courtneyriot

Dot told me to update my shit, so I obviously have to listen to her.

I turn 24 in two days. Let's party.

When Metal Blade Records founder Brian Slagel first envisioned the label, he was just like you or me -- a music hungry kid from the burbs, his afternoons consumed in record stores and in the pages of music glossies, frustrated that his beloved, local metal scene got continuously shut out by major...

Ghost towns have a bad reputation: Shop doors creak, Saloons swirl with phantoms of unloved prostitutes, rotting jail cells are haunted by remorseless outlaws, and the dusty streets are patrolled by spirits of hardened deputies...

It started with a potato chip. Turbonegro frontman Hank von Helvete threw a potato chip at me, or so I thought. Sitting in a makeshift dressing room, munching on chips, smoking cigarettes, drinking cheap beer, talking with a self-proclaimed oral sex master well, quite simply, Hank was bound to leave...

Every touring band has that Spinal Tap moment where it gets lost backstage trying to make a grand entrance. While the crowd chants and waits, the band wanders through unfamiliar corridors, totally fucking lost. Hello Cleveland! At this point, it's safe to assume that most, if not all, road warriors...

Over the next few months, Hollywood's hottest writer, Diablo Cody, will see her second and third scripts rushed into development. One of those, Girly Style, is a girl's version of Superbad. The other is a horror film called Jennifer's Body, starring Transformers' Megan Fox, and it's about -- wait...

The music industry is more than just a business. For some it's merely a game, a le enfant terrible's experiment of intoxicating proportions. But for others, it's an asylum. It's a labyrinth of lunatics, all lost amongst themselves and all scrambling for something to protect them from the deafening...

Before the punk and new wave erupted in New York City in the late '70s, female pop singers were like carefully crafted charms dangled from a bracelet, they were chanteuses whose sexuality was packaged as the ultimate pop commodity. When the tokenism of '60s rock finally gave way to the rebel yell...

For Ville Valo, life as a musician is very surreal, or very "Dali-esque" as he might say, and he's not referring to the painter's infamous mustache. In some ways Valo is still waiting for the day when he wakes up and finds out it's all been a giant LSD experiment in the Finnish military, where institutional...