It’s been a long time coming, but the Beastie Boys have finally released a new music video. Said video is for the track “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win,” and boy is it a doozy.

The video was directed by Spike Jonez and is, well, believe it or not 11 minutes in length. Go big or go home?

This is the second single off their new record “Hot Sauce Committee Part Two.” So, sit back and enjoy. And tell your wife and kids that they won’t be seeing you for a while. (Eleven minutes is a LONG time!)

Video>>>

Click here to view the embedded video.

via

Actor and old school hip-hop-head Michael Rapaport made his directorial debut in a documentary called Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, which will be released in Los Angeles and New York on July 8. So far the film is already getting high praise, having won the “Audience Award” for the best Feature Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

We can tell you that we’ll be there on July 8 to watching with intrigue, as this film is being promoted as the “first ever documentary to focus on a hip hop group.” They picked a pretty damn good one to lay their focus on.

The film dissects the rise and fall of A Tribe Called Quest, focusing on the in-fighting between its members: Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammed and Jarobi White. Just from watching the trailer we can tell you that there is no love lost here.

Rapaport sat down with the Dallas Observer after a screening of the film in Dallas. Here is a bit of what he had to say about the film, the group…

(jump for trailer as well!)

Interview:

It seems like a lot of it happened on that road, especially the backstage stuff that you got with Phife and Q-Tip pretty much at each other’s throats.
I didn’t have any idea that it was going to happen. I had a lot of the early stuff in my head, because those were things I knew. Musically, there were things I wanted to touch on about what Tribe did because those were things that were exciting to me and I thought would be
exciting to the fans. But all the sort of “their take” stuff, and the conflict, there’s no way to predict any of that.

How aware were you of the inner conflict of the band…
I was totally unaware. I had no clue.

And then…

I think, in many ways, the heart of the documentary is Phife, because of his struggles both with the group’s dynamics and with diabetes. Were you surprised about that? Was that something you knew you wanted? To tell his side of the story? Obviously, Q-Tip is the biggest name when people think of the group.
He just has a very big personality, and he’s unfiltered. He’s very funny, and I think that I tried to make the balance. And, obviously, what he’s going through with his health, you know, it’s compelling. And, you know, he’s very honest. When he’s talking about it, it’s very compelling to listen to, because that’s who he is. There is no air of performance with him. You get what you get — there is no in-between with him. Which I like. And obviously, as an emcee, the things that made Q-Tip and Phife so great and so different, that work with A Tribe Called Quest, are the same things that make them so great and interesting to observe in a documentary. Phife is who he is, and he’s not a filterer, and Q-Tip’s a little more abstract, but they’re both very charismatic people, and they’re both very charismatic musicians. But, essentially, their personalities come out the same way.

We happen to be Phife fans ourself (the 5-footer!), but fully recognize that when you talk about Tribe to most people the name typically associate with the group is Q-Tip. In our world, we imagined that it must have been hard for Phife, who is so damn talented, to have to live in the shadow of Q-Tip–who, don’t get us wrong is so talented in his own right.

And this…

Would you say this is a tragic story? What do you think the story is?
I don’t think it’s tragic. I mean, so many groups have broken up. I think the movie’s a celebration of what they accomplished as a group, I think it’s a celebration of the golden era of hip-hop, I think it’s an examination of four guys’ relationships as friends and brothers. They’re a family. I think that it’s honest. I think it’s an honest depiction of where the group is at now and where they came from.

Then…

You’ve got a bit on the end about how they’ve got one record left on their record contract. How much of that was the fan in you putting it out there as a wish?
It was absolutely the fan. Just reminding the group and reminding the fans, and everybody, that Tribe Called Quest is alive and kicking, and maybe one day they’ll do it. I think that if they did it, it would be great for hip-hop.

Do you think it’ll happen?
I don’t know if it will happen.

Again, this film opens in New York and Los Angeles on July 8, but we’re pretty sure that by the end of the month it will be coming to a theater near you.

Trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’ve never been on a boat. If you’ve never had sex. If you still don’t know what a mother lover is, it’s about time you step up your Lonely Island game. The group has release their latest work “Turtleneck and Chain” featuring Snoop Dogg. Life changer? Quite possibly. Check it out after the jump.

Album drops May 10. Who will be on line for this thing (and by on line I mean hopping on Amazon in about a week)? Yup, that’s right, this girl right here.

Via: Huffington Post

Only William Shatner could ever pull off something as ridiculous as a space-inspired heavy metal album. It sounds completely crazy, but don’t think for one minute we won’t be giving this thing a listen. Find out more after the jump.

Continuing his tradition of odd musical creations, Willie boy’s album will include:

Space Trucking Originally By Deep Purple – Deep Purple Drummer Ian Paice Has Performed The Drum Part. Johnny Winter Is On Guest Guitar.

She Blinded Me With Science Originally By Thomas Dolby – Bootsy Collins Is On As The Guest Bassist. Patrick Moraz (Ex Yes And Moody Blues) Is Guesting On Keyboards/Synth.

In A Little While Originally By U2 – Manuel Gottsching From Ash Ra Tempel Has Added Guitar.

Empty Glass Originally By The Tea Party – Michael Schenker (UFO/Scorpions) Has Added Guest Guitar.

Lost In The Stars As Done By Frank Sinatra – Jazz Legend Ernie Watts Is On Guest Saxophone.

Twilight Zone Originally By Golden Earring – Warren Haynes (Gov’t Mule/Allman Brothers) Is On Guest Guitar.

Space Cowboy Originally By Steve Miller – Country Artist Brad Paisley Has Added Guitar And Vocals.

Rocket Man Originally By Elton John – Guitarist Steve Hillage (Ex Gong Member And Current Member Of Techno Rock Duo System 7) Has Added Guest Guitar

Space Oddity Originally By David Bowie – Ritchie Blackmore (Ex-Deep Purple) Has Added Guest Guitar. Alan Parsons Is Adding Guest Keyboards.

Spirit In The Sky Originally By Norman Greenbaum – Peter Frampton Has Played Guitar On This Track.

Bohemian Rhapsody Originally By Queen – John Wetton From Asia Has Played Bass And Done A Vocal.

Silver Machine Originally By Hawkwind – Wayne Kramer From The MC5 Is Adding Guitar And Carmine Appice (Vanilla Fudge/Rod Stewart) Is Adding A Guest Drum Part.

Major Tom Originally By Peter Shilling – Nick Valensi, The Guitarist From The Strokes Has Added Guest Guitar To This This Track. Also Zakk Wylde (Ozzy Osbourn, Black Label Society) And Mike Inez (Alice In Chains)Have Contributed To This Track.

Learning To Fly Originally By Pink Floyd – Edgar Froese From Tangerine Dream Has Played Guitar And Keyboards On This Track.

Mr. Spaceman Originally By The Byrds – Dave Davies From The Kinks Has Added Guest Guitar On This Track.

Iron Man Originally By Black Sabbath – Zakk Wylde (Ex Ozzy Guitarist) Played Guitar And Did A Vocal On This Track.

Planet Earth Originally By Duran Duran – Steve Howe, Guitarist With Yes, Played Guitar On This Track.

Walking On The Moon Originally By The Police – Toots Of Toots & The Maytals Has Added A Guest Vocal.
Mrs. Major Tom – Female Singer To Add A Track -To Be Announced

If that doesn’t wreak of awesome, then I really have no idea what would.

Via: Huffington Post

At 3 a.m. this morning, everyone’s favorite fallen hottie (no, not Lindsay Lohan) Britney Spears tweeted out her new video for the song “Till The World Ends.” While it’s nice to see Brit Brit doing something productive with her time, I really can’t get over the whole post-apocalytic theme she’s going with. I mean would you want to spend your last minutes on earth with this crazy ass chick? I think not. Find out more and check out the video after the jump.

And let’s not leave our that the fact that Ke$ha wrote this song makes it just that much more unbearable. But I must say this is the best Britney has looked in a long time, so keep up the good work lady. Check out the video below.

Via: Idolator

What better way to celebrate his 28th birthday than to put out a new album for all of the fans who have been anxiously awaiting his release from jail. Lil Wayne is definitely not disappointing with ‘I Am Not A Human Being.’ Find out more about the album after the jump.

While people are going to have to wait until Oct. 12 if they want to pick up Wayne’s CD (wait, people still buy those?), they got a taste of his lyrical mastery with the album’s online-only release. Needless to say the album is already a huge hit on iTunes. On its first day of release, Wayne’s I Am Not A Human Being managed to beat out Eminem on the Hip Hop/Rap charts and the Zac Brown Band on iTunes’ overall albums chart.

Lil Wayne may still have a few more months in jail, but he is prepping for one hell of a successful comeback when he gets out. Check out the title track off his new album below.

Via: LA Times

Lil’ Wayne doesn’t let a silly little thing like jail ruin his flow when it comes to dropping new tracks and videos. The title track off of Lil’s Wayne’s forthcoming ” I Am Not A Human Being” is now out and completely poppin.’ Check out the song and accompanying video after the jump.

Mark your calendars: Lil’ Waynes new album is slated for release Sept. 27 and if this track is any indication, the LP will be certifiably dope.

Via: Perez Hilton

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let me preface this by saying that I’m Lady GaGa‘s straightest fan, and I wish her nothing but the most complimentary bottles of red wine and the most glamorous inhalants eBay can buy.  But even we ridest and dyest of fans have our, “ugh ok Lady GaGa” moments.  The whole “I’m bisexual too!” thing was taxing.  I was pretty eh on the sparkler bra gag as well.  It felt like it had been done before, and I don’t care whether it Has Been Done or merely Should Have Been Done, Lady GaGa’s appeal is that she Does Otherwise Than That.

The new Fame Monster, leaked over the weekend a week in advance of its release (download it via here or here, the “DepositFiles” host site works, after you wait for the ad to time out: look I am all supportive of artists and their intellectual rights especially if those artists are Lady GaGa, but seriously one of this woman’s three-ring costumes could feed f*cking Azerbaijan, and Azerbaijan does not even have that low a standard of living), is larded with the fresh GaGa, but you get scoops of the trite GaGa as well.  The bad and the good, after the jump.  

Some of the new tracks – there are eight, plus deluxe rereleases of all the songs from The Fame – are bad.  ”Teeth” is worse than anything on the original CD.  ”Summerboy” is rooted in the right place, taking cues from Anita Hill’s “Ring My Bell,” The Waitresses’ “I Know What Boys Like,” and other ponytail-twirl come-ons and kiss-offs.  It’s a self-aware song in that it knows it’s cloying (it’s called “Summerboy” for Christ’s sake.  One word!), but unfortunately my ears do not care that the song has lineage and perspective and irony because all they understand is sounds, and whether or not those sounds are annoying and unpleasant.  This one is!

More troublesome, maybe, is that virtually every song here is packaged to sound “influenced” by a different genre.  ”Dance in the Dark” is ’80s – not even any specific subgenre of ’80s music, just “’80s.”  It’s Benatar over the Eurythmics (the synth line almost plagiarizes “Sweet Dreams for a few beats and then veers).  ”Disco Heaven” is uh?  (Answer key: disco).  ”Alejandro” is maybe the most absurd ditty here.  ”Latin ballad” is the template, and GaGa actually begins the song with a goofy monologue about forbidden love, delivered in a cutup romance novel Spanish accident.  It sort of highlights the problem with The Fame Monster: someone (perhaps GaGa herself) clearly went to great lengths to hit the listener as hard and repeatedly as possible with the THIS ALBUM IS ECLECTIC IN TERMS OF STYLES AND TASTES mallet.  Disco on one song and world music on another.  She likes all the music everywhere!  She sees and assimilates quality music from Brazil to 1960!

Thing is, no one is like that.  I want to listen to critically agreed-upon newschool sad-rock.  Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, the Hold Steady, their time is now and I live in Brooklyn for Vice‘s sake!  But look, I do not prefer this music, in my cochleas and music brain.  And I think, for her part, Lady GaGa doesn’t gives a sh*t about the genre of stripped-down, piano-based, walking-through-a-parking-lot-with-your-head-down music because she’s big screen, so why did she bother with a song like “Brown Eyes”?  It’s one of several tracks that feel either apathetic or cheesy without any payoff.

The converse of that, however, is this: while some genres get a perfunctory once-over, Lady GaGa clearly adores certain other species of pop music, and when she’s at home in these, her songs are as good as they ever are.  Disco is one and apparently Motown funk is another: “Disco Heaven” and “Retro, Dance, Freak” are, respectively, the most likely and most unlikely successes on the album.

Weird, of course, is another of her favorite hats.  The first single, “Bad Romance” was well chosen, and it may be the best song here: campy, nonsensical, melodramatic, and punctuated by gibberish noises, it shows how well a touch of self-parody can grease your self-expression when your own caricature is also your purest aspiration.  Would “Poker Face” have become the pop event it was if not for the utterly ridiculous sexy-locomotive MAH MAH MAH MAH part, with everyone from Walken to Weezy riffing on it?  I submit no, and while it’s unlikely anything new on this set will be in our ’00s time capsule with “Poker Face,” Lady GaGa does give the remixers and bass sculptors something to work with.  ”Telephone,” done with Beyonce, is the finest of this sort of vintage GaGa space-clubby chart here (bonus: it’s about cell phones and the problems they cause in our lives!  (brain cancer and sex)).

And finally there’s “Monster,” which has something to do with eating hearts and eating brains.  Would Lady GaGa eat person meat?  I have often wondered this.  I think if it came with a certificate that said it wasn’t like a child or something, she might.  She is much weird, often in ways you can’t fake.  Which is great, obviously.  My biggest worry was that on this album she’d go more straight top 40 and edge away from her inner weird.  (Literally, this is the biggest worry in my life.)  She does and she doesn’t.  But singing songs is neither the weirdest nor the best thing Lady GaGa does, so let’s just wrap this up with her star assignment of the year, the “Bad Romance” video, which got a check plus-plus-plus gold star 5/5 on the A.P. Weird exam.

Click here to view the embedded video.

…I figured you might want to know that d*cktowel.com is now live.  My roommate Dan who also works for the internet looked up the URL last night during the show.  There was no site (“Did you mean ‘d*cktrowel.com’?”), but he checked again today, and whoa, so many MS Paint penises!  Includes a bonus video from the Always Sunny dudes.  ”A girl with the towel on works too.”

As the site exhorts, “Join D*ck Towel Nation!”  It appears you can actually order as well.

Nothing about this is safe for work: d*cktowel.com.

Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam give Halloween the full Devo treatment at a Philadelphia performance.  Classic, timeless music from great musical artists.  And Pearl Jam aren’t bad either!  Dumb as a Blog suggests a few other bands-on-bands Halloween ideas: E Street Band as KISS and Jonas Brothers as ZZ Top would be pretty wonderful, but I’d also like to see

• Matisyahu as Toby Keith
• Black Flag as the Bangles
• Buckethead as Deadmau5
• Aubrey O’Day as Slutty Johann Sebastian Bach
• Hanson as Manson