Q&A: Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes on Releasing His Long-Lost Side Project

Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The history of rock is littered with legends of albums never quite completed. In the case of TV Mania: Bored With Prozac and the Internet?, longtime Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes and Warren Cuccurullo, guitarist for the band from 1986 to 2001, had actually finished their side project in 1996 before losing it entirely. Seventeen years later, this experimental, sample-heavy concept album has finally been released.

The only Duran Duran member to have weathered all of his band’s many personnel changes, Nick Rhodes, the 50-year-old musician born Nicholas Bates, spoke to Rolling Stone about making music about pop culture from within the belly of the beast.

What was the inspiration behind this album?
We were working in London on a Duran Duran album, Medazzaland. Simon hit a brick wall with the lyrics, and said, "Look, I wanna take a few weeks out to try and find the right subject matter. I like the songs; we just gotta get this right." So we had a little downtime, and Warren Cuccurullo, our guitarist at the time, and myself, we didn't want to stop working. There was a TV show on every day at 2 p.m. when we'd start work called Planet Fashion, and the people being interviewed always said things that were song titles waiting to happen. One day I said, "Warren, we should sample some of 'em, put them in my keyboard, and I can alter the pitches and we could write songs." So he started recording, and that's how we ended up with titles like "Beautiful Clothes" and "I Wanna Make Films" and "You're Dreaming Pal." And when we started piecing it together, we managed to make these musical tapestries with lots of samples and old rhythm units mixed in with super high-tech things from television, analog synthesizers, and harsh digital sounds.

Video: Duran Duran on Recording 'All You Need Is Now' With Mark Ronson

We created something that I think is truly unique, and when I took it to our record label, EMI/Capitol, needless to say, they thought we'd gone completely crazy. They were awaiting their Duran Duran album with some finely crafted pop songs, and we brought this strange art piece made by a couple of Dadaists in Battersea. They just said, "I don't think it's for us."

At that point, we were gonna go off and release it independently because we had finished the album in 1996. But it ended up being shelved because we then wanted to complete the Duran album. A few years passed because we went on tour, made another Duran Duran album, and then the reunion of our original lineup happened, so it just got lost. I thought it was gone forever. Then one day 18 months ago, I was searching through one of our tape storage places trying to find a Duran track to digitize and I opened a little DAT [digital audio tape] box that was mislabeled and inside was the TV Mania album. I didn't even have a DAT player anymore; it's one of those lost formats. So I had to get one, and I was really happy when I heard it because it's aged rather well. It's a real time capsule.

You had intended to turn it into a Broadway musical?
It was written as a concept album about a dysfunctional family. The father was an extremist, obsessed with religion. The mother was addicted to pharmaceutical drugs and spent most of her time looking at the Internet. Her son was completely infatuated with online games and learning the skills of hacking. And the daughter, a very beautiful girl, just wanted to be famous for no particular reason. We imagined this scenario where scientists had been looking for a family to study why our society was crumbling. They found this family, this ideal mixture of stereotypes, and were going to put them in a house with surveillance cameras, seal them off completely, and monitor all their behavior. The TV channels offered the scientists so much money that they caved in, and it became an international show. That was the premise – before Survivor or Big Brother. The Truman Show came out some months after we completed the record. Warren and I saw that and thought, "Wow, there goes that idea." Obviously there were a lot of people thinking the same things. We never finished everything because it was going to be a couple of albums long. The second album was going to be slightly more traditionally song-based.

Why release it now?
One, because I found it. Two, because it's much easier. One of the great ironies to me is was that I wanted Medazzaland to be the first album sold digitally online. The technology was barely available, but I found a company called Liquid Audio, and the first single from that album, "Electric Barbarella," actually became the first track to be sold as a digital download in 1997. We subsequently got banned by every major record store in America. They were completely horrified by it and, in hindsight, you can see why, but I thought that this was the future. It was clearly such phenomenal technology that Napster had, but it didn’t take so much to see the devastating effect it was gonna have on the industry if everybody started stealing music. I thought it would get sorted out, but instead of adapting the technology and using it sensibly as Apple did six years later with iTunes, the record labels decided upon going down the path of taking a sledgehammer to Mr. Anonymous in Idaho instead of thinking intelligently about what to do with the future of the music business. But that's all in the past now. We know what happened.

In I Want My MTV, the oral history of MTV, Duran Duran come across as the voice of reason in an insane industry.
I think we've always been pretty pragmatic about the industry. MTV certainly was fantastic timing for Duran Duran, and when it started it was all you could ever wish for: 24-hour music on television with videos, interviews and bands popping in – it was really something. But once they decided that game shows were gonna be more successful and they only wanted a playlist of five songs a week. . . The quote I'll always remember – I saw it on the front of a newspaper – was "Toys 'R' Us Wants to Get Out of the Toy Business," and I thought that was so applicable to MTV. "MTV Wants to Get Out of the Music Business" would've been the appropriate headline.

This isn't intended as a criticism, but there's never been an artier band more successfully marketed to teen and pre-teen girls than Duran Duran. How did you reconcile that?
Well, I suppose by looking back at the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors and other bands that made a lot of music that wasn't necessarily engineered to be screamed at. It's very easy to be analytical and say it lost us some of our "rock cred," but I care so much more about songs and how things sound and the shows we put on, so we never really paused to think about it much because we were too busy doing the things that we wanted to do. The fact our audience enabled us to do that, I'm hugely grateful. I get why it was strange: Believe me, the first time we played "The Chauffeur" [Rio's droning, synth-heavy final track] and people were screaming and we couldn't hear what we playing, it was surreal. But you get used to these things. When I took my daughter to concerts when she was younger and there was a lot of excitement in the audience, it creates a different vibe that you don't get if you just have a load of men in T-shirts shaking their fists in the air.

Your bassist John Taylor writes in his autobiography about the addictiveness of the life lead by Duran Duran. Not just the drugs, which became a problem for him, but the constant stimulation on every level – sex, fame, travel, stress. How did those conditions shape your perspective to make this album, which deals with many of the same issues?
(Laughs) Well, I love pop culture. I love to be inside of it, and step outside and look back in. "Too Much Information," one of Simon's great lyrics, was about the overload of the media back then. I think pop culture is the greatest subject matter out there – "Other People's Lives," as we wrote about on the last Duran Duran album. Most ideas for great songs come from real situations, something your friend said to you the night before, the girl that just left, or something traumatic in your life. The irony was that Simon was searching deep to find words at the time and we were just taking them from pop culture right in front of us – more like William Burroughs’ cut-up technique than traditional writing.

Why have you chosen to stay with Duran Duran and not do more experimental projects like this one?
Because I can pretty much do whatever I wanna do within Duran Duran, as most members of the band can. I got to work with lots of great people in art, fashion, design, photography. The year before last, we made a film with David Lynch. David prepared loads of original material and he overlaid the band live; we put it out live on the internet, and had over seven million people tuned in at different times looking at this thing that was happening in a theater in L.A. with us playing and David's beautifully strange imagery being double-exposed over the band. We're going to put it out at least as a DVD at some stage. Even the producers we got to work with – from Colin Thurston, who worked with Iggy Pop and David Bowie; Alex Sadkin, who worked with Grace Jones and Bob Marley and Talking Heads; and we moved on to Nile Rodgers [Chic, Bowie, Madonna] and more recently we worked with Justin Timberlake and Timberland and then with Mark Ronson on the last album, which was pure joy. Those collaborations have always kept it interesting. 

Many rock musicians are now celebrity DJs, but you were one of the first – possibly the first – to have played records in a club, Birmingham's Rum Runner disco, where Duran Duran was the house band, before you became widely known for playing in a group.
Yeah, I was 16 when I was doing that.

How did that DJ experience shape what came after?
Probably more than I ever think about. It gives you a sense of what works musically – what tempos work, what people like to dance to. The anthropology of it is extraordinary because you can see which songs make girls come onto the dancefloor, and if girls come onto the dancefloor, boys follow. I was playing all the things I liked at the time - Kraftwerk and Ultravox and David Bowie, and then mixing that in with Grace Jones and the Sex Pistols and Frank Sinatra. It was very eclectic, post-punk. We were looking for the new directions.

What do you hear musically and see culturally and think, "I helped make that happen?"
[Laughs] I can't be that presumptuous. But I have to confess that I have seen stuff over the years after we've done it and smiled, whether it's a magazine layout that looks like our last album cover, or a new young band that sounds somewhat like our first album. It's nice to see that we possibly had given some inspiration to other musicians. I know how important other musicians were to me and still are to me for what we do and what we create. And I still love music - that's never gonna go away. If you can be a part of that and pass something on to the next generation, than I think that's special.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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Q&A: Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes on Releasing His Long-Lost Side Project

Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The history of rock is littered with legends of albums never quite completed. In the case of TV Mania: Bored With Prozac and the Internet?, longtime Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes and Warren Cuccurullo, guitarist for the band from 1986 to 2001, had actually finished their side project in 1996 before losing it entirely. Seventeen years later, this experimental, sample-heavy concept album has finally been released.

The only Duran Duran member to have weathered all of his band’s many personnel changes, Nick Rhodes, the 50-year-old musician born Nicholas Bates, spoke to Rolling Stone about making music about pop culture from within the belly of the beast.

What was the inspiration behind this album?
We were working in London on a Duran Duran album, Medazzaland. Simon hit a brick wall with the lyrics, and said, "Look, I wanna take a few weeks out to try and find the right subject matter. I like the songs; we just gotta get this right." So we had a little downtime, and Warren Cuccurullo, our guitarist at the time, and myself, we didn't want to stop working. There was a TV show on every day at 2 p.m. when we'd start work called Planet Fashion, and the people being interviewed always said things that were song titles waiting to happen. One day I said, "Warren, we should sample some of 'em, put them in my keyboard, and I can alter the pitches and we could write songs." So he started recording, and that's how we ended up with titles like "Beautiful Clothes" and "I Wanna Make Films" and "You're Dreaming Pal." And when we started piecing it together, we managed to make these musical tapestries with lots of samples and old rhythm units mixed in with super high-tech things from television, analog synthesizers, and harsh digital sounds.

Video: Duran Duran on Recording 'All You Need Is Now' With Mark Ronson

We created something that I think is truly unique, and when I took it to our record label, EMI/Capitol, needless to say, they thought we'd gone completely crazy. They were awaiting their Duran Duran album with some finely crafted pop songs, and we brought this strange art piece made by a couple of Dadaists in Battersea. They just said, "I don't think it's for us."

At that point, we were gonna go off and release it independently because we had finished the album in 1996. But it ended up being shelved because we then wanted to complete the Duran album. A few years passed because we went on tour, made another Duran Duran album, and then the reunion of our original lineup happened, so it just got lost. I thought it was gone forever. Then one day 18 months ago, I was searching through one of our tape storage places trying to find a Duran track to digitize and I opened a little DAT [digital audio tape] box that was mislabeled and inside was the TV Mania album. I didn't even have a DAT player anymore; it's one of those lost formats. So I had to get one, and I was really happy when I heard it because it's aged rather well. It's a real time capsule.

You had intended to turn it into a Broadway musical?
It was written as a concept album about a dysfunctional family. The father was an extremist, obsessed with religion. The mother was addicted to pharmaceutical drugs and spent most of her time looking at the Internet. Her son was completely infatuated with online games and learning the skills of hacking. And the daughter, a very beautiful girl, just wanted to be famous for no particular reason. We imagined this scenario where scientists had been looking for a family to study why our society was crumbling. They found this family, this ideal mixture of stereotypes, and were going to put them in a house with surveillance cameras, seal them off completely, and monitor all their behavior. The TV channels offered the scientists so much money that they caved in, and it became an international show. That was the premise – before Survivor or Big Brother. The Truman Show came out some months after we completed the record. Warren and I saw that and thought, "Wow, there goes that idea." Obviously there were a lot of people thinking the same things. We never finished everything because it was going to be a couple of albums long. The second album was going to be slightly more traditionally song-based.

Why release it now?
One, because I found it. Two, because it's much easier. One of the great ironies to me is was that I wanted Medazzaland to be the first album sold digitally online. The technology was barely available, but I found a company called Liquid Audio, and the first single from that album, "Electric Barbarella," actually became the first track to be sold as a digital download in 1997. We subsequently got banned by every major record store in America. They were completely horrified by it and, in hindsight, you can see why, but I thought that this was the future. It was clearly such phenomenal technology that Napster had, but it didn’t take so much to see the devastating effect it was gonna have on the industry if everybody started stealing music. I thought it would get sorted out, but instead of adapting the technology and using it sensibly as Apple did six years later with iTunes, the record labels decided upon going down the path of taking a sledgehammer to Mr. Anonymous in Idaho instead of thinking intelligently about what to do with the future of the music business. But that's all in the past now. We know what happened.

In I Want My MTV, the oral history of MTV, Duran Duran come across as the voice of reason in an insane industry.
I think we've always been pretty pragmatic about the industry. MTV certainly was fantastic timing for Duran Duran, and when it started it was all you could ever wish for: 24-hour music on television with videos, interviews and bands popping in – it was really something. But once they decided that game shows were gonna be more successful and they only wanted a playlist of five songs a week. . . The quote I'll always remember – I saw it on the front of a newspaper – was "Toys 'R' Us Wants to Get Out of the Toy Business," and I thought that was so applicable to MTV. "MTV Wants to Get Out of the Music Business" would've been the appropriate headline.

This isn't intended as a criticism, but there's never been an artier band more successfully marketed to teen and pre-teen girls than Duran Duran. How did you reconcile that?
Well, I suppose by looking back at the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors and other bands that made a lot of music that wasn't necessarily engineered to be screamed at. It's very easy to be analytical and say it lost us some of our "rock cred," but I care so much more about songs and how things sound and the shows we put on, so we never really paused to think about it much because we were too busy doing the things that we wanted to do. The fact our audience enabled us to do that, I'm hugely grateful. I get why it was strange: Believe me, the first time we played "The Chauffeur" [Rio's droning, synth-heavy final track] and people were screaming and we couldn't hear what we playing, it was surreal. But you get used to these things. When I took my daughter to concerts when she was younger and there was a lot of excitement in the audience, it creates a different vibe that you don't get if you just have a load of men in T-shirts shaking their fists in the air.

Your bassist John Taylor writes in his autobiography about the addictiveness of the life lead by Duran Duran. Not just the drugs, which became a problem for him, but the constant stimulation on every level – sex, fame, travel, stress. How did those conditions shape your perspective to make this album, which deals with many of the same issues?
(Laughs) Well, I love pop culture. I love to be inside of it, and step outside and look back in. "Too Much Information," one of Simon's great lyrics, was about the overload of the media back then. I think pop culture is the greatest subject matter out there – "Other People's Lives," as we wrote about on the last Duran Duran album. Most ideas for great songs come from real situations, something your friend said to you the night before, the girl that just left, or something traumatic in your life. The irony was that Simon was searching deep to find words at the time and we were just taking them from pop culture right in front of us – more like William Burroughs’ cut-up technique than traditional writing.

Why have you chosen to stay with Duran Duran and not do more experimental projects like this one?
Because I can pretty much do whatever I wanna do within Duran Duran, as most members of the band can. I got to work with lots of great people in art, fashion, design, photography. The year before last, we made a film with David Lynch. David prepared loads of original material and he overlaid the band live; we put it out live on the internet, and had over seven million people tuned in at different times looking at this thing that was happening in a theater in L.A. with us playing and David's beautifully strange imagery being double-exposed over the band. We're going to put it out at least as a DVD at some stage. Even the producers we got to work with – from Colin Thurston, who worked with Iggy Pop and David Bowie; Alex Sadkin, who worked with Grace Jones and Bob Marley and Talking Heads; and we moved on to Nile Rodgers [Chic, Bowie, Madonna] and more recently we worked with Justin Timberlake and Timberland and then with Mark Ronson on the last album, which was pure joy. Those collaborations have always kept it interesting. 

Many rock musicians are now celebrity DJs, but you were one of the first – possibly the first – to have played records in a club, Birmingham's Rum Runner disco, where Duran Duran was the house band, before you became widely known for playing in a group.
Yeah, I was 16 when I was doing that.

How did that DJ experience shape what came after?
Probably more than I ever think about. It gives you a sense of what works musically – what tempos work, what people like to dance to. The anthropology of it is extraordinary because you can see which songs make girls come onto the dancefloor, and if girls come onto the dancefloor, boys follow. I was playing all the things I liked at the time - Kraftwerk and Ultravox and David Bowie, and then mixing that in with Grace Jones and the Sex Pistols and Frank Sinatra. It was very eclectic, post-punk. We were looking for the new directions.

What do you hear musically and see culturally and think, "I helped make that happen?"
[Laughs] I can't be that presumptuous. But I have to confess that I have seen stuff over the years after we've done it and smiled, whether it's a magazine layout that looks like our last album cover, or a new young band that sounds somewhat like our first album. It's nice to see that we possibly had given some inspiration to other musicians. I know how important other musicians were to me and still are to me for what we do and what we create. And I still love music - that's never gonna go away. If you can be a part of that and pass something on to the next generation, than I think that's special.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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Stars of 'The New Girl,' 'The Mindy Project' Tease Upcoming Romances

Mindy Kaling of 'The Mindy Project' arrives at a screening of Fox TV's new Tuesday night comedies in Santa Monica.

At an interactive chat last night to kick off Fox's new Tuesday comedy block, The New Girl star Jake Johnson addressed the question on everyone's minds: Will Zooey Deschanel's Jess and his character, Nick, get together this season? "You'll have to ask our great writers," he coyly responded. "It'd be great if they get together. If they don't, it'd be fun, too." Johnson admitted he doesn't worry, like the diehard fans in attendance did, if the pairing would come too soon if it featured prominently in the upcoming season – but he did tease that the episode set to start taping today features plenty of Nick and Jess scenes.

Johnson was one of eight actors present at Fox's advance screening event in 10 cities last night, joining stars of returning comedy Raising Hope as well as new series Ben and Kate and The Mindy Project in Santa Monica, California, for a live-streamed Q&A following a screening of the two new shows.

When asked about the similarities between themselves and their characters, New Girl's Greenfield reassured the crowd, "I think they got the right guys for the right roles." Added Johnson, "I think when the show starts, it's one thing. And as it progresses, you become more and more like your character, and/or vice versa." Read into that what you will, Schmidt and Nick fans. Know this: Greenfield followed up by saying, "I just know that I wake up early, I get to set and I unleash. I'm working out a lot of things on set."

The brashly funny The Mindy Project finds Mindy Kaling as the title character, a thirtysomething OB/GYN struggling to balance her career and love life. Of her same-named character, writer-star Kaling said "there's a bigger overlap than I a little bit hate to admit" between their personalities. Though she detailed personal hijinks in her book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, the writer-star did not let on whether, like her character in the show's pilot, she has ever gone to work after spending time in jail following a drunken outburst at an ex's wedding, had a heart-to-heart with a doll at the bottom of the pool, or prayed for a man with "the wealth of Mayor Bloomberg, the humor of Jon Stewart and the face of Michael Fassbender . . . OK, the penis of Michael Fassbender" before a date. Kaling also promised that the love triangle "energy" introduced in the pilot between her character, Chris Messina's gruffly endearing Danny Castellano and Ed Weeks' cocky Englishman Jeremy Reed will manifest during the season, though other romantic interactions will come into play.

Oscar winner Nat Faxon (for co-writing last year's The Descendants screenplay) and Melanie Griffith/Don Johnson progeny Dakota Johnson, fielded questions about their upcoming stint as siblings in Ben and Kate, while Raising Hope's Martha Plimpton and Garret Dillahunt revealed the upcoming list of guest stars on their sitcom include Johnson's mom and "Marcel the Shell" creator Jenny Slate.

The New Girl returns September 25th, along with the debuts of Ben and Kate and The Mindy Project. Raising Hope follows on October 2nd.

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The Baseball Project Asks Suspended Giants Outfielder, 'Why Melky Why?'

Like many San Francisco Giants fans clutching their temples in agony this week over the suspension of star outfielder Melky Cabrera for a positive drug test, indie-rocker Scott McCaughey had a simple question: Why, Melky, why? Unlike most Giants fans, McCaughey wrote and recorded a song about it for his band, the Baseball Project. "I was so bummed, not because he's on one of my fantasy teams, but I'm a big Giants fans and a super-big Melky fan this year because he's been so fucking awesome," McCaughey, who also fronts the Minus 5, the Young Fresh Fellows and played with R.E.M., tells Rolling Stone.

Although the Baseball Project usually consists of McCaughey, Steve Wynn, Linda Pitmon and Peter Buck (or sometimes Mike Mills, when Buck's not available), McCaughey recorded "Why Melky Why" himself in his basement studio. "It's just me, because it had to be done really quick," he says. 

Cabrera was traded to the Giants this year after stints with the New York Yankees, Atlanta Braves and, most recently, the Kansas City Royals. He was named most valuable player of this year's All Star Game, but testing positive for high levels of testosterone means he'll serve a 50-game suspension that, perversely, could help Cabrera win the National League batting title, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

The Young Fresh Fellows release a new album, Tiempo De Lujo, on August 21st, and McCaughey played on a solo album Buck is releasing in September. He's also writing songs for a new Minus 5 album.

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The Baseball Project Asks Suspended Giants Outfielder, 'Why Melky Why?'

Like many San Francisco Giants fans clutching their temples in agony this week over the suspension of star outfielder Melky Cabrera for a positive drug test, indie-rocker Scott McCaughey had a simple question: Why, Melky, why? Unlike most Giants fans, McCaughey wrote and recorded a song about it for his band, the Baseball Project. "I was so bummed, not because he's on one of my fantasy teams, but I'm a big Giants fans and a super-big Melky fan this year because he's been so fucking awesome," McCaughey, who also fronts the Minus 5, the Young Fresh Fellows and played with R.E.M., tells Rolling Stone.

Although the Baseball Project usually consists of McCaughey, Steve Wynn, Linda Pitmon and Peter Buck (or sometimes Mike Mills, when Buck's not available), McCaughey recorded "Why Melky Why" himself in his basement studio. "It's just me, because it had to be done really quick," he says. 

Cabrera was traded to the Giants this year after stints with the New York Yankees, Atlanta Braves and, most recently, the Kansas City Royals. He was named most valuable player of this year's All Star Game, but testing positive for high levels of testosterone means he'll serve a 50-game suspension that, perversely, could help Cabrera win the National League batting title, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

The Young Fresh Fellows release a new album, Tiempo De Lujo, on August 21st, and McCaughey played on a solo album Buck is releasing in September. He's also writing songs for a new Minus 5 album.

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Aaliyah's Family Not Involved With New Drake-Led Album Project

Aaliyah performs in Mountain View, California.

Aaliyah's family say they're not involved with – or supportive of – a new posthumous album that Drake is working on, The Guardian reports. "There is no official album being released and supported by the Haughton family," said Rashad Haughton, Aaliyah's brother.

Drake on Sunday posted the new song "Enough Said" on his blog. The collaboration features a previously unreleased vocal track from Aaliyah and a rap verse from Drake, over a spare beat produced by frequent Drake collaborator Noah "40" Shebib. Aaliyah's family was unimpressed.

"Do you want an AALIYAH album?" they asked Monday on a Facebook page for the singer, who died in a plane crash in August 2001. "If so, who should executive produce it or be featured on it? The Haughton Family would love to hear what her FANS have to say?"

Aaliyah was best known for her work with Timbaland and Missy Elliott, who wrote and produced most of her 1996 album One in a Million. Drake recently contacted Timbaland after the producer last week told New York hip-hop station Power 105 that it "would just not be right" if he and Elliott weren't part of the project. "The proper way for him to do that would be for me, him and Missy to be all on the record," said Timbaland, who is now reportedly producing a pair of songs for the album, with Shebib handling the rest.

It appears the Haughton family's lack of support is mostly symbolic for now: Aaliyah's uncle and manager, Barry Hankerson, likely owns the rights to her unreleased recordings. His Blackground Records released "Enough Said" with Drake's label, October's Very Own.

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Aaliyah's Family Not Involved With New Drake-Led Album Project

Aaliyah performs in Mountain View, California.

Aaliyah's family say they're not involved with – or supportive of – a new posthumous album that Drake is working on, The Guardian reports. "There is no official album being released and supported by the Haughton family," said Rashad Haughton, Aaliyah's brother.

Drake on Sunday posted the new song "Enough Said" on his blog. The collaboration features a previously unreleased vocal track from Aaliyah and a rap verse from Drake, over a spare beat produced by frequent Drake collaborator Noah "40" Shebib. Aaliyah's family was unimpressed.

"Do you want an AALIYAH album?" they asked Monday on a Facebook page for the singer, who died in a plane crash in August 2001. "If so, who should executive produce it or be featured on it? The Haughton Family would love to hear what her FANS have to say?"

Aaliyah was best known for her work with Timbaland and Missy Elliott, who wrote and produced most of her 1996 album One in a Million. Drake recently contacted Timbaland after the producer last week told New York hip-hop station Power 105 that it "would just not be right" if he and Elliott weren't part of the project. "The proper way for him to do that would be for me, him and Missy to be all on the record," said Timbaland, who is now reportedly producing a pair of songs for the album, with Shebib handling the rest.

It appears the Haughton family's lack of support is mostly symbolic for now: Aaliyah's uncle and manager, Barry Hankerson, likely owns the rights to her unreleased recordings. His Blackground Records released "Enough Said" with Drake's label, October's Very Own.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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Pusha T Reveals What He Can't Reveal About Kanye's G.O.O.D. Music Project

Pusha T has spent a significant amount of time over the past year working on Cruel Summer, the forthcoming album Kanye West is putting together with the stable of artists signed to his G.O.O.D.
Music label. The Clipse MC describes the tracks he's rhymed on as "emotional hip-hop mixed with trap music," but he admits that despite all the work he's done on the album, he can only guess what it will ultimately sound like.

"I've done about 20 verses, but the album's still a mystery to me because I don't know what's made it and what hasn't," he tells Rolling Stone. G.O.O.D. artists Kid Cudi, Big Sean, CyHi, Common, Q-Tip, John Legend and 2 Chainz have all contributed vocals, as have a few artists not signed to the label, but the only one who knows what the final product will include is West, who has sworn off interviews ever since a tense Today Show tete-a-tete with Matt Lauer in 2010.

"It wouldn't be right if the element of surprise wasn't there for everybody involved except Kanye," says Pusha. "That's his magic, man."

The album originated as a companion piece to a surreal, grandiose 30-minute film that West debuted as a seven-screen experience at the Cannes Film Festival in May. So far two singles ("Mercy" and "New God Flow") have been released, and West previewed a few other songs, including "Way Too Cold" and another, possibly titled "Perfect Bitch," during an unannounced visit to a New York City club at about 1:30 a.m. on August 5th. Rumors have swirled about various producers on the project.

"There is some guest production," confirms Pusha. "But I've never heard anyone say in an interview who else is up there production-wise, so I don't want to be the one to spoil it."

All the secrecy is nothing new for West. Pusha first noticed it during the sessions for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

"In the studio there would be sheets of paper that said, 'No tweeting, no talking, no emailing, no anything. Do not talk to anybody outside of this studio room.' Then there happened to be a leak, and I remember Kanye ranting and raving, like, 'Fuck this! We're not going to ever work there again! We're going to work in hotel rooms!'"

West was true to his word. Pusha says Cruel Summer was recorded entirely in hotels. West also refused to email files to his collaborators.

"'Ye would call me and be like, 'Yo, I've got this ill beat,'" explains Pusha. "I'd be like, 'All right, send it to me.' And he'd say, 'No, I'm not emailing it.'" Instead Pusha's manager would have to fly out to pick it up.

If such behavior seems a tad paranoid, it may not be entirely unwarranted. According to Pusha, the email addresses of West and most of his G.O.O.D. Music family have been hacked repeatedly.

"We get bogus emails from each other, from hackers," he says. "I don't even open my emails. If [West's tour manager] Don C. emails me something, before I touch it, I call Don and say, 'Don, did you email me?' So with that being said, I understand keeping things quiet."

Cruel Summer is due out September 4th.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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Creator's Project Brings James Murphy, Karen O to San Francisco

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs perform during The Creators Project in San Francisco.

When the Creators Project, Vice and Intel’s showcase of art, music and film, touched down on the windy piers of San Francisco’s Fort Mason this weekend, the collective reaction could best be described as a cheery, "What took you so long?" San Francisco needs more cultural events of this size, and the weekend’s crowd was eager to get that point across.

The three-year-old Creators Project, as a concept, benefits from an elevator pitch, which San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee was happy to provide during a brief speech Saturday: "Art, music and technology!" (This got some eyerolls.) Typically housed indoors, the Creators Project is something like going to a huge museum with the goal of seeing every exhibit on show. Unlike bigger festivals like South By Southwest and CMJ, it’s easy to be immersed in a Creators Project event, appreciate the common themes on display, and come out the other side inspired, rather than dehydrated and counting down the layovers til you’re home. This weekend, which kicked off the Creators Project’s 2012 tour, one could conceivably see ten musical acts in a row, check out some interactive art pieces between sets, and come back the next day to hit up a screening of David Bowie’s remastered and remixed "Life on Mars" video, a talk on Bjork’s Biophilia iPad app, and a documentary on Karen O’s rock opera Stop the Virgens.

The biggest draw, judging from how he transformed a quiet crowd into an elated one, was LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, who DJed the last two hours of the night with help from bandmates Nancy Whang and Pat Mahoney. Being able to bring this hugely popular figure back from "retirement" (let’s hope the quotes stick) lent legitimacy to the event to anyone doing a quick scan of the lineup. But the organizers deserve credit for nabbing a delightfully disparate group of up-and-comers to precede the big guns. Murphy and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the necessary crowd-pleasers, but the other bands, particularly Shabazz Palaces and Zola Jesus, made at least as big a splash.

Nika Danilova, aka Zola Jesus, is a trained opera singer raised in rural Wisconsin, now living in L.A., whose goth-pop is evocative of her childhood landscape. It’s also fun. Saturday night she essentially performed 2011’s Conatus, her impressive third full-length, in its entirety, stomping around the stage in a white minidress and at one point launching herself into the crowd. Her band consisted of a laptop guy, a drummer, and a woman playing an electric violin, and like preceding act, Seattle’s Shabazz Palaces, it was all about the drums: big, booming bass drums, glitchy beats, and a general relentlessness. For Shabazz Palaces, rhythm is melody – especially inside the nearly 200-foot-long building that housed the weekend’s music, where vocals indecipherably fly down the structure so that all that was really left was a beat.

The event’s largely 20-something crowd didn’t let loose until Karen O took the stage for a brief set of Yeah Yeah Yeahs singles old and new-ish, clad in a zebra-print shirt, sparkly red blazer with fringed sleeves, and matching red pants. There was a detectable swell for influential British electronic maestro Squarepusher, who hasn’t performed in the U.S. for years, but his impact was lost on some of the crowd. One person remarked that he "expected more from an electronic DJ from 1996." (Someone should tell him that Squarepusher was doing LED lightshows with a helmet over his head when Deadmau5 was still a kid.) But another guy just as dramatically decided, "This is the best electronic show I’ve ever seen!"

Those who came back for Day Two got some food for thought to go with Saturday’s revelry. The interactive art, which included a few video games, was fun and visually entertaining, but the panels and films offered deeper rumination on making art in the 21st century. The accessibility of art-enabling technology was a powerful theme, as was privacy, fame, and fandom. The schedule showcased creative teams that try to shirk broad categorizations in music, theater and technology. Bjork’s revolutionary iPad app for her album Biophilia is a great example of this, bringing "experiences that aren’t meant for a digital platform to a digital platform" as one of the app’s creators, Max Weisel, put it. Similarly, the director of Karen O’s Stop the Virgens described the work as musical theater for people who don’t necessarily like musical theater.

Intel and Vice did a fine job of catering the event specifically to San Francisco without getting heavy-handed about it. Internet Rising, a cerebral documentary about the future of the Internet, fit comfortably alongside On My Way Back Home, a short film of a Band of Horses concert in Big Sur, California. The end result: a free, diverse, art-and-tech geek-out.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

Amazon Music and MP3 Center

Read more »

Creator's Project Brings James Murphy, Karen O to San Francisco

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs perform during The Creators Project in San Francisco.

When the Creators Project, Vice and Intel’s showcase of art, music and film, touched down on the windy piers of San Francisco’s Fort Mason this weekend, the collective reaction could best be described as a cheery, "What took you so long?" San Francisco needs more cultural events of this size, and the weekend’s crowd was eager to get that point across.

The three-year-old Creators Project, as a concept, benefits from an elevator pitch, which San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee was happy to provide during a brief speech Saturday: "Art, music and technology!" (This got some eyerolls.) Typically housed indoors, the Creators Project is something like going to a huge museum with the goal of seeing every exhibit on show. Unlike bigger festivals like South By Southwest and CMJ, it’s easy to be immersed in a Creators Project event, appreciate the common themes on display, and come out the other side inspired, rather than dehydrated and counting down the layovers til you’re home. This weekend, which kicked off the Creators Project’s 2012 tour, one could conceivably see ten musical acts in a row, check out some interactive art pieces between sets, and come back the next day to hit up a screening of David Bowie’s remastered and remixed "Life on Mars" video, a talk on Bjork’s Biophilia iPad app, and a documentary on Karen O’s rock opera Stop the Virgens.

The biggest draw, judging from how he transformed a quiet crowd into an elated one, was LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, who DJed the last two hours of the night with help from bandmates Nancy Whang and Pat Mahoney. Being able to bring this hugely popular figure back from "retirement" (let’s hope the quotes stick) lent legitimacy to the event to anyone doing a quick scan of the lineup. But the organizers deserve credit for nabbing a delightfully disparate group of up-and-comers to precede the big guns. Murphy and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the necessary crowd-pleasers, but the other bands, particularly Shabazz Palaces and Zola Jesus, made at least as big a splash.

Nika Danilova, aka Zola Jesus, is a trained opera singer raised in rural Wisconsin, now living in L.A., whose goth-pop is evocative of her childhood landscape. It’s also fun. Saturday night she essentially performed 2011’s Conatus, her impressive third full-length, in its entirety, stomping around the stage in a white minidress and at one point launching herself into the crowd. Her band consisted of a laptop guy, a drummer, and a woman playing an electric violin, and like preceding act, Seattle’s Shabazz Palaces, it was all about the drums: big, booming bass drums, glitchy beats, and a general relentlessness. For Shabazz Palaces, rhythm is melody – especially inside the nearly 200-foot-long building that housed the weekend’s music, where vocals indecipherably fly down the structure so that all that was really left was a beat.

The event’s largely 20-something crowd didn’t let loose until Karen O took the stage for a brief set of Yeah Yeah Yeahs singles old and new-ish, clad in a zebra-print shirt, sparkly red blazer with fringed sleeves, and matching red pants. There was a detectable swell for influential British electronic maestro Squarepusher, who hasn’t performed in the U.S. for years, but his impact was lost on some of the crowd. One person remarked that he "expected more from an electronic DJ from 1996." (Someone should tell him that Squarepusher was doing LED lightshows with a helmet over his head when Deadmau5 was still a kid.) But another guy just as dramatically decided, "This is the best electronic show I’ve ever seen!"

Those who came back for Day Two got some food for thought to go with Saturday’s revelry. The interactive art, which included a few video games, was fun and visually entertaining, but the panels and films offered deeper rumination on making art in the 21st century. The accessibility of art-enabling technology was a powerful theme, as was privacy, fame, and fandom. The schedule showcased creative teams that try to shirk broad categorizations in music, theater and technology. Bjork’s revolutionary iPad app for her album Biophilia is a great example of this, bringing "experiences that aren’t meant for a digital platform to a digital platform" as one of the app’s creators, Max Weisel, put it. Similarly, the director of Karen O’s Stop the Virgens described the work as musical theater for people who don’t necessarily like musical theater.

Intel and Vice did a fine job of catering the event specifically to San Francisco without getting heavy-handed about it. Internet Rising, a cerebral documentary about the future of the Internet, fit comfortably alongside On My Way Back Home, a short film of a Band of Horses concert in Big Sur, California. The end result: a free, diverse, art-and-tech geek-out.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

Amazon MP3 Download Center

Read more »