HOT
The New "Boo!"
Bloggers and message-boarders type, sports fans throw trash, Punks used to spit. But in the UK today it seems the best way to let an entertainer know how you feel is by throwing bottles. At last weekend's Reading Festival, nearly every other band was greeted with a barrage of bottles during their sets. Go to NME.com and type "bottled" into the search engine for more evidence — in the form of 193 results — of the trend. My Chemical Romance got the most headlines out of all of the Reading festival's bands-as-target-practice. According to NME, singer Gerard Way was flustered, saying at one point, "This song is called thanks for all the bottles, thanks for all the piss, thanks for all the golf balls, thanks for all the apples and thanks for all the sticky shit" (guess festgoers are experimenting, with "bottles of piss" being the most vitriolic variation). Panic! At the Disco got a more efficient response; singer Brendan Urie was struck in the face within seconds of the band's first song. Guns N' Roses, 50 Cent and The Mars Volta have also gotten the treatment over the past couple of years. We smell a cottage industry coming; new aero-dynamic bottles are no doubt in the works.
And look for full-body protective football gear to become the hot stagewear at future fests.
WARM
Tribute Reboot
Tribute albums rewired in some style other than the tibutee are almost all pure novelty, good for one or two listens before it gets shelved to collect dust next to the Weird Al and Bill Shatner albums. We were kinda psyched to hear about a Metal tribute to The Beatles, forthcoming at the end of October. Alas, "Metal" is a relative term here. While we were anticipating Cannibal Corpse dribbling blood all over "She Loves You," Butchering The Beatles features newly recorded "all-star" collaborations. And the "all-stars" are often about as Metal as your grandma. So while you get Lemmy from Motörhead garbling "Back in the U.S.S.R.," you mostly get stuff like Jack Blades of Night Ranger singing "Day Tripper" and Kip Winger doing "Drive My Car." Meanwhile, Radiohead is getting another strange homage, courtesy of DJ Gyngyvytus. Following Classical piano, Reggae, lullaby and Bluegrass reworkings, DJ Gyngyvytus has gone public with Skeet Spirit: A Crunk Tribute to Radiohead. We'd be sleeping in front of Best Buy for a copy of the Ying Yang Twins doing "Paranoid Android," but Gyngyvytus offers just a small handful of crunked-out instrumentals. Give him points for titles though: "No Sizzuruprises," "Creepin' (On Dat Ass)" and "Fitter, Hyphier."
COLD
It's All Over (The Web) Now, Baby Blue
Bob Dylan's antagonistic relationship with the press has been well documented throughout his career. Now, with the rise of blogs and other information transmitters, Dylan is getting to see how his words are interpreted or misinterpreted in the new millennium. Prickly pundits are taking umbrage with comments the icon made about the current state of recorded music in Rolling Stone, painting Dylan as a cantankerous, out-of-touch geezer. In the RS interview, Dylan said that no one has made a good sounding record in 20 years: "You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious." Dylan's comment that the sonic quality is because "CDs are small" is being treated like Alaskan senator Ted Stevens' ramblings that the Net is a "series of tubes." Instead of debating Dylan's point (that producers over-compress sound), most have taken his words as a chance to make fun of his age and moustache, using headlines accusing Dylan of saying all modern music "sucks." More proof that if Shakespeare were alive, some nerd with a high-speed Internet connection and a Blogger account would be calling Hamlet "totally gay."
