Photograph by Mark Seliger
“You hear it all the time: Rock is dead,” David Fricke writes in the new issue of Rolling Stone, on sale at newsstands today. “But the current state of music is the same as it ever was: There is the good and the bad, and there is always plenty of the former, if you’re willing to seek it out.”
To prove the point, the Rolling Stone staff assembled a rundown of the 40 top reasons to be excited about music right now, starting with our cover stars, the Black Eyed Peas, a group that has perfected the art of global domination thanks to the brilliant maneuvering of philosophical leader Will.i.am. The producer/rapper/friend-of-Bono tells Chris Norris about his theory that music works in circles, not squares (the proof: the success of the 45; the failure of the 8-track), the moment he realized an electro album would be a blockbuster (see: The E.N.D.), and how it’s possible to make a whole song a chorus. “Lots of people say, ‘Black Eyed Peas shit is simple,’ and I’ll be like, ‘No, fool, it’s the most complex shit you even could fathom, that’s the reason it works everywhere around the planet,” Will.i.am says.
Check out photos from the Peas’ The E.N.D. tour opener.
RS also spotlights MGMT (Number 17), who tell Vanessa Grigoriadis about rejecting fame in the wake of their blockbuster Oracular Spectacular and returning to their real psychedelic roots for their new disc Congratulations. Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser also open up about their unique dynamic and their personal struggles after their first disc blew up big: “We needed to figure out how to exist in the real world, but we had no idea how to do it,” Goldwasser says. “To have a record deal come along — well, we pretty much convinced ourselves that aliens had ...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily