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A great little indie rock track that’s loaded with jangly guitars and oooh-wee-oooh’s.

As you may or may not have heard by now, Pearl Jam had their Lollapolooza performance censored in the webcast that AT&T was broadcasting for the stop in Chicago. Apparently during the performance of ‘Daughter’ they segued into ‘Another Brick In The Wall’, which they have been prone to do. Well, during this performance they used the lyrics “George Bush, leave this world alone” and “George Bush, find yourself another home”. But if you were listening via AT&T’s Blue Room service, you never heard these lyrics. They were censored out.

This highlights a very big concern of mine that we should all be paying attention to, and that is the shear amount of control that major corporations have over what news and messages we see and hear. AT&T apologized and said that it never was supposed to have happened, but I say that’s not good enough. It DID happen, regardless of the intent and THAT is the problem.

If you’d like to read more about it, you can follow up with this article from Reuters for more of the details. In the meantime, I encourage you to talk about this amongst your friends and blog about it on your websites. This issue needs more attention and this particular incident is just egregious enough to catch peoples interest.

Every supergroup, by their very nature, carry a large amount of baggage right from their inception. And Velvet Revolver, with their choice of Scott ‘Can’t Stay Off the H’ Weiland as their frontman, exacerbated the problem. There was more talk about the politics and issues that the band faced than there was about the music. Especially so after the debut proved to be very mediocre. However, ‘Libertad’ seems to be about erasing all of that.

I’ve always been a fan of Weiland. Stone Temple Pilots has long been a critically underrated act and I never got the Pearl Jam comparisons. And it goes without saying that the GnR guys changed the face of music when the unleashed ‘Appetite’. But somehow I knew that Velvet Revolver’s debut was not going to click with me. Luckily, the new album can restore some of my faith in the possibilities of this band. Read the rest of this entry »