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.

Slash and Chester knocked out "Sweet Child O' Mine" at a Camp Freddy all-star gig in Vegas, at the very least confirming that he would be a better fit for Velvet Revolver than a difficult junkie who can only pull off "It's So Easy."

The band also did "Highway To Hell" and "Whole Lotta Love," songs considerably happier and hornier than anything Linkin Park has come up with. If he's not leaving his compatriots in sensitive rap-rock, is he at least going to do more songs that match his increasingly metal look and lifestyle. After all, the guy who sang "Somewhere I Belong" is married to a Playboy Bunny.

Chester: "I am not Velvet Revolver's new singer" [Kerrang! via Blabbermouth]
Chester Bennington, Slash... Playing Paradise City [YouTube]

This track is probably supposed to have the turgid, inspirational drive of "Lose Yourself," but Chester Bennington would have been better off just singing the hook from "Eye Of The Tiger," which Busta would have probably preferred back when his music was fun. Rhyming "my life is glorious" with "I'm a symbol of greatness, you can call me Morpheus," indicates Busta's stuck at the turn of the century even more than his decision to work with Linkin Park. Mike Shinoda would also like you to know that once upon a time, people didn't give Linkin Park respect. But that's all changed now! Awww yeah!

I assume the "Jimmy" Busta references in the last verse is Interscope honcho Jimmy Iovine. 50 Cent also name dropped the former Stevie Nicks producer in a single recently, and I'm wondering if these recent on-track shout-outs are meant to stave off the release delays that Iovine has become notorious for in recent years. It was always common for Arista artists to open their liner notes with a thank you to God and Clive Davis, but I'm pretty sure he never inspired a rapper to announce they were staying alive, making money like Clive.

Busta Rhymes ft. Linkin Park - We Made It [GREAT QUALITY!] [Youtube]

After a few sluggish months of slow-rising hits, the past few weeks have seen some major movement on the Billboard rock charts, with several new entries making big impacts. And the biggest comes from Disturbed, the Chicago nu-metal band distinguished primarily by frontman David Draiman's resemblance to Howie Mandel with multiple facial piercings, as well as his usually annoying, occasionally awesome Korn-meets-Shudder-To-Think vocal tics. "Inside The Fire," the lead single from their forthcoming album Indestructible, entered the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart at a staggering No. 5, and moved up to No. 4 last week—pretty impressive, considering that even the biggest monsters of rock tend to take at least a few weeks to reach that high on the chart. This marks the band's tenth consecutive top 10 hit, and it's also quickly becoming one of its biggest hits to date on Hot Modern Rock Tracks, where it's historically had less traction. But since Draiman neither goes "oooh-wah-ah-ah-ah" nor covers Genesis on "Inside The Fire," the song is not one of the rare instances where I will refrain from changing the station when a Disturbed song comes on the radio.

Elsewhere on the Mainstream chart, a number of recent entries suggest the following theory: rap-metal is back, just without the rapping. The chart is still littered with holdovers from that widely maligned subgenre's turn of the century heyday, but right now three of those acts have hits rising up the chart without busting a single fresh rhyme: Linkin Park's "Given Up"; P.O.D.'s "Addicted"; and Kid Rock's "All Summer Long." Now, don't get me wrong. Mike Shinoda, Sonny Sandoval, and Bob Ritchie are not among my top five MCs of all time; they wouldn't even make my top 10. (Sorry, Sonny!) But these bands' early hits were at least a lot more fun than listening to these jokers and their bandmates decide to get 'melodic.' Please, nobody tell Fred Durst that all he has to do to get back on the radio is start earnestly crooning. He might cover The Who again.

As Chris Molanphy noted in his last 100 And Single column, the other big Modern Rock debuts come from the Raconteurs and Death Cab For Cutie. "Salute Your Solution," the lead single from the Raconteurs' Consolers Of The Lonely, is at No. 11 after entering the chart at No. 26 for the first week that anyone, including radio stations, had a copy of the song, given that the album it comes from was made available in "EVERY FORMAT AT ONCE" on March 25. Although Jack White's insta-release stunt was ostensibly done in part to circumvent the major-label "first-week sales" mentality, both the album and the single got off to very strong starts. Still, "Salute Your Solution" is one of my least favorite tracks off the album, and I can't see it topping the chart like "Steady, As She Goes" did in 2006. Death Cab, whose 2005 album Plans was just certified platinum this February, are right behind the Raconteurs at No. 12 with "I Will Possess Your Heart," an ambitious eight-minute single that most stations are presumably playing in its four-minute radio edit.

So what isn't on the Modern Rock chart? Two big rock hits currently in the upper reaches of the Hot 100 and the Pop 100.
• Three Days Grace's actually-kinda-good "Never Too Late" was one of the most-played Modern Rock hits of 2007, but it dropped off the chart well before its current crossover to VH1 and adult top 40 stations. That crossover was helped by program directors being made less squeamish about the song's anti-suicide theme through a new edit that changes the chorus line "you want to end your life" to "you want to change your life."
• Meanwhile, Fall Out Boy's cover of "Beat It," which has already been hailed by one Idolator contributor as potentially the best rock song of 2008, is all over pop radio, but it has yet to crack the rock charts. I'm not shocked, given that one of the big theories put forth in my '07 wrap-up was that FOB are quickly losing their rock radio support. But I wonder if those stations will keep holding out on this one, considering that many of them still play that damn Alien Ant Farm version of "Smooth Criminal." Personally, I think the band's take on "Beat It" is weak sauce—Patrick Stump earns his better-than-your-average-emo-frontman bona fides much more easily when he's not held to the higher standards of pop and R&B vocals. Nonetheless, when he hits the Rod Stewart Great American Songbook phase of his career in a couple of decades, he'll have a head start thanks to this cover, not to mention his previous work interpolating Supertramp and Jermaine Stewart with Gym Class Heroes and covering Go West with New Found Glory.

Billboard's end-of-year lists, as always, provide a feast for those of us who care to painstakingly analyze not just popular music, but exactly what was the most popular and why. While Chris Molanphy made a meal out of the stats—including the Modern Rock numbers—last week, he left plenty of meat on the bones for me to dig into. And the Top 40 Hot Modern Rock Songs of 2007 chart is a mix of the usual suspects with some intriguing surprises.

As is generally the case with Billboard's year-end charts, which start in December of the previous year and end in November, this one heavily favors hits from the first half of the year and holdovers from 2006. Pretty much the entire Top 10 had impacted radio by the spring, giving the shaft to songs that have been inescapable over the last few months like the Foo Fighters' "The Pretender" and Paramore's "Misery Business," which had to settle for Nos. 14 and 25, respectively. Unsurprisingly, if depressingly, the top spot is held by Linkin Park's "Another Version of 'Numb,' This Time Without Jay-Z," with Finger Eleven's unlikely dance-rock smash "Paralyzer" (a personal favorite) taking runner-up status.

By far the most unexpected and inexplicable stats on the chart are the respective placements of Nine Inch Nails' two hits from Year Zero. "Survivalism" landed at No. 37, with "Capital G" coming in eight spots above it at No. 29. "Survivalism," the album's lead single, was out longer and peaked at No. 1 on the Modern Rock chart. But follow-up "Capital G," released just before Trent Reznor began his very public divorce from Interscope, didn't have a video or even a remix single with a "halo number"; it peaked at No. 6, making it the first NIN single to not top the Modern Rock chart since 2001. And the song itself, aside from a drum pattern that was eerily similar to Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel," sure didn't smell like a hit, with Reznor's goofy vocal delivery and heavy-handed indictment of the Bush administration. I'm totally open to any theories on how this song, which I scarcely remember hearing on the radio at all, not only racked up more airplay than "Survivalism," but apparently became one of the biggest rock hits of the year. Perhaps it became a favorite on West Coast stations I don't listen to, or a few liberal DJs got a kick out of playing the song as much as possible during graveyard shifts? I'm stumped.

What the list demonstrates most is that modern rock radio in 2007 operated in its own sphere, with a limited amount of pop culture crossover. Fall Out Boy may have been crowned by media outlets like MTV as the biggest (or at least the most visible) young band in the world this year, but their tabloid-fodder relationships and numerous hip-hop collaborations cemented them as pop stars, not rock stars. Their sole entry on the list, "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race" (No. 26), reflects the fact that this year's Infinity On High skewed far more pop than their 2005 breakthrough, From Under The Cork Tree. All of Infinity's singles peaked higher on the Pop 100 and iTunes sales charts than on rock radio, and only "This Ain't A Scene" scraped the Modern Rock Top 10, at a lower peak than earlier hits like "Dance, Dance" or "Sugar, We're Goin' Down." Meanwhile, FOB was beat out on the year-end list by bands like Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, Sick Puppies, and The Almost, none of whom you were likely to see on television this year (unless you watch Fuse, maybe).

While a handful of bands land on the list twice, including Muse and My Chemical Romance, only one is there three times, and you probably wouldn't be able to guess who it is: Incubus. Though their highest spot is a modest No. 12 for "Dig," the first three singles from the band's late 2006 album Light Grenades wound up on 2007's top 40. When Light Grenades debuted at the top of the album charts last November, I figured it was just the usual case of a band's diehard fans coming out in full force on the release date, coinciding with an otherwise slow week for new releases. But Billboard's list reaffirms that Incubus still has a tight grip on Modern Rock radio, even if they're a long way out from their peak of mainstream popularity in the late '90s, when frontman Brandon Boyd was the token rocker pin-up on TRL, a spot currently occupied by FOB bassist Pete Wentz. Unless Fall Out Boy plan on completing their transformation into this generation's Duran Duran with their next album, they might want to consult the guys in Incubus for some advice on how they can avoid losing rock radio's support entirely.

It might seem like an odd idea to have anyone explain the state of something as commonplace as rock radio, but in the indie-centric blogosphere, you can't assume prior knowledge about popular music that escapes the Hype Machine's gaze. Even in the critical community at large, where pretty much any populist genre (country, Radio Disney, ringtone rap) gets its share of respect and scrutiny from a dedicated gaggle of writers, mainstream rock is just about the only significant slice of the SoundScan pie that gets dismissed across the board without a second thought. (Possibly because those other stabs at populism came out of attempts to banish the bogeyman known as "rockism.") One of the seeds for this column was planted while playing corporate-rock apologist in response to Maura's potshot at the Modern Rock Top 10, which looked to me to be a hell of a lot better than the chart's been at most points in the past five years. And I don't care what anyone says, "Bleed It Out" (see above) and "Paralyzer" (see below) are fucking catchy songs.

Despite the persistence of faceless nu-grunge merchants like Seether, the chart is fairly diverse at the moment: Warped Tour insurgents (Paramore), pretentious British art-rock (Muse), hoarse-throated orthodox punk (Against Me!), and the perennially critic-friendly White Stripes have all staked out real estate on the current Top 20. Bands with grass-roots followings and indie origins are all over the radio—just not the kind of grass-roots followings and indie origins that get Pitchfork love, for the most part. But these bands all play loud, guitar-heavy rock music that sounds good on FM frequencies, which hasn't been a big part of the indie zeitgeist for a long, long time. For once, mainstream and underground rock are mutually exclusive, as much for musical reasons as for any kind of indie loathing of the mainstream. There's still some indie crossover happening on the radio waves, but it's mostly on sleepy triple-A stations.

Back around the turn of the century, the relative health of rock radio was popular debate fodder for music fans everywhere, but nowadays even its detractors seem to have lost some of their passion for the argument. The endless cycle of "rock is dead!"/"rock is back!" trend pieces that accompanied every major event in the rock press (Radiohead "abandoning" guitars, the Strokes-led garage rock revival, etc.) seem to have run their course, with hip-hop fans now picking up the torch to argue endlessly about whether their beloved genre can be dead despite all evidence to the contrary. It's a foregone conclusion that mainstream rock sucks. Granted, that assumption's frequently right. But it's probably wrong more often than you think.

Recently, Billboard brought back the Top Rock Albums chart that it had discontinued in 1984, which might be seen as an acknowledgment that rock music is as marginalized as it's been in the last 23 years. Which still isn't that marginalized, though: the bottom album on the Album Rock chart's Top 10 is at No. 32 on the big chart, which means that roughly a third of the most popular albums of the country are still rock music, at least by Billboard's somewhat inconsistent definition of the genre. Guitar rock doesn't rule the monoculture like it once did—and it never will again—but the media's no longer in a panic about it. Rock's big unit-shifters of recent years have been, for the most par, VH1-friendly balladeers of all stripes, from Maroon 5 to Nickelback, and TRL-beloved emo-not-emo phenoms like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance. Not exactly the kinds of bands that folks like Jann Wenner would feel great about grooming for eventual canonization in Cleveland, but not as difficult for them to embrace with a straight face as Limp Bizkit or Creed were when they were running shit a few years ago.

But even now, with thoroughly 21st-century mediocrity like Linkin Park ruling rock radio, the format is clearly living in the shadow of the '90s. Although plenty of bands have tried, and failed, to maintain or regain the relevance they enjoyed a decade ago (paging Billy Corgan), those that have succeeded now get to be big fish in a slightly smaller pond. Bands that made more music in the '90s—and for the most part were more popular then, too—have enjoyed most of their No. 1 singles on the Modern Rock chart since 2000. Eight of Red Hot Chilli Peppers' 11 chart toppers, half of Green Day's eight, four of the Foo Fighters' five, and all four of Nine Inch Nails' were racked up in this decade. Perhaps it's just a less competitive field than it used to be, or perhaps aging program directors will add anything with name recognition to their playlists en masse just to keep Three Days Grace at bay.

The prevailing wisdom is that Modern Rock radio had its glory days, and they're long gone by now. But looking at lists of '90s chart-toppers just reminds me that there was always a lot of horrible, horrible bullshit clogging up those stations' playlists. There was no sudden downhill slide set in motion by Staind, or Sugar Ray, or even Bush. And only once we free ourselves from the rose-colored glasses of the Nirvana era can we crank up our local rock station and enjoy the good—or channel-surf past the bad.

Biggest Debuts: Coming in behind Linkin Park was the R & B singer (and future bandmate of Tyrese) Tank, whose album Sex, Love & Pain sold 103,000 copies. Wilco's call to arms to its fanbase seems to have worked; Sky Blue Sky entered the chart at No. 4, selling 87,000 copies and causing the band to have its best one-week sales tally ever. Gretchen Wilson came in at No. 5, selling 73,000 copies of One Of The Boys, while Megadeth completed the round of top-10 debuts, entering the chart at No. 8 with United Abominations, which sold 54,000 copies.

Charting The Decline: The total number of albums sold went up 1% from last week (8.59 million units from 8.51 million units), although it's probably worth noting that without Linkin Park's massive numbers in there, the overall units moved would have seen a bit of a dip. A year ago this week, the total number of albums sold totaled 9.24 million copies—so this year's totals represent a 7% year-to-year dip.

Nickelback Award For Inexplicable Durability: It's pretty obvious who gets this award this week, isn't it?

Linkin Park Scores Year's Best Debut With 'Midnight' [Billboard]

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The stalking started after she saw Chester's email address inadvertently CC'd in a mass mailing to promote a tattoo parlor he owned in Tempe. Using Chester's birthday and zip code to access his Mac.com account, she started guessing passwords until she found the right one: his middle name, Charlie.

Townsend suddenly had access to all of her idol's messages. Soon she had Talinda's Yahoo address, too, and after guessing the password, she reset it. From there, her infiltration was a feat of feverish social engineering. As Townsend pored through the Benningtons' email, she began cataloging every detail of their lives: friends, Social Security numbers, photos, plans. Getting Chester's cell phone data was a snap: All she'd needed was his wireless number, his zip code, and the last four digits of his Social Security number to register his Verizon account online and get complete access to records of his calls. Even Townsend herself seemed astonished at how easy it was. When she opened the Verizon account, the user ID she chose was "ohshititworked."

Why did you do all this? Dimitrelos asked. In flat tones, Townsend told him that she was bored. Her job at Sandia took about half an hour a day, and she was looking to pass the time.

Townsend was, in fact, a fan, and she was even wearing a Linkin Park hoodie during the questioning that eventually led to her detention. The story's a fascinating, sad read, and we came away from it with one important lesson that, apparently, enough people don't seem to understand: If you're a high-profile figure, don't choose an e-mail password that can be guessed from details about your life that are on Wikipedia.

Linkin Park's Mysterious Cyberstalker [Wired]

Linkin Park, Minutes To Midnight
The artist: Rap-rock stalwarts looking to break free from the first half of the decade ... by looking like the Strokes.
The sound: Less rap, more moaning, same quotient of not-very-good.
The first in line: The few. The proud. The people who still listen to modern rock radio.

Wilco, Sky Blue Sky
The artist: Elder statesmen who still manage to remain scruffy.
The sound: A long, divisive ride back to the early '70s album-rock era.
The first in line: Mailing list subscribers (at least, the band hopes so).

Megadeth, United Abominations
The artist: Premier shredder Dave Mustaine and his latest band of hired hands.
The sound: Heavy riffing and New World Order ranting.
The first in line: Diehard fans hoping for a return to Rust In Peace form (and who almost, almost get it).

Gretchen Wilson, One Of The Boys
The artist: Dirt-kicking lass who wears her redneck-woman status proudly.
The sound: Whiskey-filled, but melancholy—like those 30 minutes between last call and the bar shutting down.
The first in line: Cowgirl tomboys who like to shoot whiskey, pool, and the shit.

Rufus Wainwright, Release The Stars
The artist: Just your everyday gay messiah.
The sound: Pomp-filled pop orchestrated in part by the Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant.
The first in line: Drama club kids.

On The CD Front [Pause & Play]

Linkin Park - What I've Done (Live @ Saturday Night Live) [YouTube]

Linkin Park - What I've Done [MP3, link expired]

From Billboard. Yeah, we're thinking it's about time to call it an evening.

Linkin Park Inspired By Prog Rock On New Album [Billboard]
Earlier: The Ugliest Album Cover Of The Year: We May Have A Winner