Music Artists, Videos and News

Sometimes working on side projects can pull a band apart and lead to their break-up. But there are other instances where key members taking time off from a giant act can help everybody recharge their batteries. Though Foo Fighters is Dave Grohl’s main squeeze, he hasn’t been hurt by dalliances with Queens of the Stone Age, Probot or Them Crooked Vultures. The members of Linkin Park also haven’t had any trouble keeping their core strong while branching out into other areas of the music world. Mike Shinoda has had a successful run as part of Fort Minor, and Chester Bennington is currently enjoying success as the frontman of Dead by Sunrise.

Dead by Sunrise combines Bennington with members of arena-goth act Orgy. Interestingly, the Orgy members also have an electronic side project called Julien-K. The family tree runs so deep, in fact, that Bennington joked that they could plan an entire festival featuring only his bands and the connected side projects. “We’re going to call it the Narcissism Tour,” he joked to MTV News at the Ulalume Festival. “It’ll be Linkin Park, Orgy, Fort Minor, Dead by Sunrise, Circuit Freaks, Julien-K and JK DJs.”

“That’s like a seven hour work day,” added guitarist Ryan Shuck.

Be sure to check out the Ulalume Music Festival playlist, which features live performances from Dead by Sunrise, A.F.I. and Paramore. You can check out the whole show tonight (October 30) at 9 p.m. on MTV or at 11 p.m. on mtvU.

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When I was a kid, my mom would make birthday cakes that looked like trains, or zoo cages. One time there was a really, really scary clown. There are psychic scars, to be sure, but they’re likely nothing compared to poor Ireland Basinger-Baldwin, 14, daughter of battling ex’s Kim Basinger and Alex Baldwin.

The teen — who, you might recall, was on the wrong end of a really nasty voicemail from her pops two years ago — reportedly got a frighteningly accurate specialty birthday cake last week in the shape of Lil Wayne’s head, complete with licorice dreads, chocolate sunglasses and iced out icing grill. We have no idea if this story is true (since the image from Los Angeles ace cake shop Rosebud Cakes has since been removed from its Flickr account), but any way you slice it, that is the most WTF?-tastic cake we’ve ever seen.

Congratulations Kim and Alex, you may have outdone that dad who reportedly advertised on Craigslist for a Lil Wayne impersonator for his blind 16-year-old’s birthday party. “Here is the kicker my son is blind so you do not need to look like the rapper just sound like him. I understand he grunts and mumbles a lot. I don’t care if you are 67 and Jewish if you can sing the songs you’re hired,” the Craigslist ad read. “Money is not an issue.” We can’t confirm if that dad ended up getting the cake he wanted, but we hear it looked a bit like Whoopi Goldberg.

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Every day a multitude of stars wanders through the halls of MTV News to talk about their latest projects and goof around with our intrepid correspondents. But sometimes we catch stars elsewhere, and that’s why we put together Spotted!, a daily compendium of stars in the wild.

The opening of “New Moon,” the second installment in the “Twilight” film series, is still a few weeks away, but next year’s edition has already wrapped. Principle photography has been completed on “Eclipse,” the third film in the “Twilight” tetralogy. The film was shot in Vancouver, and now that the footage has all been captured, the film’s two stars are headed home. Yesterday, both Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson were spotted in an airport working their way out of our neighbor to the north. They’ll return to their “Twilight” home soon enough, as there is still one more movie to be shot.

The movie world was popping yesterday, as the cast of “Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day” joined other luminaries (including Guns N’ Roses/Velvet Revolver guitarist Slash) on the red carpet for that film’s premiere, while “Eclipse” co-star Taylor Lautner spent more time with Taylor Swift. Click here for these pictures plus the entire “Spotted!” archive, which includes over 400 candid shots of superstars like Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Madonna, Lady Gaga, the Jonas Brothers, Adam Lambert, Justin Timberlake, Whitney Houston, Katy Perry and Janet Jackson!

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Last night’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden (the first of a two-night celebration; tonight’s lineup includes U2 and Metallica) featured a series of amazing performances: Stevie Wonder jammed with John Legend on songs by Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen jammed with Tom Morello on a scorching electric version of “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” and Smokey Robinson delivered a sweet, soulful “Tracks of my Tears.” But the evening’s most surprising musical moment came a few minutes before the show got started.

Before he delivered the formal introduction to the sold-out MSG crowd, Tom Hanks (who was producing the event for broadcast on HBO on November 29) stopped by the press room to answer a few questions about meeting his musical heroes and what rock and roll means to him. When asked what his favorite song of 2009 was, Hanks hesitated a bit before launching into a spastic performance of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” that drew laughs and cheers from the normally jaded media crowd.

Clearly, Tom Hanks watched this year’s Video Music Awards!

When a journalist asked him what it was that he liked about it, Hanks replied, “It’s infectious! What are you, an idiot?” That drew another huge laugh. (He quickly apologized for calling the writer an idiot.) Apparently, he had a personal connection to the lyrics, too. “That’s what I said when I met my wife. ‘I like that — I’m gonna put a ring on it!’” Minutes later, Hanks was whisked away to open the show and introduce Jerry Lee Lewis, and the night was on. But despite the murderer’s row of rockers that followed, nobody managed to match the majesty of Hanks’ “Single Ladies” moment.

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There are so many reasons that Heath Ledger’s death from an accidental drug overdose in 2008 at age 28 was a tragic loss for his fans. But in addition to the legendarily intense Australian star’s Academy Award-winning on-screen performances, his posthumously-revealed skill as a director has provided proof that Ledger had vision beyond his thespian chops.

Minds were already blown earlier this year when Modest Mouse let loose the animated clip for “King Rat” directed and conceived by Ledger as a not-so-subtle ecological parable about our destruction of the oceans. And his posthumously-released 2007 video for the Nick Drake song “Black Eyed Dog” — a movingly dark black-and-white clip that ends with Ledger drowning himself in a bathtub — provided another dim chapter in the brooding actor’s singular profile.

On Thursday, yet another Ledger-directed video, this one for his childhood friend rapper N’fa Forster-Jones, was released and it showed yet another side of the actor’s multifaceted personality.

The video for the song “Cause An Effect,” shot in 2006, features the Australian rapper in a kind of White Stripes-like alternate reality, wearing stark black and white and red and white face paint against zebra-striped backgrounds that create a kaleidoscopic effect and reveal Ledger’s sharp eye for visual aesthetics.

In a video accompanying the clip, Forster-Jones describes how it was shot in one day the garage of Ledger’s beachside apartment. “He gave me a call one morning, as he often did at crazy hours, and he’s like, ‘N’fa, I’ve got this idea for a video,’” the rapper explains. “He was basically running around directing me each shot … It was a really cool day … Every day I count my blessings that I got to have him direct this piece of art.” According to the Associated Press, the video debuted earlier this month as part of a collection of Ledger’s work shown at the Rome Film Festival.

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