they do." He recounts the standard litany of Koldplay Komplaints—their music is dull, the 40-Year-Old Virgin "gay" comment—then notes that the band's new album is produced by Brian Eno and Arcade Fire knobsman Markus Dravs, and is thus spikier and more challenging than its previous music.

For the remainder of the piece, Gross portrays the dudes being self-deprecating. They are self-deprecating while planning the band's marketing; they are self-deprecating in that they foolishly ceded too much decision making to others and erred in dismissing their now-reinstated manager, Dave Holmes; Martin frets over the possibility that someone might think the name of the album and the video for "Violet Hill" are pretentious, as well as the celebrity culture that makes his family's life trying; and so on.

YB should mention here that he was interested to learn that Martin's grandmother is Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe's next-door neighbor. But otherwise, YB is mostly struck that with Coldplay, the now 15-year-old expectation that musical artists should not behave in a manner associated with Louis XIV dovetails with an ancient and very English notion that one should not draw undue attention to or seem altogether pleased with oneself.

Similarly, Deputy Editor Steve Kandell's "Animal Collective of Montreal" (BTW: no matter the knowledge and predilections of Spin's readership, that's one unwieldy mufuggin' headline) concerns the Canadian quartet Wolf Parade. The men of this band are also laconic and concerned/unconcerned with seeming too prepossessing: like Coldplay, they each profess a lack of interest in cellphones and the innuhnet, and are bemused that anyone cares much for their music. Unlike Gross, Kandell ascribes these traits to the band's nationality; he also delightfully describes singer/guitarist Dan Boeckner as being "one blue knit cap away from being Jimbo from The Simpsons."

Finally we come to "Fjord Escorts," which concerns how the Swedish government takes an active interest in and indeed subsidizes native musicians as key exports abroad. The piece is written by Adam Sachs, a fellow YB has known since he was 14 years old and with whom he spent a long weekend prior to this writing, so he must recuse himself from any qualitative assessment. He'll just leave you with the fact that Swedes—part of the Scandinavian continuum populated by folks widely considered to be exceedingly reserved—seem to regard music and musicians as humble artisans producing exquisitely designed and serviceable craft, and not powerfully self-involved "art."

YB should say here that he tends to desire humility in his personal acquaintances, in elected servants, and in other players in public life. And it may be that most self-conscious, middle-class music fans were taught by Nirvana 15 years ago and by the domestic and foreign policies of the current administration that swaggering around with your big dick is bad. "Those folks are not like the Motley Crue, most rappers, or the tweakers on all those realty shows," they might say. "They're like me: responsible and humble. They look like they go to the same bar as me." And perhaps some of the people interviewed in these three articles are in fact preening jerks, but are adept at concealing this from journalists.

But YB more or less believes that some artists should be arrogant. Swaggering around with your big dick when you have a titanic, compelling gift that enriches the human race is okey-dokey in YB's book, and he'd like the regular-guy paradigm to go away for a while.

Apple Corps has become more active in recent months since Jeff Jones took over as chief executive.



The company, whose board includes Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono Lennon, has allowed Beatles compositions to be used on American Idol and in a Las Vegas show.



Martin Bandier, chief executive of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which controls more than 200 Beatles copyrights, said the exposure on American Idol had yielded a number of inquiries, including from mobile phone carriers.



"To my view, it's only a matter of time before we see Beatles songs that are the original recordings in motion pictures, in television work, and yes, maybe even one day in a commercial."

It wouldn't be the first time, dude. Have we already forgotten Michael Jackson's reign as the King Of Beatles Copyrights?

While Guitar Hero has been a stronger seller, I think Rock Band is the more logical platform for the Beatles to sign up with. Though honestly, I really just want to do those slow Ringo drum rolls.

Beatles Seek To Join Videogame Revolution [Financial Times]
Nike Beatles Revolution Ad [YouTube]

I mean, I loved Guyville and think Phair's other two pre-Matrix albums are pretty underrated because of her debut's outsized stature, and I'm sure glad that talk of the album is at least serving as something of a Katy Perry corrective as far as "women in music" are concerned. But every time I read a "think piece" pegged to Phair these days I want to claw my eyes out at the simplistic theorizing within, none of which has even attempted to grapple with the fact that 1993, for better or for worse, is not 2008, and that simply saying "women are awesome, yay!" or "sexism is bad, boo!" doesn't really even scratch the surface of the surface of the problems with music and gender in the current era, which we've gone into in some detail before.

The Phair sex war (repeated) [Guardian]

Last month, Keyboard Krybaby scolded Vibe editor Danyel Smith for evidently allowing a story about June cover subject Mariah Carey to be printed despite the lack of anything resembling an interview.

For the July "Swagger" issue, the mag secured the participation of Usher Raymond for both a photo shoot and a sit-down chat. In "Caught Up," penned by Mitzi Miller, Usher addresses the issue that has enveloped his public profile in the past year: the dismissal of his "mom-ager" of 30/15 years, Johnetta Patton, and his marriage to longtime confidant Tameka Foster.

The two were to wed at the Hamptons estate of Antonio "L.A." Reid last summer, but it was called off, which prompts producer Jermaine Dupri to provide this reminiscence, which amused KK: "Usher had all of us pay for private planes to go to Reid's house, and on my way to the plane, he cancels, and I blow a couple hundred thousand dollars for not going up in the air." The rich are very different than you and me, etc., etc....

The common supposition is that Foster has supplanted Patton in Usher's organization, and that his marriage has rendered him a player no more. (In KK's municipality, this is called "being pussy-whipped.") So Miller sets 'em up for her interloctutee to knock down. In his telling, he did not fire his mother, but she was by mutual consent to be retired so she could be "a full-time grandmother." Miller contacted Patton, who, after an hour of off-the-record conversation, contradicts her son's account and enumerates her continuing managerial duties for other artists. Usher goes on to say that he gets his swagger from his wife, which if true would be the first time in history that such a thing has ever occurred.

So this month, Vibe's cover story did what it was supposed to: It got a famous person to address a controversy or otherwise surrender personal information, as consumers of popular culture have come to expect. Fine.

But it's at times like this that KK sympathizes with a complaint common to artists: "Why don't you ask about my work?" It might be true that said consumers are not interested the creative process, but KK would like to know how his personal life impacted Usher's (pretty good) new album, and to what degree his music reflects his choices and preferences or those of his co-conspirators. (Miller only references "Love In This Club" in her piece, so it may be that no one at Vibe got to hear the record before press time.) Clearly, though, KK's interests are prioritized by neither Vibe nor any magazine aimed at the present consumer, so perhaps he doth protest too much.

The other substantive article in the July Vibe comes from the pen of Online Content Producer Linda Hobbs. "Stoked" concerns the alleged misdeeds of Chris Stokes, the "king of black boy bands" and former manager of B2K and Immature, a pre-teen R&B trio that recorded some tunes that KK dug the fuck out of in the '90s.

It seems that the three less-emphasized members of B2K (lead singer Omarion transitioned into a successful solo career) are now disgruntled and have accused Stokes of sexual misconduct and not allowing his charges to eat chicken, since the hormones therein would make them grow too fast. Horrors! Hobbs has done her due diligence with this deeply reported story; every underappreciated online drone who watches with irritation as his/her lazy editorial "betters" do little other than pick belly-button lint should salute her.

And it does seem, based on this particular issue, that there's some indifference or sloppiness in the editorial department at Vibe. To wit:

1. The first page of the Usher story is on the right-hand side of the magazine, facing an ad for the Nature Conservancy. The reader sees a freestanding picture of Usher and has to turn the page to see that it's part of the package: the placement of the photo seems disjointed and is likely a hugely embarrassing error.

2. 2008 marks Vibe's 15th anniversary, so the front-of-book of recent issues has dedicated space to counting down the "top this or that" of the past 15 years. This month recounts the most notorious sex scandals since 1993, which on its face is a tremendously lazy exercise. But the fact that the page design defies notions of easy navigation on the part of the reader compounds the problem: each numbered entry proceeds to the next in a willy-nilly, illogical, and almost amateurish manner around the page.

3. Similarly, the results of a sex survey conducted on vibe.com take up nine pages; not only are the findings presented by the edit staff—as it must—as very exciting and revealing, but like the charticle described above, the pages are designed using a worrying clash of colors.

4. Smith states in her editor's letter that the July issue is not the "Sex" issue traditionally presented this time of year; it is instead the "Swagger" issue. Yet there is not much in the way of what KK understands as "swagger" represented in the issue. You've got the Usher profile, and two pages in the VMix front-of-book replete with photos of Jay Z, Snoop and Flo Rida swaggering around. And that's it.

Typically, this kind of indifference is evidenced in magazines published in July and August, when editorial staffers can't wait to get to the share house on the Jersey Shore or Fire Island. Is something distracting Smith and her staff?

The performer - whose real name is Robert Ritchie - said his record company Atlantic had asked him to "stand up for illegal downloading" a few years ago because it told him "people are stealing from us and stealing from you".



"And I go: 'Wait a second, you've been stealing from the artists for years. Now you want me to stand up for you?'



"I was telling kids - download it illegally, I don't care. I want you to hear my music so I can play live."



Asked whether he was worried about illegal downloading, he replied: "I don't agree with it. I think we should level the playing field. I don't mind people stealing my music, that's fine. But I think they should steal everything.



"You know how much money the oil companies have? If you need some gas, just go fill your tank off and drive off, they're not going to miss it."



But he said he did not implement that advice himself. "No, I don't steal things. I'm rich."

If I was rich I wouldn't even speak the word CD-R, so I hear ya, Kid. The hunger for a big hit may be getting to the Kid already; "All Summer Long" is already available on iTunes in Europe, and the track will be soon available for download in the UK as well.

Kid Rock boycotts iTunes over pay [BBC]

Some years ago, Anono-Prick was walking around one day with a copy of the magazine he assesses this week. He ran into an acquaintance, who noticed the issue. "My boyfriend can't live without Mojo," she snorted. "It's porn for rock nerds."

Indeed it is. AP had been a longtime Q reader in 1994 when he noticed its new sister publication, which was emblazoned with the visage of Frank Zappa. A few feet away from where AP writes is a closet containing about 100 issues of Mojo that, despite taking up space better used for irreplaceable family heirlooms, he cannot bear parting with.

It would seem likely that Emap, the former mag's publisher, noticed that issues of Q bearing images of classic rock acts (or however artists are thus described in the UK) on their covers sold well. So, one year before Q would get in the tank for Oasis and Blur, came Mojo, ready to go to the well for Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin multiple times. (Mojo is now owned by the massive German publisher Bauer.)

But Mojo wasn't just an enterprise based on challenging Rolling Stone for the title of "magazine that p