Nashville Music Blog

It bears repeating.

​I didn't catch the U.S. Air Force Reserve spot during this year's Super Bowl -- maybe because I had gotten fed up with bad attempts at Internet meme-jokes and stopped watching The Commercials -- but it looks like the White Stripes did not approve or even know about the version of their song "Fell in Love With a Girl" that was used in the commercial. From a statement:

We believe our song was re-recorded and used without permission of the White Stripes, our publishers, label or management.

The White Stripes take strong insult and objection to the Air Force Reserve presenting this advertisement with the implication that we licensed one of our songs to encourage recruitment during a war that we do not support.

The link to the commerical posted to the White Stripes website does not seem to be playing the video in question anymore. Furthermore, Arthur reports:

Apparently the geniuses at Blaine Warren Advertising of Las Vegas, Nevada were behind this idiocy. According to the New York Times, Blaine Warren will be issuing a statement later today. That should be amusing reading.

(And of course Arthur mentions Godsmack.) I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that re-recording a song by a well-known band and using it in your Super Bowl commercial is so fucking bush league it boggles the mind. Oh, and props to J.W. for the countermeasures.

​Thank you, Mr. Barry Mazor. Last time I lamented the flood of stories about Nashville that lazily employ the same old shock that Nashville isn't just country, folks more or less said with a status-quo shrug: "Quit-yer-whinin'," "What do you expect?," "Stop beating a dead horse" or "Any publicity is good publicity." You yourself, as a Nashville residing national reporter (and veteran, revered music journalist, author and editor), even pointed out in the comments that national stories need national angles, and national angles about Nashville have to school an unknowing outsider of the non-country ways of many of our citizens. It's an angle even the best editors can't resist.

And then you went and changed the script.

​Today's the day that the Bonnaroo lineup "unfolds," as we were told would happen. The unfolding sure feels a lot like a trickle, but let's not get caught up in semantics, right? There's also supposed to be a big "unveiling" at 11 a.m. our time, so we shall be on the lookout for that. Meanwhile, we'll update this post throughout the day as we find stuff out.

It looks like artists' sites are the source of some initial confirmations, as is the case with the Fogerty. Here's what we know so far:

John Fogerty
The Flaming Lips (performing Dark Side of the Moon)
Phoenix
Jeff Beck
Weezer
Medeski Martin and Wood
Isis
Baroness
OK Go
Punch Brothers
Daryl Hall With Chromeo
Bassnectar
Neon Indian
Dave Matthews Band
Cross Canadian Ragweed
The Avett Brothers
Ingrid Michaelson
The xx
Regina Spektor
Mayer Hawthorne and the County
Wale
Steve Martin & The Steep Canyon Rangers
Norah Jones
Baaba Maal
Japandroids
Local Natives
Monte Montgomery
... And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
Jay-Z
Thievery Corporation
Kings of Leon
GWAR
She & Him
Jimmy Cliff
Tokyo Police Club
Kid Cudi
Stevie Wonder
Zac Brown Band
Dropkick Murphys
Needtobreathe
Dr. Dog
The National
John Prine
Dave Rawlings Machine
Manchester Orchestra
Jay Electronica
The Postelles
Carolina Chocolate Drops
Damian Marley & Nas
Tenacious D
The Black Keys
They Might Be Giants
Jamey Johnson
The Entrance Band
Lotus
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Rebelution
Clutch
Tori Amos
The Melvins
The Dodos
The Dead Weather
Rise Against
Deadmau5
Martin Sexton
Blitzen Trapper
The Gaslight Anthem
Mumford & Sons
Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue
Julia Nunes
Here We Go Magic
The Temper Trap
LCD Soundsystem

Winning caption goes here.

Tickets to the upcoming Tortoise show at Exit/In are $15. I understand how that can create a dilemma for you: You've already spent all your disposable income on the weed you're planning to puff before the show and, consequently, can't afford a ticket. Normally you'd be content to just smoke the weed and forget such crippling adversity, but you really love Tortoise and getting high is just gonna bring out the weed demons and make you depressed over missing the show. While poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on our part, we at the Cream are here to help.

Come up with the funniest caption for the image above and a pair of tickets to the show is yours. This contest ends Thursday at 3 p.m. I'll warn you now, don't smoke all your weed trying to come up with something funny -- that's how you got in this predicament in the first place. And don't forget to enter your caption before the deadline. And definitely don't forget to include your email address so we know how to contact you. (Fear not, it won't be published.) Now, hurry the fuck up and get funny!

Lance Conzett

Check out the slideshow for more photos.

We've been Of Montreal fans since the olden days of the early 2000s. We first saw them at Red Rose in Murfreesboro and moved up and over with them -- first to The End, then to Mercy Lounge, and Saturday we saw them yet again at their sold-out show in The Cannery Ballroom.

Unfortunately we got sucked into the Sarah Palin Teabag manifesto, so we missed opener James Husband. When we finally moseyed over, something strange hit us: Of Montreal somehow has a fan base that is perpetually 19 years old. The band's evolution into a gaggle of psychedelic sex fiends lets them make them the perfect soundtrack for the awkward college freshman eager to bang that photography major while the roommate is out of town. Have these people even heard of Cherry Peel? The mind boggles. The Spin felt like a geezer, and was half-expecting the joint to go Logan's Run at any second.

A photograph taken in 2007 of about two days' worth of received publicity mail.

​Without getting too "inside baseball" on it, as they say, allow me to just share a little part of our job with you: Our inboxes here at the Cream/Scene are regularly inundated with just about every sort of entertainment-related email you'd never want to see. Random example from the top of this morning's e-heap? "Extra's First Look [as in the TV show hosted by A.C. Slater]: Simon Cowell's 'Everybody Hurts' Video." Blech. I also received word just last week that Guitar Center has created a battle-of-the-bands style competition (perhaps as a diversion from this), the winner of which gets to record a three-song EP with Mike Clink and Slash. Cutting-edge stuff right there.

But for all the Slash contests and old-man breast fests we catch wind of, there are also plenty of emails about bands we actually care about. Though there are pretty much never bios we want to read, there are albums we want to hear and videos we want to see. The trick is getting folks to send them to us in such a manner that we can a) distinguish them from the shit we don't want and b) actually have copies of an artist's material, not just links to streaming 30-second clips. That's where Chris Weingarten comes in. He's the fire-and-brimstone pastor of music journalism we've blogged about before, and he recently squeezed out a series of tweets about the suckiest parts of publicists' emails. Not to be outdone, Bloodshot Records publicist Marah Eakin responded with a list of how writers can be less sucky as well. Both lists are pretty entertaining, and you can see them after the jizzy.

​Missed Connection attempts may seem trivial and insignificant to the average Cream reader, but rest assured they offer a cornucopia of anthropological evidence illuminating the subtle mating rituals of club-going humans. The dichotomy that strikes me again and again while reading them is how bold yet timid, how revealing yet obscuring each message really is. It takes courage to put yourself out there and risk rejection, and yet, doing so with absolutely no identifying details -- thus ensuring there is no hope of ever reuniting with your could-be -- is actually quite cowardly. Sure, there's an argument to be made here that it's satisfying in and of itself to merely shoot such desire into a vacuum. That perhaps the act of launching one's lust willy-nilly knowing full well it will barely register in the oversaturated ether is a sad, yet beautiful human ritual of self-expression -- a message in a bottle that crashes onto a rocky shore never reaching its intended, a shooting star missed by so little as a blinked eye, a love letter lost in the mail, etc. But, there's also just total lazy bullshit like this:

12th & Porter - m4w - 18 (Nashville): I saw you at the after party at 12th & Porter. We made eye contact a few times. You bumped into me a few times while dancing. Trying to get me to dance with you? Lets meet some time. What was I wearing? Send me a pic so i know its u.

Ash Wright

Check out the slideshows for more photos: The Features; Cortney Tidwell & Majestico.

Selling out a show in Nashville is easy: All you have to do is start a rumor that Kings of Leon are playing. One look at the mass of unfamiliar faces packed into Exit/In Saturday to see the very familiar Features, and it was obvious some folks didn't get the memo that rumors (reported in the British press) that Kings would open for their record label signees were bogus. Inevitably, the rumors flared up again on show day, so even we wondered if something unexpected would take place as we made our way down to the Rock Block.

Steve Cross

Check out the slideshows for more photos: Girls; Magic Kids & The Smith Westerns.

Maybe it was the week of cold weather and the promise of jingle-jangly sunshine-y power-pop to warm The Spin's cold soul (and colder extremities), but somehow we managed to make it to Exit/In on time Saturday to see San Francisco's Girls.

By 9:45, the room was filled with the expected mixture of beards, cardigans, skinny jeans and those preposterous oversized glasses. But, curiously, we also saw more polo shirts and tucked-in button-downs than we expected. Of course, the brahs had Muffy and Tiffini hanging off their tribal-tatted arms -- "OMG me and my sisters LOVE that 'I wish I had a boyfriend' song!" The first band, The Smith Westerns, had an aesthetic that reminded us of The Katies in the late '90s -- all striped sweaters and stringy hair and, weirdly, a flannel shirt. They sounded to us like sped-up Del Shannon, except dronier.

One thing you can't say about Norwegian black-metal acolytes: when it comes to Satanism, murder and suicide, they're not exactly Hot Topic dilettantes. Or that's evidently the message of Until the Light Takes Us, the documentary opening tonight at The Belcourt. Here's Matt "Evisceratør" Sullivan on the movie in this week's Scene:

The film's narrative revolves largely around two figures -- Darkthrone member Gylve Nagell (better known as Fenriz), and the then-incarcerated Varg Vikernes. As sole member of the band Burzum, Vikernes dubbed himself Count Grishnackh, released a few records, burned some churches -- and oh yeah, murdered the guitarist for Mayhem. These events have been well-documented, most notably in the surprisingly academic book Lords of Chaos by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, which serves as something of a black-metal Rosetta Stone.

Though a number of its subjects criticized the book, Lords of Chaos highlighted their contradictions without glossing over the anti-Semitism and racism that seeped into the scene's more radical pockets. But where the book elaborates on Vikernes' tendency to adopt extreme right-wing ideology and retroactively ascribe his actions to it, Until the Light Takes Us simply allows him to deliver unchallenged his well-rehearsed account of the murder of Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth. His criticism of Christianity as a "Jewish religion" also goes unchecked.

Huh. Sounds like child's play compared to what's going on in the Belcourt's other side.