Archive for December 14th, 2009

The Clash’s “London Calling” Turns 30: Look Back at the 1979 LP

December 14th, 2009
We’re spending a lot of time celebrating Rolling Stone’s Number One album of the 2000s — Radiohead’s Kid A — this month. So consider this a pause to pay tribute to our Number One album of the Eighties … an album so good, it actually came out in 1979. December 14, 1979 to be exact: today is the 30-year anniversary of the Clash’s London Calling. (To be fair, it didn’t hit the states until January ...

Courtney Love Loses Temporary Legal Control of Frances Bean

December 14th, 2009
Photo:McCarthy/WireImage Geraldine Wyle, an attorney who represents Courtney Love’s daughter Frances Bean Cobain and Kurt Cobain’s mother and sister, Wendy O’Connor and Kimberly Dawn Cobain, has confirmed that Love has temporarily lost legal guardianship of Frances Bean. According to court documents obtained by TMZ, O’Connor and Cobain were awarded guardianship of the 17-year-old on Friday. Love was reportedly not in court for the hearing. The guardianship, according to court papers, is for both Frances Bean personally ...

Enter to Win Lil Wayne’s “The Carter” and More in Rolling Stone’s Gift Guide Giveaway!

December 14th, 2009
Rolling Stone’s holiday gift guide giveaway is still going strong! Enter now for the chance to pick up a DVD of The Carter, the Lil Wayne documentary that taught us seven very important Weezyisms. We’re also giving you the chance to walk away with a Toshiba Laptop U505, a Motorola Cliq phone and a copy of the photo book Street Level: New York Photographs 1987-2007 by Sue Kwon. Check out Rolling Stone’s Great Rock & Roll ...

Readers’ Rock List: Most Underrated Album of the Decade

December 14th, 2009
Now that Rolling Stone has posted our lists of the 100 Best Albums and 100 Best Songs of the decade (as voted on by a panel of more than 100 industry experts and artists), and our readers have had their say in our Decade-End Readers’ Poll, we’re looking at what got left behind: first up, the 2000s’ most underrated albums. The Rock Daily faithful were adamant that the Killers got short shrift this decade, voting ...

Chris Brown Claims Stores Are “Blackballing” New Disc “Graffiti”

December 14th, 2009
Chris Brown’s Graffiti is projected to land at Number Three on the Billboard Top 200 this week with sales of 95,000-110,000 albums, per Billboard. But the 20-year-old R&B singer’s last album, Exclusive, moved 294,000 copies its debut week in 2007, and Brown thinks he can explain the difference: in a series of angry tweets over the weekend, Brown accused stores of “blackballing” him and failing to stock the album in the wake of his guilty ...

Watch Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch Live at Rolling Stone

December 14th, 2009
When Rob Sheffield caught Echo & the Bunnymen in New York recently, frontman Ian McCulloch in rare form, pausing mid-song to announce, “Quiet down — this is a speech. If I play my cards right it might be a soliloquy. Can anyone spell soliloquy?” McCulloch didn’t challenge anyone to a spelling contest when he stopped by the Rolling Stone studios to play not one but three stunning songs for us, including the awe-inspiring “The Killing ...

Feist, Beck Brighten Up Skip Spence’s “Weighted Down”

December 14th, 2009
We haven’t heard much from Canadian songstress Feist lately, save for her contributions to Beck’s Record Club covers of Alexander “Skip” Spence’s 1969 album Oar. The LP was the Moby Grape frontman’s last (he died in 1999), and Beck first expressed his interest in the record by covering “Halo of Gold” on the tribute comp More Oar. Today, Beck unleashed his cover of “Weighted Down (The Prison Song)” featuring Feist singing lead vocals on a ...

Weezer’s Cuomo Released From Hospital, January Gigs in Question

December 14th, 2009
Photo: Loccisano/GettyWeezer’s Rivers Cuomo was released from an Albany, New York, hospital on Friday (December 11th), six days after his tour bus crashed on its way to Boston, leaving the frontman with cracked ribs and internal injuries. Band pal Karl Koch reports that Cuomo and the rest of the group are taking a marathon two-day bus trip back to Los Angeles armed with “Mad Men DVDs, meditation, medication, naps, Amy’s Organic frozen entrees [and] ice ...

Taylor Lautner Revisits Kanye West-Taylor Swift VMAs Drama on “Saturday Night Live”

December 14th, 2009
If you thought Saturday Night Live got all their Kanye West-Taylor Swift jokes out of the way when Swift sang about the VMAs incident in her monologue in November, think again. The show let recent RS cover star Taylor Lautner make light of the fact that he stood idly by while his presumed girlfriend got steamrolled by West during his own monologue this past weekend, reliving the event — and using his Xtreme Martial Arts ...

Lambert, Bieber, Meester Reflect on 2009 Backstage at Jingle Ball

December 14th, 2009
Photo: Parra/WireImage Backstage at Jingle Ball, the annual holiday concert for New York radio station Z100, the show’s big names — from teen sensation Justin Bieber to Adam Lambert — celebrated the end of 2009, a year that propelled many of them into megastardom. Fifteen-year-old Bieber, who solicited the most screams and swoons from the mostly teenage sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden, greeted reporters by beatboxing and coyly answered “Beyoncé” to nearly every question, from ...