HOT
Feud of the Week
Long before he became a total laughingstock, Axl Rose once got into a public tiff with Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, allegedly telling the Nirvana singer to "shut his bitch up" and offering to fight him at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. Cobain and his band played the class clowns to Axl's school-yard bully, making fun of Rose's outburst and prima donna behavior. Rose hasn't done too much else, but he is still engaging in ridiculous feuds. The most recent one has been the most entertaining. After their opening set on the first date of GNR's current tour, Eagles of Death Metal were booted off, "officially" because they didn't win over GNR's crowd and didn't play for a full hour. When GNR took the stage, Rose called the band "Pigeons of Shit Metal" and announced they were off the tour. EODM frontman Jesse Hughes said they were offered to come back on the tour, but were too pissed off to accept. But the Eagles' got in the best swipes, courtesy of their official response the day after being kicked off the tour: "At first the audience refused to welcome us to the jungle, but by the time we took our final bow it had become paradise city. Although Axl tried to November rain on our parade, no sweet child o' mine can derail the EODM night train. We say live and let die."
WARM
Kiss and Yell
A while back, it was reported that Paris Hilton was trademarking the phrase "That's hot," making us wonder about the effects on the restaurant industry. Can you imagine the lawsuits from customers as waiters and waitresses struggled to tell patrons, "That's ... heated up to a temperature that could cause severe burns," in order to avoid paying Hilton royalties? Notorious money-hounds/franchise-protectors KISS have stretched the long arm of the copyright law by reportedly claiming that the mere font used to write the word "kiss" on a musical product can be too "confusingly similar" to the legendary band's trademark. All-girl Metal band Kittie were set to call their new record label Kiss of Infamy, but KISS' lawyers hit them with a cease-and-desist letter saying the logo was too close to their client's and would be misleading to consumers. The band changed the label's name to X of Infamy — no word on whether John Doe and Exene Cervenka have unleashed their legal team yet. It's probably too late, but "Gene Simmons Is The Biggest Asshole in The World Records" has a great ring to it.
COLD
Punk Gets Listed
Somewhere along the lineage of Rock & Roll history, "Punk" went from being a fringe, underground musical explosion to something more akin to the Gin Blossoms with louder guitars. Kerrang!, a UK Metal, Hard Rock and Punk magazine, asked its readers to vote on the Top 50 Punk Albums of All Time, and its makeup is indicative of the genre's ever-shifting definition. Kerrang! readers apparently have no love for (or have never heard of) Hüsker Dü or The Germs (suspiciously absent from the list), but Green Day (whose Dookie made No. 2 and Nimrod came in at 43), Blink 182 (Enema of the State is No. 14), Less Than Jake (Hello Rockview is in at No. 37) and Sublime (No. 34) really get their Hot Topic chain-wallets swingin'. The list is far from devoid of legit Punk classics — Black Flag's Damaged, Fugazi's Repeater and The Clash's debut and the hardly-Punk London Calling make the Top 20, while Dead Kennedys' Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables came in at a surprising No. 3 and The Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks unsurprisingly made the top slot. Professional Novelty Punk band The Offspring are about as Punk as Weird Al now, but their Smash came in at No. 5, way ahead of brilliant works like Bad Brains' Rock For Light and The Misfits' Static Age. What, no Avril Lavigne?
