Idolator

Cheeky piano-heavy trio Ben Folds Five have announced that they're reuniting for a show where they play their 1999 album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner in its entirety. The concert—which takes place in Chapel Hill, N.C., on Sept. 18—is the first installment in the "let's have bands play the albums you love so they can keep raking in the nostalgia cash" series Front To Back, which is sponsored in part by nowwhat.com. (As Al Shipley put it, the site's "named after the phrase bands utter after they stop making good albums and have to just play the old ones." Ha ha! OK, it's actually an ethics-lite site sponsored by the insurance giants at State Farm. Same diff?) Anyway, as with so many music-publicity claims these days, there's something a little strange about the video announcement of the show, which I've embedded after the jump. More »

A long, long time ago (by which I mean nine months), we first heard talk of a reunion by the Norwegian pop group Aqua, I guess in honor of the fact that their Mattel-angering hit "Barbie Girl" is now 11 years old. Well, they have come back indeed, and they have a new song... which, for some reason, is a look back at the '80s, and not the decade that they're so identified with. Perhaps they are trying for some more-retro-than-reality image shift? Or maybe they just know what gets audiences cheering, given that the lyric that uses the words "David" and "Hasselhoff" gets a roaring ovation from the crowd. (Even if you do count Baywatch, sticking him in a song about the '90s just seems a little cheap.) [YouTube]

Well, too bad, because it's getting one: Howard Stern is co-producing a remake of the 1982 film that will have its script penned by Alex Winter, a.k.a. Bill from the Bill & Ted movies and the director of Extreme's video for "Decadence Dance." "This movie seemed so ripe for a remake," Winter told Variety. Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that the role of the Ramones will get played by, I don't know, McFly or Busted or some other band that some desperate major-label exec is really trying to "break." And if that does indeed come to pass, the whole enterprise is going to be more than a little bogus, dude. [Variety / YouTube]