For those unfamiliar with the band’s history, Van Halen’s history of lead singers roughly follows this sequence: David Lee Roth, Sammy Hagar, David Lee Roth, Gary Cherone, and Sammy Hagar. Now, some fans mock the Hagar years, referring to the band of that time period as Van Hagar. I, on the other hand, didn’t mind Hagar that much. I mean, sure, I probably preferred Roth, but I don’t mind him in the least on those days when I’m listening to For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge or other Hagar-voiced albums.

There’re rumors now, however, that Roth could return to the band:

Rumors continue to swirl that original singer David Lee Roth, who was replaced by Hagar in the mid-1980s, will return to the fold, despite years of enmity. Roth, who has recently worked as a radio DJ and a paramedic, told Billboard.com in May that he saw it “absolutely as an inevitability.”

“I’m telling Dave, ‘Dude, get your ass up here and sing, bitch! Come on!’” Eddie told Guitar World. “As it stands right now, the ball is in Dave's court. Whether he wants to rise to the ocassion is entirely up to him, but we’re ready to go.” […]

I dig the band and just about any avenue which leads to more axe shredding is a-ok with me. Just along as it doesn’t involve Gary Cherone — that man can only be described as Van Halen’s George Lazenby.

Apple released iTunes 7 about a fortnight ago with, among other features, support for movies from the iTunes Store (née iTunes Music Store). Reaction to its interface updates have been mixed, but I rather like the tweaks to the interface.

Having said that, if you use iTunes alongside the podcast-subscription tool Juice, you should probably hold off on the upgrade since there have been reports of incompatibilities between iTunes 7 and Juice. Basically, Juice is still able to download podcasts, but it’s unable to automatically add them to your iTunes library (as it normally would).

Of course, these incompatibilities pertain to iTunes version 7.00 and Juice version 2.2 (the current versions as I write this). If you’ve come across this entry and it’s hypothetically December 2006, the now-current versions of those apps may very well have solved those issues.

iTunes 7-based niggles aside, Juice still works very well with iTunes 6.x (to which I plan on downgrading this evening). In case you’re not familiar with the app, Juice is an open source “cross-platform podcast receiver” for Windows, OS X and Linux. While iTunes has built-in podcast support these days, I still prefer Juice for the extra features that it offers, including (optional) auto-expiration (delete episodes of Podcast XYZ after ## days), and (optional) genre-forcing (such as forcing all podcasts to the “Podcast” genre). Oh, and it also has a customizable scheduler, so that you can have it check for new podcasts at an interval which you specify (rather than the arbitrary interval defined in iTunes).

Sirius is announcing that they’re adding ten more channels today with the headline “Sirius debuts 10 new channels to bring you more of what you want”. That sounds reasonable enough on the face of it, but I wasn’t aware that “more of what I want” encompassed:

• A NASCAR channel,
• A Catholic channel,
• CNN in Spanish,
• Not one but two French-language news channels,
• … and a Canadian soft rock channel

Don’t get me wrong — I totally dig Sirius — but I’m not exactly thrilled out of my gourd at the news of these new channels. Well, ya win some, ya lose some. C’est la vie.

To me, MySpace is the online equivalent of a mall’s Hot Topic store. In case you're not familiar with them, Hot Topic is a self-described “punk” styled clothing store. However, when that includes Aerosmith and Lynyrd Skynyrd merchandise (no joke), I dare say that their punk-cred would appear somewhat compromised, to say the least. (I’m not casting judgement on Aerosmith or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s musical abilities — they’re just pretty much the opposite of punk.)

All the same, plenty of Generation Y poseurs like to shop at Hot Topic, thinking they’re edgy and counterculture when in reality they’re lining the pockets of The Man. And that’s where MySpace fits in. Sure, many users think of it as their private treehouse for them and their closest friends, but when your treehouse is home to 72 million other people, your exclusive club isn’t so exclusive, now is it?

To be sure, I have nothing against capitalism. Yes, I’m the kind of guy that buys beverages at Starbucks, and happily — hey, if a given company happens to be profitable due to an effective business model, I’m ok with that. (Well, as long as said company isn’t evil; see also Clear Channel.) Having said that, if you like MySpace because it’s a a website offering “photos, blogs, user profiles, groups, and an internal e-mail system”, that’s fine. It just doesn’t mean you’re more 3l337 for the sake of doing so.

Getting back to KMFDM, I enjoy their music and I’m on their online mailing list (so far, so good). However, in the mailing sent out today, they proudly announce the 1-year anniversary of their MySpace page. Well, what’s the use in having a MySpace page if you have a perfectly good actual domain name? All right, the maneuver be excused if they’re merely trying to make their music available to more listeners. All the same, a part of me is worried a bit that KMFDM could be somewhat HotTopicifying itself — making ventures based on marketing perception rather than substance.

Does it make me totally lame if I've got NPR’s Morning Edition theme song stuck in my head?

(I have a daily scheduled task which rips it to mp3 for me and I listen to it while I'm at the gym and while I walk from the parking garage to the office.)

Update, 2005-09-29: Just as a warning, don’t even think about reading that linked BBC News article if you’re especially susceptible to getting songs stuck in your head. Damn you, Henry Mancini!

My brother Adrian and his friend David are in a band and they're getting ready to release an EP which they're tentatively calling Greetings from Johannesburg. Adrian has always been into music and I know that he and Dave have been working on some tracks for a couple years now but, I hadn’t heard any of it until this today.

Adrian has released the tracks as mp3s and I downloaded them earlier this evening. I wasn’t really sure what to expect — well I kinda had an idea since Adrian loves indie music (you know, Elephant Six and all that). I piled them into a playlist in Quintessential Player and took a listen. And, I really enjoyed it — I think it’s the kind of music I might buy in a store, if it was for sale.

The part that’s troubling me, as I write this, is that I’m not sure what genre it would fall into. I’m guessing “indie”, somehow, but I would suppose that there’re sub-genres within “indie” much like there’re sub-genres within (say) metal (such as melodic death metal, power metal, and black metal, if you’re curious). But, after some brain wracking, I can see some resemblances to The Postal Service and maybe Barcelona in some ways.

I would have hosted some of the tracks here in order to save Adrian some bandwidth but I didn't see a license specified and I didn’t want to guess wrongly. Perhaps he’d be open to one of the Creative Commons audio licenses; then again, though I could hazard a guess that Adrian might be open to that, I’m not sure how Dave would feel.

Preface: Mashups are an art form where someone superimposes one song on top of another to form a brand new song. Wired has a good article on the phenomenon.

I recently ran across the darndest thing: a mashup of Nickleback + Nickleback. The original MetaFilter thread was back in April, so maybe I’m a bit behind the curve on this one ;). But, there was a recent follow-up thread when NPR covered the mashup.

And, unlike most mashups, this one wasn't done as a tribute to the bands involved. Rather, a fellow named Mikey Smith wanted to show his girlfriend that all of Nickleback's songs sound just about the same. And, in particular “How You Remind Me” and “Someday” could be combined almost eerily (with one song in each channel).

And, while the original threads don’t have an MP3 handy of the now-christened “How You Remind Me Of Someday”, this guy at Nintendorks has the MP3 on his server (yeah, I could link to the MP3 directly, but I figure that I could at least link to his entry about it if he’s donating the bandwidth for it).

Really, this mashup just weirds me out [and trying to figure out how to un-end that sentence with a preposition almost made my head explode]. The songs plod along at the same pace, the drum solos come in almost one-after-the-other and the choruses are almost in sync as well. I didn't like Nickleback before — though I couldn’t put my finger on it — and now I think I've figured out at least of my reasons ;).

Well, it looks like this MonkeyFilter thing is working out already :). A thread yesterday points to RuthlessReviews’ Top 10 Most Ridiculous Black Metal Pics of All Time. Being a metal fan myself, I can laugh along with some of these pictures. It’s not uncommon for metal artists to attempt to appear ghoulish or macabre — which sometimes comes across well — but sometimes just looks silly ;).

Really, I think the commentary accompanying the photos may be the best part:

• “This is some serioulsy shoddy corpse-paint on everybody…”
• “What exactly is going on here? Is this the new WWF tag-team? […]”
• And, my personal favorite, “Wait, are those suspenders? […]”

And, while the commentary is often on-point, I would have preferred that the author didn’t use “gay” to mean “bad” or “stupid” (as one of the comments put it). That aside, I think the metal world sometimes takes itself too seriously and some self-deprecating humor can be just the antidote needed.

Now that it’s back on the air, I often try to catch Headbanger’s Ball on MTV2 (which airs each Saturday at 10/9c). Though I’ve never seen the original (circa ten years ago), my understanding is that it used to have a good amount of hair-metal & pop-metal (neither of which are really metal at all). But, the show these days — while not perfect — is far from posturing about metal.

The current iteration is hosted by Jamey Jasta, frontman for Hatebreed. And, while I don’t particularly care for Hatebreed, I can’t deny that it’s not metal (I generally prefer more melodic metal). And, to MTV2’s credit, they feature plenty of legitimate metal bands on the show: In Flames, Children of Bodom, Meshuggah, Lacuna Coil and others.

In any case, on next week’s show, they’re airing Headbanger’s Ball and Revolver Magazine’s Best Metal Videos of the New Millennium. Granted, it’s a a bit premature to start declaring a best-anything of the new millennium, but I think it’s partly tongue-in-check (even their website includes the sheepish postfix “so far”).

Looking over the apparent candidates (from a concurrent online poll), I was discouraged at first since I didn’t recognize many of the band names. But, as I read further, I gained faith in the list — sure, some blowhards like Korn are on there, but so are Arch Enemy and In Flames (two of the more talented metal bands out there, in my opinion).

However, until Headbanger’s Ball’s teaser for this Best Metal Videos list, I hadn’t even heard of Revolver magazine. So, I’m curious how the list will end up. Not that I’ll take it personally if some of my favorite bands don’t make the list, but it would renew my faith in the American Music Scene to see some of Scandinavia’s top metal acts make the cut. (And, yes, all the best metal seems to come from Scandinavia, for reasons which elude me.)

Reuters is carrying a story on decision by several metal bands to soften their own sound in an attempt to get more radio play. I just can’t understand why someone would sacrifice her or her craft for monetary gain alone. I guess some people will do anything for a buck.

Hard rockers Flaw from Louisville, who blend sensitive melodies with aggressive guitars and anguished screams, are hoping to break through on radio with “Recognize,” a song featuring clean guitars and vocal harmonies from their second album, “Endangered Species.”

“We thought that if we came out with one of our heavier songs first it might not be grabbed onto by daytime radio,” said singer Chris Voltz of the band's new strategy. “This time the first song that we gave to radio was one of the softer, more daytime-acceptable songs.” […]

If I were in the same position, I’d just make the best music I could and make my money from CD sales and concerts. And, if that didn't work out, I may try to improve the band’s sound, but I wouldn’t want to dumb it down. Oh, and do I even need to mention that Metallica is also featured in the article?