The sad saga of Earl "DMX" Simmons, rapper, actor and frequent guest of our various correctional facilities just got a little sadder with news of his latest drug-related arrest. Sohh.com is reporting that the troubled former superstar has violated his parole by using cocaine. According to TMZ, the rapper's attorney, Gary Jenkins has reached out to television and radio personality Dr. Drew Pinsky in an effort to help DMX finally win his longtime battle with drug addiction. In other DMX news, the rapper's wife, Tashera Simmons, will release a tell-all book about her life with Simmons entitled ...

One day out of each month, music writer/A.V. Club regular Leonard Pierce sits down with a cup of Earl Grey, cues up some Belle & Sebastian, and tells his two cats, Doc and Vera, that they are very special and wonderful. The rest of the month, though, he fills his head with life-defiling madness and evil, as he seeks out the best of hard rock and heavy metal for your enjoyment in his column, Metal Box. So crank your speakers up to 11, carve a pentagram on your forehead, and get ready to spread some mayhem: here?s what ...

Since 2007, when The Onion moved its Chicago office to our current location, I've been slightly obsessed with utilizing a really strange round room in it. The first thought, of course, was to have bands come and perform inside this odd little cylinder. Fast forward two and a half years, and we're excited to introduce A.V. Undercover, which takes the idea of live performances and gives it a little twist. Or maybe it's a pinch. We made a list of 25 songs we'd like to see covered, and we're inviting bands into the newly ...

An introduction to our new music-video series, in which 25 bands will cover 25 songs in The A.V. Club office.

Looks like Billy Corgan is in need of some brand new Smashing Pumpkins, again, according to a press release we just received. Current bassist Ginger Pooley is leaving the band to raise her new baby. As for the keyboardist, it sounds as if Corgan has plans to take the band in a slightly different direction. The details: BILLY CORGAN has announced that he will look for a new bassist in the same manner as he found new drummer Mike Byrne last year: via an open audition process (see below for details).   CORGAN also says that auditions will be held (again ...

When Da Ali G. Show featured Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat, sidling up to the stage in a redneck bar in the Deep South and singing an infectious ditty with lyrics like ?Throw the Jew down the well so my country can be free / You must grab him by his horns, then we have a big party,? it struck me as the single most Jewish thing I?d ever seen. We Jews have survived millennia of bigotry, genocide, and oppression, in no small part by finding the pitch-black comedy in anti-Semitism. We?ve disarmed many an anti-Semite by making a ...

?I?m just runnin? a temperature / Happiness is for amateurs,? Jason Collett drawls on Rat A Tat Tat?s first track, ?Rave On Sad Songs,? perhaps mocking the role of a self-pitying folkie, embracing it, or more slyly, both. Collett?s twists of phrase bring character without too much figurative baggage: His burden on ?Winnipeg Winds? is ?heavy as the King James version.? Even though the part-time Broken Social Scenester borrows some dust and part of his vocal style from Blonde On Blonde, that doesn?t account for the swaying grooves of ?Lake Superior? or the tense piano-plodder ?High Summer ...

As much as first albums can capture bands in their purest form, debuts can also find them over-emulating influences, regurgitating what inspired them instead of building upon it. That was the knock against British band These New Puritans, whose 2008 debut, Beat Pyramid, had difficulty escaping the long shadow cast by Mark E. Smith of The Fall.  Two years later, Hidden still bears that influence, but These New Puritans have moved into territory more easily called their own. Although the album opens with the subdued melodies of a woodwind ensemble (the instrumental ?Time Xone?), the seven-minute follow-up, ?We Want War ...

Colin Hanks spends most of the young-author-wish-fulfillment comedy Orange County whining about how he?ll never be one of the greats if he doesn?t escape his bourgeois hometown, until he?s told that ?every good writer has a conflicted relationship with the place where he grew up?Joyce, Faulkner, Tolstoy.? While his tastes skew more toward Shakespeare and Camus, it?s easy to see Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles appreciating this bridging of the highbrow and lowbrow. After all, Stickles and his bandmates spent much of their debut album, The Airing Of Grievances, bashing out sloppy ?fuck this town ...

Jimi Hendrix has enjoyed a remarkably active afterlife since 1970?s Band Of Gypsys, the last album he authorized before his death. A 2Pac-like flood of posthumous releases appeared in the years that followed, most drawing heavily from sessions intended to become an album called First Rays Of The New Rising Sun. A version of First Rays made an appearance in 1997, assembled by the Hendrix estate after it wrested control of his studio recordings from a producer who?d spent years liberally adding new instrumental elements to Hendrix?s work, patching together ?songs? out of disparate fragments, and calling ...