by Fred Topel
“Buddha didn’t stop struggling with women until enlightenment.”
– Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons sat all by himself at NBC’s party on the rooftop of the Beverly Hilton hotel. Well, not totally by himself. The young girls he came with were talking amongst themselves, and celebrities kept stopping by to meet him (hence the photo opp with Jimmy Fallon).
The Oxygen Channel, an NBC cable arm, is producing a documentary on Simmons’ business. Running Russell Simmons shows the viewer what it takes to maintain Simmons’ multi-faceted life, by following the assistants who coordinate all his endeavors behind the scenes. It is scheduled to premiere Nov. 2.
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by Nicole Powers
“We’re willing to put our balls on the line.”
– Chester Bennington
It’s been over a decade since Linkin Park released their debut album, Hybrid Theory, which spawned the breakout, radio-friendly crossover hits “Crawling” and “In the End.” The SoCal rock/rap band, whose vocal interplay between singer Chester Bennington and rapper Mike Shinoda became their sonic signature, have come a long way since then.
But though Linkin Park’s subsequent full-length offerings, Meteora (2003) and Minutes to Midnight (2007), were solid performers, they failed to match the excitement of the band’s initial release. Consequently, when we were invited to a special laser listening event a week ahead of the street date for Linkin Park’s fourth studio album, A Thousand Suns, we weren’t sure what to expect. However, the album – and its presentation – quite frankly, blew us away. And, judging by the reactions of those gathered at Hollywood’s Music Box Theatre, we weren’t the only ones who felt that way.
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by Alex Dueben
Dame Darcy is a renaissance woman. The Idaho-born artist has crafted a broad and powerful body of work. She’s an illustrator and fine artist, a musician, dollmaker and designer. Her work has been exhibited in galleries around the world. In 2006, Penguin released a new edition of Jane Eyre heavily illustrated by her. She has an etsy store where she sells not just prints and original art, but dolls and other handcrafted work. She’s collaborated with Alan Moore and contributed to the Tori Amos comics anthology Comic Book Tattoo. Her other books include Gasoline and Frightful Fairytales.
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by Nicole Powers
The Pleasure Principle is an album that’s provided its maker, Gary Numan, with both instant and delayed gratification. Three decades ago, when the now classic electro album first came out, it made a massive impact culturally and commercially. The Pleasure Principle, and the iconic single it spawned, “Cars”, hit the number one spot simultaneously on the album and singles charts in the UK in September, 1979. The following year, the records crashed the US Billboard charts, making the painfully shy young vocalist, composer and musician a household name here too.
Numan’s Kraftwerk-inspired tracks, which channeled the voice of the machine, had a raw energy and DIY aesthetic that served as the bridge between ’70s punk and the early dance and hip-hop scenes of the 1980s. Indeed the bare break beats from the opening segment of “Films” (the fourth track on The Pleasure Principle) became the sample of choice for a generation of producers, thanks in part to the song’s inclusion on Street Beat’s tastemaker compilation series Ultimate Breaks and Beats (which served as the primary DJ and studio sample resource pre-CD).
Ironically, as the spotlight faded on Numan, the sounds he created proliferated exponentially through the fabric of pop music culture. As a new generation of producers sampled samples, the origins of these staple breaks escaped many. However those in the know – such as Basement Jaxx, Armand Van Heldon, Afrika Bambaataa and Dr. Dre – openly covered, used, credited and paid homage to Numan’s body of work.
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by Nicole Powers
“I’m going to write songs about fucking blowing my head off and giving in to apathy,” says Filter founder and frontman Richard Patrick during our interview. It’s not that he’s going to do either, it’s just that he understands what anger combined with a sense of hopeless can do to a person’s psyche.
In 2008 he released Anthems For The Damned, which served both as a protest against the Iraq war and a tribute to a friend it had claimed. (Anti-war, but very much pro-troops, Patrick has traveled to the Middle East twice to play concerts for those who risk their lives to serve our country.) Two years on, though our president may have changed, the status quo (or lack thereof) remains the same in the Middle East. After too many years listening to grim reports from the frontlines of a war that was misguided from the start, both the troops on the ground and the masses here at home are suffering from a severe case of fuck up fatigue. With dissent now largely falling on deaf ears, and, even worse, serving to remind the proletariat of their powerlessness, Patrick gets why it’s therapeutic to embrace indifference, shrug your shoulders and say “fuck it” to the world.
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by Alex Dueben
Dan Goldman is best known for “Shooting War,” a comic written by Anthony Lappe which he illustrated. It first appeared online at Smith Magazine before being collected into a book in 2007. Since then Goldman, a member of the online comic collective Act-i-vate, has crafted a number of comics for print and the web.
“Red Light Properties” is a project Goldman has been developing for years and since January he’s been serializing the book on Tor.com. It’s the story of a small Miami Beach real estate firm – with a specialty – taking on haunted properties and exorcising the ghosts before selling them on. This isn’t ghostbusters, though. The plot’s a lot stranger and more complex, as are the characters.
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by Fred Topel
Pat Tillman was a safety for the Arizona Cardinals. In 2002, instead of renewing his NFL contract, he decided to enlist in the Army. As a Ranger, he served tours in Afghanistan, where he was killed in 2004. Early reports said he died taking enemy fire, but further investigation showed that it was actually a friendly fire incident. This would simply be a tragedy if the facts came out. But the military tried to spin a different story which resulted in a now exposed cover-up.
The Tillman Story is a documentary that shows what we were told about Pat Tillman, what actually happened to Pat Tillman, and why the government lied. Director Amir Bar-Lev follows Danni Tillman, Pat’s mom, and Kevin Tillman, his brother who also enlisted, as they piece together the truth and bring it to light.
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