Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe and Spin are given a once-over by an anonymous writer who's contributed to several of those titles—or maybe even all of them! After the click-through, a look at the new issue of Rolling Stone:
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According to the New York Post, future popular-vote winner/Supreme Court-mandated loser Barack Obama is going to appear on the next Q-Tip album. Yeah, that's right, Roots. The best you could get was Patrick Stump? Q-Tip hasn't released a record in nine years and he gets the maybe-next-president!
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The Guardian looks at which musicians are endorsing which Presidential candidates today, and delivers the shocking news that the lines of support aren't as cut and dried as R & B singers breaking for Obama and powerful women in music going to Hillary Clinton's side of the fence. Shocking! Perhaps almost as mind-bending as the fact that the piece's information on which musicians are stumping for Republican candidates is pretty thin, although the Guardian does share the 
Dave Mustaine will not stand for the funky fretwork of Mike Huckabee. In fact, when asked to critique Huckabee's bass playing for Good Morning America, the worm-infested Megadeth frontman called the art of the bass "one step up from playing the kazoo," which is another way of asking for a late night ass-whupping from the ghost of Charles Mingus. (Or at least a wedgie from Bootsy.) In addition to grooming 2008's musically minded prez hopefuls Berry Gordy-style, Dave sez he would also be a valuable ally on the campaign trail thanks to an innate ability to reach adolescents into skulls and blood and blowin' up stuff.
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Quite a bit. Who knew, right? Apparently anyone committed to a close reading of the Psychopathic Records catalog. In the spirit of democracy/Web 2.0 page view whoring, Barry O's socially networked Web site is giving blogs away to anyone who asks—and that includes Juggalos, one of whom has penned a lengthy essay explaining exactly where Obama's positions on various issues link up with the seemingly illiberal policies of the ICP. "The Republicans and right wingers claim to care about the morals of America," politicized Jughead Robert Tidwell writes, "but it is people like Barack Obama and the Insane Clown Posse, who've made it their life's work in changing the world around them."
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The Obama campaign can finally relax, because two of the most important musical voices of two distinct generations have officially come out in favor of the '08 prez candidate and gawky dreamboat, and they're committed to spreading the good word to two very crucial voting blocs: "tweens with no vote (and Maura)" and "NPR listeners/Pitchfork readers who already vote Dem unless there's a wacky third party."
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So after slogging through hours of Giuliani's justifications for tying with Ron friggin' Paul and McCain supporters chanting "USA! USA!" on MSNBC, I finally gave up and went to bed before the Democratic results were called in New Hampshire, only to wake up this a.m. to learn that, yes, Barry O finished second last night to Hillary C. And after he conceded, he went back to his hotel room and played "Ignorant Shit" a few dozen times while weeping into his pillow. Well, maybe.
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When it comes to picking campaign songs, 2008's prez hopefuls have gotta be pissy that William Jefferson already raided Rumours, picking the "gold standard for campaign anthems" according to "political pundits" and this here Wall Street Journal story. So how do the other candidates' choices rate, given the fact that they can't bite Big Bill's bulletproof soft-rock steez?
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The efforts of Clear Channel's programmers have probably helped you already get sick of holiday music, but there are many fine celebratory songs that would never cross their airwaves out there. To help cut through the clutter we've asked Jon Solomon, whose 20th annual 24-Hour Holiday Radio Show on WPRB kicks off at 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve, to offer up some seasonal cheer in MP3 form. Today's song brings together George W. Bush and John Lennon's Christmas wish for the world:
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Ed. note: Last night, the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C., hosted "The Music Of Seal On Ice," which would bring together the songs of the deep-voiced, Heidi Klum-attached crooner and the ice-skating prowess of Brian Boitano, Todd Eldredge, and Kyoko Ina and John Zimmerman (who look like they're attacking Seal with Ina's skate above). And lucky for us, former Idolator guestblogger Maria Sciarrino happens to be an expert on both figure skating and pop music, so we bundled her up and sent her down to the nation's capital for a report on just what would happen when one tried to combine a Seal concert with a few jumps and spins on the ice.
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So Barry Obama's big benefit shindig coming up next week in California features musical endorsements from Ne-Yo (yay!), the Goo Goo Dolls (uh), Nicole Scherzinger (ack), and will.i.am (dear lord no). Meanwhile, Hilary Clinton has recently ditched Celine Dion's "You And I" (holy shit) as her campaign song in favor of Big Head Todd And The Monsters' "Blue Sky" (could be worse, right?). Forgetting their opinions about, like, stuff salient to running a country, this does not particularly fill us with hope for the future. (Even the Republicans are showing better taste this time out; for instance, did you know Mitt Romney's campaign tune is "I Get Around"*?) So we put it to you, a year or so early, to decide who you would vote for based solely on these less than stellar musical track records.
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At this point, "Sweet Caroline" is probably intractably associated with the Boston Red Sox (two World Series wins = they finally supplanted that scene in Beautiful Girls that forever added the "ba-ba-baaaa" to its chorus), and the wave of publicity afforded by the team's latest World Series win has prompted Neil Diamond to reveal his muse for the track: a 10-year-old Caroline Kennedy, whose hand was apparently touching hand and reaching out with .. a pony. Wait, what?
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Barack Obama: As Evil As Ja Rule?
Gay rights advocates have put Barry on blast for bringing gospel singer Donnie McClurkin to a South Carolina fundraiser, thanks to McClurkin's off-message thoughts on the homosexual scourge.
Following up on the "Chris Walla's hard drive got confiscated at the border" story: the Department of Homeland Security said that the drive didn't have the necessary paperwork to come back into the country, and that any insinuations of there being a political element to the drive's seizure were incorrect; the confusion seems to have stemmed over whether or not the drive's contents were actually a commercial product or not. Walla—who actually now has the files to finish the album, which comes out next year—shot an e-mail to The Daily Swarm explaining things more fully, including a quirk about what was and wasn't confiscated from the courier who tried to bring his stuff across the border:
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Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, is peeved at LimeWire, several years after the P2P program first found itself in the crosshairs of record companies for illegal file sharing. But it seems that Waxman is now more concerned with the possible identity-theft repercussions of folks sharing music and movies than the file-swapping itself:
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The Taiwanese symphonic-doom metal outfit ChthoniC will be hitting the road on this summer's free-to-all-comers Ozzfest, and it's planning to stump for its home country along the way:
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Representative Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has been poking around on LimeWire a bit lately—and he's not just looking for advance copies of My December. The chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating whether "government, personal and corporate data" is leaking on to peer-to-peer filesharing sites:
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Idolator
