Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter Reteaming for ‘Bill & Ted 3’

The Hollywood Reporter:

Currently in preproduction, Bill & Ted Face the Music will see the duo long past their days as time-traveling teenagers and now weighed down by middle age and the responsibilities of family. They’ve written thousands of tunes, but they have yet to write a good one, much less the greatest song ever written. With the fabric of time and space tearing around them, a visitor from the future warns our heroes that only their song can save life as we know it.

Kanye West in the Age of Donald Trump

Kanye West

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in The Atlantic:

There’s nothing original in this tale and there’s ample evidence, beyond West, that humans were not built to withstand the weight of celebrity. But for black artists who rise to the heights of Jackson and West, the weight is more, because they come from communities in desperate need of champions. Kurt Cobain’s death was a great tragedy for his legions of fans. Tupac’s was a tragedy for an entire people. When brilliant black artists fall down on the stage, they don’t fall down alone. The story of West “drugged out,” as he put it, reduced by the media glare to liposuction, is not merely about how he feels about his body. It was that drugged-out West who appeared in that gaudy lobby, dead-eyed and blonde-haired, and by his very presence endorsed the agenda of Donald Trump.

I highly recommend reading this entire piece.

The Used Granted Restraining Order

The Used

TMZ is reporting that The Used have been granted a restraining order against former guitarist Justin Shekoski:

The Used were granted the protection … which requires Shekoski to stay 100 yards away from all members of the group, and any place they work. That includes any venues where the group’s performing.

Manchester Orchestra Beer

Manchester Orchestra are working with Hop City Beer and Wine and SweetWater Brewing to release a new beer for charity:

The beer will be brewed by members of the Manchester Orchestra, Sweetwater brewmaster Nick Nock, and Torres early in May on the brewery’s Hatchery pilot system. It will debut at Barleygarden on Thursday May 24th – now dubbed Manchester Orchestra Day. […] Look for ‘The Gold’ to pop up at Sweetwater’s tasting room and at both Atlanta Hop City locations (1000 Marietta St in West Midtown and 99 Krog St in Inman Park’s Krog Street Market) soon afterwards.

Pirate Radio Stations Explode on YouTube

YouTube

Jonah Engel Bromwich, writing at The New York Times:

College Music had 794 subscribers in April 2015, a year before Mr. Pritchard and Mr. Laxton started streaming. A month after they began, they had more than 18,440. In April 2016, they had 98,110 subscribers and as of last month, with three active live streams, they have more than triple that amount, with 334,000. They make about $5,000 a month from the streams.

The boys stumbled upon a new strategy, one that, in the past two years, has helped a certain kind of YouTube channel achieve widespread popularity. Hundreds of independently run channels have begun to stream music nonstop, with videos that combine playlists with hundreds of songs and short, looped animations, often taken from anime films without copyright permission.

The Maine Talk With Substream

The Maine

The Maine recently sat down with Substream Magazine to talk about their plans for the next year:

As for what the future does hold for The Maine, they have already started working on their next album. Though, as Brock explains, this is something that they have been doing since Lovely Little Lonely first came out. “The second the last [record] comes out, we start working on the next one,” he begins, “the goal is just to keep on pushing. We’re constantly working on music. We have a studio back at home that we’ve rented out for a whole year, and we’ve already been in there for a couple months. It’s not necessarily about just recording stuff in there at the moment, but it’s about exploring, writing, and just feeling open and free again to make music.

Gibson Files For Bankruptcy

Money

Gibson guitars have filed for bankruptcy. NPR reports:

The petition, filed on Tuesday, notes that the company currently has up to $500 million in debt and will focus its operations on its musical instruments business, “unburdened by the challenges experienced by [the company’s] separate, primarily non-U.S., consumer electronics business.” That business includes the brands KRK, Cerwin Vega and Stanton, whose lines include studio monitors, headphones and turntables.

J. Cole Tops the Charts

J. Cole has the number one album this week:

KOD opened with 397,000 total copies, including 174,000 traditional albums and 215,000 streaming equivalent albums (SEAs). Only Justin Timberlake’s Man of the Woods sold more debut week traditional copies than KOD this year, but KOD’s first-week streaming totals, the third-best ever since the Billboard 200 began measuring streams, pushed the album to 2018’s best sales week, Billboard reports.