Good morning Radicals! We’re in the middle of the week, but you can make it to the weekend! Let’s check out the latest from the world of rock and roll:
— Lollapalooza (@lollapalooza) June 9, 2020
Lollapalooza 2020 has been canceled due to ongoing health concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic. The annual event, which was set to take place July 30th through August 2nd, is held at Chicago’s Grant Park and typically draws about 100,000 people each year.
Festival organizers wrote, “We wish we could bring Lollapalooza to Grant Park again this year, but we understand why things can’t move forward as planned. The health and safety of our fans, artists, partners, staff and community is always our highest priority.”
Organizers say they will host a virtual livestream festival during the same weekend that will feature “performances from around the city and beyond, epic archival sets from Chicago and the festival’s six international editions, never-before-seen footage from the 1990’s and much more.” A full schedule will be released next month.
Lollapalooza was perhaps the last of the big American summer festivals to finally alter its plans due to the COVID-19 outbreak. An official lineup, usually unveiled in late March, was never announced, with organizers saying at the time that they would continue to consult with local officials and update fans as soon as possible.
South American editions of Lollapalooza in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, originally scheduled for this spring, have been rescheduled to November and December. They are still on for now, with Guns N’ Roses, the Strokes and Travis Scott still set to perform at all three.
As for Coachella, the California desert festival was one of the first major music events to be postponed in the wake of COVID-19, moving from its usual April dates to two weekends in October. But it has now been confirmed that Coachella will not happen this year.
The festival may return in limited capacity format in April 2021, with 60 percent capacity, or perhaps as a full-fledged Coachella experience in October 2021. Whether any of this year’s planned lineup — which included headliners Rage Against The Machine, Travis Scott and Frank Ocean — will return remains to be seen.
Avenged Sevenfold bassist Johnny Christ confirmed in a new interview at Knotfest.com that the California band has been working on the follow-up to its 2016 album The Stage.
Christ said, “We’ve been working for a long time on new material. I can’t verify how far in we are or anything like that. And it’s not even me trying to be secretive or anything like that. There’s so much going on in the world right now, for me to get people’s hopes up and then something has to switch last minute, I would be very irresponsible if I gave any kind of information of where we are in the process.”
Christ would not confirm how many songs the band has written when pressed, insisting, “There’s stuff, there’s stuff. I don’t wanna divulge that . . . There’s too many moving parts in the world right now, and I don’t wanna mess with anybody’s hopes and dreams.”
Singer M. Shadows told us a while back that he was confident the band’s eighth studio album would come together smoothly once the group got started: “There’s just so many cool new influences and even just the idea of sparking us to think of different things outside of the box, I just know it’s going to be different and cool. A lot of times it’s just hard to find inspiration, but once you find inspiration, it’s usually a lot easier process.”
Avenged Sevenfold kept a low profile during 2019 and will likely not return to the road until next year. A blood blister on Shadows’s vocal cords forced the band to cancel a summer 2018 tour with Prophets Of Rage and Three Days Grace.
A YouTuber and parody musician named Kirt Connor has given the world a “new” Metallica song with lyrics written entirely by an artificial intelligence bot.
Connor, under his Funk Turkey pseudonym, composed “Deliverance Rides” with the help of lyrics.rip, a site that lets you generate lyrics from any artist in its database based on existing lyrics. He then ran the words through a Markov Chain, a computer model for a certain type of probability, which yielded “Deliverance Rides.”
Connor, who wrote the music, played all the instruments, sang the vocals and recorded the whole thing in his kitchen, has done the same in recent months for Nickelback, Red Hot Chili Peppers and AC/DC. Those songs were “Nobody Died Every Single Day,” “Great Balls” and “Tool Shed” respectively.
Metallica frontman James Hetfield told us a while back that songwriting is the most fulfilling aspect of being in a band: “The part of being in a band that’s most satisfying to me is the creative part, and being able to get your insanities and thoughts and inspirations and everything out, in a song, through lyrics and music, is the greatest communicator for me and it always has been growing up.”
Drummer Lars Ulrich said in an interview in late April that it was possible Metallica could get together to write and record a new album while in quarantine.
Pearl Jam‘s groundbreaking 1998 video the song “Do The Evolution” is the subject of a new book called Pearl Jam: Art Of Do The Evolution. The 200-page, full-color hardcover reveals the full story behind the creation of the clip, which was all animated and Pearl Jam’s first music video in six years.
Directed by comics legend and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, along with Batman: The Animated Series animator Kevin Altieri, the Grammy Award-nominated video told a graphic and dark history of the world in four gripping minutes and is widely considered one of the best music videos of all time.
The new book will include animation cells from the video, never-before-seen storyboards and designs, and a step-by-step guide through the process of bringing the band’s vision to life.
Pearl Jam: Art Of Do The Evolution is due out October 6th from IDW Publishing and is currently available for pre-order via online booksellers and comic book specialty retailers. A press release described it as “essential reading” for Pearl Jam devotees, animation fans and anyone with an acute interest in music video history.
That’s a wrap, stay safe out there folks!
