• It’s been a very Snooptastic week: first we learned about the Dogg’s March album, Ego Trippin’, then the LBC’s finest came east to honor Jam Master Jay at the J.A.M. awards. But the best thing Snoop did in the past five days was release this pimptastic video for “Sensual Seducation.”

• Led Zeppelin arrived on the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone. To celebrate we provided you with an excerpt from the cover story, audio from Robert Plant’s interview, a classic photo gallery and a 1975 Zep story written by Cameron Crowe.

• Amy Winehouse canceled her remaining ‘07 public appearances because her health is suffering — evidently from being distraught over her husband’s incarceration, and not from this. After insisting she and family would have no further comment, her father promptly commented.

• The soundtrack from High School Musical 2 was named the year’s best-selling album (and given the dubious honor of being the worst-selling best-seller since such stats have been tracked). Why’s the industry in so much trouble? Maybe it has something to do with its inability to release records.

• As we inch closer to the new year (and holiday gift-buying season), we’ve begun compiling lists: Peter Travers’ top twenty-five DVDs of the year, the ten best TV DVDs of ‘07 and the fifteen best things about Rock Band (with five things we’d love to change).

Robert Craig “Evel” Knievel has died at age sixty-nine from unknown causes just days after resolving a disagreement with Kanye West over West’s “Touch the Sky” video (in which West played a stuntman named Kanyievel). For more photos from the week in rock — including John Mayer, Britney Spears, Van Halen and more — click here.

Feeling bad because you just downloaded the entire Prince catalog in less than fifteen minutes? Disappointed at yourself for not paying anything for Radiohead’s In Rainbows? Let Dear Rockers help you make amends (or at minimum clear your conscience). In the tradition of anonymous whisper site PostSecret, Dear Rockers asks Soulseekers and Bit Torrenteers to write an artful letter of apology to artists whose music they may have downloaded illegally. The result is an amusing Web site that posts the letters fans write to bands like Wolf Parade and Whitney Houston asking for forgiveness. The price of atonement: $5, sent to the band’s management or official fan club (Dear Rockers provides all the addresses). Props go to the girl who sent Axl Rose five bucks in change. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, your check is in the mail.

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In the days of strict Top 40 radio playlists and the iPod’s shuffle, people often forget about the art of the longer-than-average song. This week, we dedicate our rock list to those tracks that last longer than seven minutes. Hit us back with your favorite tunes that break the 6:59 barrier and next week we’ll reveal our full list. Until then, here are decades-spanning favorites to help you out while you go searching for a stopwatch.

P.S. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is only 5:55 long, so don’t hound us with “Where’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’?”

Television – “Marquee Moon”
The Velvet Underground – “Sister Ray”
LCD Soundsystem – “All My Friends”
Jane’s Addiction – “Three Days”
Led Zeppelin – “Stairway to Heaven”

What It Is: The world’s first HD-capable Webcam. That’s right, it will let you have real-time video conversations over Skype with other QuickCam-Pro-9000 owners.

Who It’s For: Anybody in a long-distance relationship, particularly one that’s happening over international borders, as well as early-adopters who want state-of-the-art video on their state-of-the-art PCs.

Why It’s Worthy: What’s not to like — it’s got a Carl Zeiss lens (pretty high-end for a Webcam) and can do up to 7.2-megapixel still shots from your videoconferences (so make sure you can trust the person you’re chatting with). Plus, it comes with goofy video effect software (everything from the old Groucho mask on your live face to trippy fisheye effects) and image editing software. It’s small enough for your laptop as well as good enough for your desktop.

Our Only Complaint: Though it’ll play standard video with Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and AIM, the QuickCam Pro only does HD with Skype.

Cost: $99, Logitech.com

• The final details have finally emerged for Michael Jackson’s twenty-fifth-anniversary reissue of Thriller, out February 12th, 2008. In addition to the original album, the disc will feature rarities like “Someone in the Dark,” “Carousel” and the previously unreleased “For All Time.” The bonus remixes include Kanye West appearing on “Billie Jean 2008,” Akon showing up on “Wanna Be Startin’ Something 2008,” and Will.i.am contributing to “The Girl Is Mine 2008″ and “P.Y.T. 2008.” 2008, by the way, is actually the twenty-sixth anniversary of Thriller, but who’s counting.

• Ghostface Killah, whose solo The Big Doe Rehab drops December 4th, says the new Wu-Tang Clan album 8 Diagrams “ain’t come out right” because RZA wanted to produce the entire thing by himself and not open the door to other producers like Kanye West and Pharrell Williams.

• To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Billy Joel’s “Allentown,” a Lehigh Valley newspaper interviewed the Piano Man only to find out that the song was originally about Levittown, a suburb on Long Island, NY. Luckily for Allentown, the “Levittown” lyrics probably consisted of hanging out in 7-11 parking lots and going to the Roosevelt Field Mall, so Joel changed the lyrics to examine the Rust Belt crisis in Pennsylvania. (”Allentown,” in reality, is about Bethlehem, PA).

• Filter will make a comeback next year with their fourth album, Anthems of the Damned. Mastermind Richard Patrick will take a time-out from working with Army of Anyone to recast his original band, which will now feature Limp Bizkit’s Wes Borland and mercenary drummer Josh Freese.

• Godsmack’s lead singer Sully Erna and guitarist Gary Hoey were questioned by police regarding the slaying of a woman they partied with near Boston after the woman was slain by her estranged husband later that week.

Since ’tis the season to give, many artists are finding ways to assist those in need by contributing a song to a charity compilation or performing at a benefit concert. Here’s a short list of rockers angling to get on Santa’s “Good” list:

• The Shins, Spoon, the Cure and Animal Collective are among the dozen artists providing exclusive songs to Causes 1, a Waxploitation release that will donate 100 percent of the proceeds to charities assisting the Darfur crisis.
• The pirate dress Britney Spears infamously gave a waitress on Halloween after the two women swapped costumes is currently up for auction on the Us Weekly site. The winning bid will go to the Make-A-Wish foundation.
• Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Will Oldham, Kim and Kelley Deal and Steve Albini will all appear at The Second City That Never Sleeps: Letters to Santa. The twenty-hour event features Chicago-area comedians improvising for the duration, with spells of relief from the musicians. (more…)

Hopefully you’re already enjoying the Led Zeppelin cover story from the current issue of Rolling Stone, which tells the tale of how the most sought-after reunion in rock & roll came to be — and asks what’s next for Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham. Perhaps you’ve also listened to Plant discuss getting the band back together, and even had a chance to stroll through our Zep photo gallery, featuring shots of the band onstage and off. Here’s another piece of classic Zep for you: Click here to read our Cameron Crowe-penned cover story from the March 13, 1975 issue of Rolling Stone, where a then-twenty-six-year-old Plant talked about the band’s first American tour, the meaning of Physical Graffiti’s “Sick Again” and living in Aleister Crowley’s home.

With the year drawing to a close, music-industry monitor SoundScan has announced that the High School Musical 2 soundtrack (featuring Rolling Stone cover boy Zac Efron) has passed Daughtry’s Daughtry to become the highest-selling album of the year. The amount of albums HSM2 sold: 2.3 million copies. That figure means the album is poised to walk away with a more dubious honor: the record for lowest number of copies sold by the year’s best-selling album since SoundScan started keeping track of these stats in 1991. The previous Worst-Best mark was 2006’s High School Musical soundtrack, which sold 3.7 million copies, more than a million more than its sequel.

To put things in perspective, a decade ago, Shania Twain’s Come on Over set the record for most albums sold in one year with 15.4 million copies. Disney could make four High School Musicals (as they very well may do, since HSM3 is already in the works) plus throw in a Summer School Musical album, and all five combined still probably wouldn’t touch the number of units Twain moved in a single late-Nineties year. Each year since 2004 in fact, the best-selling album’s final tally has steadily declined as the record industry grapples with piracy, digital-single sales that render full-album purchases less necessary and the near-extinction of brick-and-mortar record stores. Had their albums come out earlier in the year, Kanye West, the Eagles and Alicia Keys would have had a solid shot at taking Number One.

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Morrissey is suing the NME because the magazine failed to print an apology after accusing the former Smiths singer of being xenophobic. The accusations stem from an interview Morrissey recently completed with NME scribe Tim Jonze where Moz explained why he doesn’t live in England. “Although I don’t have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England, the more the British identity disappears. So the price is enormous,” Morrissey reportedly said. “If you travel to Germany, it’s still absolutely Germany. If you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity. But travel to England and you have no idea where you are.” (Insert joke about how Morrissey avoids immigrant-friendly London, but opts to live in immigrant-friendly Los Angeles).

According to Morrissey, the statements were misconstrued to make him sound like he was anti-immigration: “It could be construed that the reason I wouldn’t wish to live in England is the immigration explosion. And that’s not true at all. (more…)

Every Tuesday Single Minded highlights new tracks hitting stores (or the Web) this week. On Fridays, come back for rarities, remixes, mash-ups and more.

The Cure, “A Forest” [Live]
Chilling Cure performance from 1980, before they got all dolled up in ersatz Gothwear. Truth be told, Robert Smith is creepier without the makeup.

Nick Cave, “Here Comes the Sun” [Beatles Cover]
Nick Cave manages to make even the Beatles’ most optimistic moment sound like a death rattle.

Sugababes, “Hey There Delilah” [Plain White T’s Cover]
Woefully underheard British pop band takes a whack at woefully overheard American sensations. Both come out the better for it.

AZ vs. Al Green, “I Am the Truth” [Mashup]
The sacred vs. the profane: mid-Nineties legend imbues the sweetest Al Green songs with a palpable sense of menace. You should hear his Hannah Montana remixes.

Radiohead, “Nude” [Amplive Remix]
Wow. California MC Amplive slices and dices a (let’s face it, kind of bloodless) new Radiohead song and turns it into a sleek and simmering hip-hop track. If more of In Rainbows sounded like this, we might not feel so chapped about shelling out for the discbox.

[Photo: Getty]

New York’s Finest vigilantly patrolled the streets near Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom last night because New York’s grimiest were on the bill — Mobb Deep, M.O.P., Jim Jones, Papoose, Raekwon, as well as a guy from Cali known as Snoop Dogg. The rappers were assembled for a peaceful cause, though: the J.A.M. Awards, a tribute to the late Jam Master Jay’s vision of Justice, Arts & Music. (Despite more than five years of “ongoing investigation,” the Run-DMC DJ’s murder has yet to be solved; proceeds from the show went to the JMJ Foundation for music, which supports arts education in urban and rural schools.)

Kid Capri opened the show and De La Soul set a happy-go-lucky tone with classics including “Buddy.” As Warner Music exec Lyor Cohen watched from the crowd, the mood darkened and the energy amped as Prodigy of Mobb Deep brought the streets to stage, minus his partner Havoc, with a crew of about fifteen hype men in FREE P hoodies and T-shirts (Prodigy was recently sentenced to three and a half years in prison for gun possession, which he’ll start serving in January). The crowd cheered as he went into “Quiet Storm,” and roared for “Shook Ones,” chanting along like it was a cold night in mid-Nineties Queensbridge.

After Dead Prez presented the Justice Award to Chuck D, who couldn’t make it to the show, EPMD took the stage to perform classics including “You Gots to Chill,” “So Wat Cha Sayin” and “Headbanger.” LL Cool J joined them for a verse, putting his fist in the air for JMJ. Q-Tip and Talib Kweli hung out backstage, but Snoop Dogg took over out front, performing “187” and “Gin & Juice.” “Oh man, it feels so good to be in the Big Apple!” Snoop exclaimed (more…)

• Akon has been charged with endangering the welfare of a child and second-degree harassment five months after throwing a fifteen-year-old boy from the stage during an upstate New York concert. Things turned ugly at the June show after Akon asked security to find a fan who threw something at him onstage. When Akon responded by tossing the teen into the crowd, the victim landed on a girl in the audience who later said she suffered a concussion. Akon is due in court Monday for arraignment.

• With her VMAs debacle behind her, will Britney Spears try a second MTV comeback? Various fan sites claim she’ll premiere her recently shot video for “Piece of Me” before the end of the year in a “BIG event,” which may be a live appearance on MTV (the network just launched a contest for fans to make their own version of the video).

• Lil’ Kim says she made a mixtape, Ms. G.O.A.T. (a.k.a. Greatest of All Time, due in a few weeks), to give back to her fans. “It’s been a year and a half since I been home from jail; I felt I owed them something.” Tracks include a remix of Britney’s “Gimme More” (substituting “It’s Lil’ Kim, ho” for “It’s Britney, bitch”) and a freestyle targeted at Remy Ma over 50 Cent’s “I Get Money.” Kim says a proper album should be out next year — after she’s free from Atlantic records and in charge of her own music.

• Axl Rose showed off his inner fireman when the Malibu blazes struck his home over the weekend. “He helped a lot,” his assistant told reporters. “He was with the hose everywhere.” Damage to Rose’s home was contained on the roof, so presumably those Chinese Democracy masters are still safe … somewhere.

• The culprits behind the fake Radiohead site radioheadlp7.com seem to be trying their hand at a second hoax by writing a new post claiming they’re Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher. “The rumors you have heard are true,” “Liam” writes, “I am responsible for this site … We’re having a time recording the new album.”

[Photo: Getty]

This year Christie’s is auctioning off an amazing collection of goods at their annual rock memorabilia sale. Everything from a baseball signed by all four Beatles to Bono’s sweat-soaked headband to high school yearbook photos of Buddy Holly are up for grabs. Want an insiders’ peek at goodies from Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Eric Clapton? Click here to check out some of what’s on the block (and how much you might have to shell out to call it your own).

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Yes, we’re all frightened at the prospect of the only new TV coming in the form of Carson Daly’s late-night show. So while we wait out the writers’ strike — and burn through the rest of what’s saved on our TiVos — let’s take a look at the best of the year’s television collections on DVD. Trust us, it’s worth plunking down your cash for the ten DVD sets you’ll find right here. Want to get them for free, instead? Click here for a chance to win all ten titles (unfortunately, you can’t enter this contest and the movie DVDs one, so choose wisely). Full contest rules after the jump. (more…)