Descendents!
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The new full-length CD is slated for release in March of 2004, with an EP on its way in January, both on Fat Wreck Chords.
The EP is entitled 'Merican, and includes four new tracks: "'Nothing With You", "'Merican", "Here With Me", and "I Quit". Stay tuned for more info as it develops.
Rock Against Bush
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MTV News is reporting that Fat Mike's Rock Against Bush tour and compilation are coming together. Bands involved include the Alkaline Trio, Green Day, NOFX, Pennywise, Good Charlotte and Sum 41 among others.
The bands will each contribute a track to a Fat Wreck Chords compilation that that aims to raise political awareness and encourage punk fans to vote against George W. Bush in the next presidential election. Green Day, NOFX and the Alkaline Trio will record new songs for the album. The other groups haven't yet announced whether their tracks will be new or previously released. Expect the disc in stores by April or May.
All the bands involved are playing at least one show on the Rock Against Bush Tour, which will run in two legs. The first will take place around the release of the album, with the second to occur closer to the election. Punkvoter.com will have voter registration booths setup at all the shows, which are planned to be free and staged mostly at college campuses. The tour may be called the Punkvoter tour since many college campuses and radio stations may not promote it under that name. All proceeds from the album will go toward print and television ads that will encourage punks to oust Bush from office.
"We're just going to put true facts on TV," Fat Mike said to MTV, "and one or two famous punk rockers will be reading them." With no profits from the album and free shows, Fat Mike is prepared to pick up most of the costs from the effort, "I'm planning on losing a lot of money, but I don't care. This is something I really believe in."
NOFX singer/bassist Fat Mike spoke to MTV about the effort "About a year ago I decided to use my influence to get bands together to speak out about the president... I think it's our responsibility as citizens and musicians to do so. He's wrecking the country and the world. He's starting wars for no reason, our economy is in the toilet, he's ruining the environment, and he does things like cut taxes when we need money... We're trying to build a coalition of kids 18 to 25... We want punks and other disenfranchised young people to vote as a block, which no one has ever done before. Kids are the biggest group of people that don't vote. We want to change that."
Eminem Reconstructing Tupac
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This year, Eminem was given the extraordinary opportunity to put his own spin on Pac's music when he was enlisted to produce tracks for the soundtrack to MTV Films' "Tupac: Resurrection." Even as he sits at the top of his game, producing the late master was an assignment Eminem never thought would come his way.
"Nah, I'd be like, 'Get the f--- out of here,' " Em said about ever imagining producing for one of his idols. "When they told me I got a chance to do anything for this [soundtrack], I was like, 'OK, gimme it.'
"I just got sent a bunch of Tupac a cappellas and went crazy with them," he said about the initial stages of the production process. "Whatever I could salvage out of anything, I just banged out a bunch of tracks. It's not difficult when you get somebody like Tupac and you already have their vocals. All you gotta do is find the tempo of the song, and you just build the beat around it. That's what I like to do anyway. For two or three weeks straight, we just went at it."
The first release from the soundtrack is "Running (Dying to Live)" and is a remake of a posse cut called "Running From the Police," where, most notably, Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. were featured. To breathe new life into the record, Em incorporated a sample of Edgar Winter's "Dying to Live," in addition to snippets of Tupac and Biggie interviews.
"It was obviously one of their earlier songs," Em explained. "The movie is documentary style so I tried to make the song documentary style. You hear Tupac coming in with basically the last interview that he did. He was down-talking Biggie. Then after Biggie's verse, you hear Biggie trying to downplay the [beef], basically trying to dismiss it as if it was nothing.
Penn State Students To Get Free Napster Next Semester
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Approximately 18,000 students living in residence halls across a dozen PSU campuses, including the main one in University Park, will be given complimentary memberships to the premium service of Napster 2.0, which re-launched as a paid digital-music service last week. The service, which ordinarily costs $9.95 per month, gives them the ability to stream an unlimited number of songs from Napster's library of more than 500,000, as well as be able to download any song with limited playback options. Referred to as "tethered downloads," these songs may be played on up to three personal computers and are accessible both online and off. Songs may be burned to CDs or transferred to a portable digital-music player, like Napster's own player, for 99 cents apiece.
Napster's return to the dorms, where Northeastern University freshman Shawn Fanning launched a beta version of the software four years ago, begins January 12. Later next year Penn State plans to offer the service to 83,000 people throughout the university system.
"This will be the first step in a new, legal approach designed to meet student interest in getting extensive digital access to music," Penn State president Graham Spanier said. "We have already set up student focus groups at Penn State who have been testing the Napster service. We will essentially deploy thousands of testers in the spring semester to use this program and give us feedback before we roll it out for even wider student use in the fall of 2004."
Students will not be paying anything extra for the Napster service. The cost will be taken out of the school's information technology fee, which is already in place.
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