earsucker

The Vulture covered Brad Pitt’s panel session at Cannes. Pitt was happy to wear his tolerant, and intolerant political views on his sleeve throughout the media barrage:

When a Spanish journalist asked Pitt if, as a dad, he had a problem playing a killer, he replied, “Not in any way, because murder is an accepted possibility when you’re dealing in crime. I would have a much harder time playing a racist or something along those lines. That would be much more unsettling for me than a guy who shoots another guy in the face.” Later, when the topic came up again of whether violent video games had influenced the film’s stylized shots of people getting their faces blown off (courtesy of Pitt’s The Assassination of Jesse James director, New Zealander Andrew Dominik), the actor again refused to apologize. “We live in such a violent world. I certainly grew up hunting, which is a very violent act. Have you ever had a hamburger? Have you seen how they butcher cows? It’s barbaric, it’s horrendous, it’s very violent. This is the world we live in, so I see it as absolutely important to film. Is it how it’s shot? Is it memorialized or aggrandized or romanticized in some way? That’s a fair question, but I don’t see a world without it.”

It’s a movie, it’s not supposed to glorify violence simply tell a story about it. (continue reading…)

Frank is upset at the collapse of civilization going on around him, all the fails and stupid being televised with über-intense graphics.

Frank is upset that people are mean to one another and get rich at it while his life in a cubicle farm is boring and safe.

Frank is upset that his neighbors yell at their TV through paper thin walls, where he can hear them vicariously worrying about celebrities like Lindsay Lohan on “TMI” (a spoof of TMZ). Frank is upset that their baby does nothing but scream, a sure sign the next generation will be about the same.

Frank is upset because he can see the TV is teaching people to be mean to one another.

Frank is upset because he got fired from his job for sending flowers to the receptionist’s home and Human Resources is overly sensitive to potential sexual harassment litigation. (continue reading…)

That’s a screenshot of the super-meta YouTube music video “Pop Star” from The Pilot Kids, which is enough to get them big name labels sniffing around according to Jonny Gorenc.

He tells us, “If I had a message for the Earsucker community it would be that YOU CAN BE THE “POP STAR” YOU HAVE ALWAYS WANTED TO BE. With the advent and speed of the internet, all you need is a great idea. No connections, no excessive money, no nothing. Just creativity and a sick amount of drive.”

“We recently acquired a booking agent over at William-Morris in LA, but still have no manager or label. We’ve yet to release even our first EP, so we’re excited to see what this summer brings us! (I’m graduating from NYU’s Tisch film school in May).”

I gave it a whirls and I am confident that with so many pop culture references the usurpers LMFAO should be sent packing and replaced by such actual talent (with the auto tuner set to 11).

And if anything, today I learned that basements are where “pop stars” are born, thanks to Apple’s Photobooth and a healthy dose of creativity and “a sick amount of drive”. I’m curious as to what they come up with next, or whether that guy can be coaxed into shaving.

Spammers, you’re on notice (update: again). I handed out a ban today and it felt wonderful. The rest of you, please feel free to flag that crap because we’re usually too busy fetching the juicy gossip news, not moderating anyone’s comments into oblivion.

We appreciate the community, but you guys gotta help police things around here otherwise it’s going to be a spam crapfest and we can’t have that.

Thanks, and hugs and kisses!

Performer M.I.A. — Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam — deftly disguised herself as a singer and infiltrated the heavy Super Bowl security of NBC, and the TSA, and the DHS. Her mission? To flip a middle finger to the camera all while singing a four-letter word that is part of “Luvin”‘s original lyrics.

Might as well get the wWAAAAH-mbulance on standby for the outraged parents groups that will surely come out of the woodwork over something their kids probably didn’t even notice. I know I certainly didn’t catch it during the live broadcast. It got past, after which an attempted digital blurring came oh so late. NBC censors either fell asleep at the wheel, or someone thought it was good entertainment (it is, now).

The real question is if stage-mate Madonna will ultimately come forward to stick up for them or let them twist in the wind should an FCC fine be levied. In 2004, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe fiasco ultimately led to a whopping $550,000 headache payable to the finger-wagging nanny state.

UPDATE: The New Yorker is erroneously reporting that M.I.A. has apologized, based on an LA Times story that cites a “source, who requested anonymity but was with the artist at Lucas Oil Stadium.” Her publicists at Interscope have issued a “no comment.” We are following this story intently, mostly because we know at the end of the day an entourage lackey speaking out of turn doesn’t mean squat.

As I predicted before, Parents Television Council has become the first outraged parent group to rush to the scene with stern words. I humbly suggest they spend their time and energy providing a useful product for parental television control, not blowing hot air over a bunch of known provocative artists.

Greetings and salutations gossip junkies, we interrupt this broadcast to inform you that democracy needs your help today. With your help, an actual constitutionalist candidate and principled president could finally LIVE UP TO all that hype and hope everyone seemed to have inadvertently put in that jackoff with the teleprompter.

#2 – Spread the word about BlackThisOut on Facebook
25,000 people are going to be HAMMERING facebook ALL DAY TODAY about BlackThisOut. Please add your voice! Send out private messages, post of your friend’s walls, post on your own wall, “Like” any and all posts related to BlackThisOut so that your friends will seem them in their newsfeed.

There’s an entire internet out there, kids. Facebook is just one website.

Of course, they address that:

#3 – Spread the word about BTO on ANY WEBSITE THAT HAS TRAFFIC
Post about the BlackThisOut Money Bomb anywhere and everywhere you can online. Blogs, news websites like FoxNews.com, CNN.com, HuffingtonPost.com, etc., web forums ot where ever else you spot an opportunity to share. As with facebook messages, these things add up fast when performed by thousands of individuals at the same time.

Oh yeah, here’s earsucker telling you to go ahead and donate already. You cheap fucks.

I’m not sure why Lindsay Lohan was invited to some party for ‘Saints Row: The Third’ last night in Hollywood — but if the driving dynamics of the newest addition to the Xbox exclusive title are as bad as previously, then messy Lindsay might just be the perfect cover girl for the game.

The 23 year old actress was spotted with yellow, chipped teeth, and her hands were badly smudged with nail polish along with what appeared to be soot — having not-so-glamourous shots taken on photographer’s row.

Is the downhill slide of Lohan’s career starting to actually get ugly or will she realize that it’s time for some dental veneers and sober manicures?

Correction: ‘Saints Row: The Third’ is actually not an exclusive title and will also be on PS3, I still maintain that the driving and physics in GTA IV is far superior and that if it is as bad as #2 then they might as well just call it ‘Saints Row: The Third Turd’. This has no bearing on Lohan’s apparent entropic failure, I just wanted to clear up what’s really important here.

That’s the question a full page ad in The Austin Chronicle asks. The following was dropped in the alt-weekly by Robert Morrow, CASH president:

The ad has been noticed across a wide spectrum of media outlets from The Washington Post to The Huffington Post and several other blog pickups. Many of them seem to be mentioning Ron Paul like it’s going to make people not fist pump Robert Morrow’s epic crusade in search of Rick Perry’s kinky sex history in a proven method. Whatever, tools.

Sure a few opportunists will show up looking for CASH with a salacious tale. But we have a feeling more than a few real skeletons might get knocked out of the closet with this kind of bold and independent investigative journalism style (backed by CASH).

The internets has discovered that Rick Perry spent $78 at La Te Da “Drag Queen Show” in Florida in 2009. Check out the website of Mr. Randy Roberts, who is headlining at the La Te Da Cabaret this week. We don’t need to spell it out to family values people: Where there’s hypocritical smoke, there’s flamingly fabulous Rick Perry.

For the record, I like the ad’s approach. And no, I’ve never had sex with Rick Perry.

[h/T to John Bush in Texas]
[Cross-posted from Hammer of Truth for lulz]

Weird Al is throwing his hat in the political arena with his latest hit-sucker recognizable song with new lyrics and a nerd voice musical parody Party in the CIA. Fans of pop singer Miley Cyrus will instantly recognize it as a spoof of Party in the USA. Even though lyrics are intentionally typed out in lowercase to go with the bubblegum pop feel, the subject matter is anything but cute:

i moved out to langely recently
with a plain and simple dream;
wanna infiltrate some third-world place
and topple their regime.

their men in black with their matching suitcases;
where everything’s on a need-to-know basis;
agents got that swagger;
everyone so cloak and dagger.

i’m feelin’ nervous but i’m really kinda wishing
for another undercover mission

that’s when the red alert came on the radio
and i put my earpiece on!
got my dark sunglasses on!
and i had my weapon drawn!

so i get my handcuffs,
my cyanide pills,
my classified dossier!

tappin’ the phones like yeah, shreddin’ the files like yeah,
and then i rised all the enemy spies i’ve got to neutralize today.
Weird Al Yankovic Party In The CIA
yeeeaaahhh, it’s a party in the cia!
yeeeaaahhh, it’s a party in the cia! (continue reading…)

“Ashton, you’ve been Punk’d. This account is not secure. Dude, where’s my SSL?”

“P.S. This is for those young protesters around the world who deserve not to have their Facebook & Twitter accounts hacked like this. #SSL”

Earsucker has learned from our field hacktivists lurking in a secret Internet chat room that Ashton Kutcher had his twitter account jacked for a brief period because he’s a total noob at this stuff or something: “LOL, he got punk’d. That’s what you get for not using SSL over wifi.” our Anonymous source informs us. “Most people don’t realize their passwords/usernames are cleartext if the connection isn’t SSL… it’s one of the biggest open doors into someone’s shit.”

“Packet sniffing isn’t even that hard anymore, there’s even like GUIs and shit for the mac.” In fact a simple Google search turned up a link to Cocoa Packet Analyzer, which could probably have even someone like Ashton up and packet sniffing within a few minutes on their laptop, maybe punking others.

The messages were still viewable on the account @aplusk at the time of this report.

You gave it a good try, but we regret to inform you your fifteen minutes are officially over, thanks for playing. Please please please take care of your kids, we don’t need your brand of craziness infecting them.

Octomom stars in a fetish video, in which she whips a grown man wearing a baby diaper and a bonnet.

Octo whips the dude in the diaper, so much so he has welts on his back.

Via our garbage-rummaging friends at TMZ.

If you haven’t been visiting our sister political site Hammer of Truth, these are the big stories you’ve been missing:

• US soldiers ‘killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies’
• UPDATED: Reverend Terry Jones is an attention-seeking moron
• Stealing Votes?
• This kind of disturbs me
• Truthers get a bad rap. But there’s a ray of hope…

Update by Roberta: Check it out!! HoT is awesome, Stephen puts a lot of hard work, time and effort into his baby, SHOW HIM THE LOVE!!

DO IT NOW, WE’LL WAIT.

John Cusack may be a douche for having supported Barack Obama in 2008 (join the celebrity douche-club on that one, right?), but I think his recent twitter antics are clearly meant to be taken tongue-in-cheek:

I AM FOR A SATANIC DEATH CULT CENTER AT FOX NEWS HQ AND OUTSIDE THE OFFICES ORDICK ARMEYAND NEWT GINGRICH-and all the GOP WELFARE FREAKS

The funniest part is how Fox News responds and is so obvious in their creative editorializing. I’ll bold things so you can see how they do it so beautifully:

He supported Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election and has contributed to The Huffington Post, but this is the first known time he has stooped to the level of making threats.

And while the U.S. Constitution protects Cusack’s right to speak his mind, some critics say he should be more careful about what he says, since he has more than 200,000 Twitter followers.[...]

[ED- an "expert" arrives!] Cusack could also be doing his career some damage. Image consultant Michael Sands says that Cusack should be worried that his vituperative words could turn off some of his fans.

“I think his fans will not appreciate his tone. They will be turned off to his rhetoric,” Sands told Fox411. “John Cusack is taking his fame too seriously. He is having delusions and his anger towards Fox News may get him arrested!”

I love how Fox News (and Jo Plazza, who some would say is a member of a Satanic Death Cult) starts off claiming that Cusack has all these free speech rights, works diligently to make him a dangerous person and ends with Cusack possibly facing arrest. All without actually… you know… saying anything unfair or unbalanced.

Originally posted at Hammeroftruth.com. Reprinted with permission.

FREE MP3 download: http://evamoon.net/bailout_song.html

Smooth, sultry and seductive are the words that come to mind listening to this little ditty that has a 60s lounge feel to it. Being as it is also relevant to my interests (money, I likes it), I am posting it here to share with you. Here’s how the artist describe themselves:

Can anything make the Wall Street bailout even slightly more palatable? Probably not. But Eva Moon mixes it up with a little funk and sex? Music and lyrics by Eva Moon. Ferko Saxmanov on sax, Tym Parsons bass and guitar.

(continue reading…)

Holy shit earsucker fans, incoming new music! If you’ve never heard of Kid Cudi then I am asking you to gently crawl out from your comfortable safety zone and have a go at this new track by new new king of Cleveland (even though he mostly lives in NYC now, if he’s ever in Cleveland he on the top of our list of local people I’d like to interview).

In Mojo So Dope, which has gloriously ended up leaking early from Cudi’s upcoming album (which is still untitled AFAIK Man On The Moon II is it?), the synthesized hip-hop feel that is Cudi’s trademark are ever present, but I’m really digging the almost minimalist, monotone approach that Cudi will take from time to time with his rapping.

Lyrics in the post (continue reading…)

Yes, that Rush, Tom Sawyer Rush you knuckleheads. Check out these totally stolen (or “stolen” *cough* intentionally leaked *cough*) and posted on YouTube and found by EarSucker songs before they get yanked offline. The music is catchy, relatively straightforward by this trio’s standards, which means Geddy Lee is still, most likely, doing seventeen different things at once on bass, keyboards and foot pedals. (continue reading…)

When most people think of football stadiums (soccer, for you Americans), they tend to associate them with chanting, singing and a social experience where one is cast into a sea of revelers emanating one voice. However, the South African hosted FIFA World cup seems to have been devoid of this kind of sound-making due to another kind of sound-maker: the vuvuzela.

For anyone who happened to watch the historic 1-1 tie match between the U.K. England and the U.S. yesterday, you will no doubt understand how a stadium can be transformed from chanting, to a hive of angry bees (trust me, there’s no better description of the sound these things make).

But now, a ban is under consideration by the event organizers according to The Guardian:

“We’ve had some broadcasters and individuals [complaining] and it’s something we are evaluating on an on-going basis.”

The BBC and ITV have received complaints from viewers about the background noise and, while both have said they will monitor the situation, they have also made the point that it is important to reflect the atmosphere of the tournament.

Fifa has previously shrugged off complaints from broadcasters, players and coaches about the noise from the plastic horns that are being sold on every street corner in South African host cities.

I hope they ban them, or at least the networks discover a trick to squelch them a bit (300MHz range) before broadcasting the games.

UPDATE: They said they would ban them if any were thrown onto the pitch (field). Someone, please… be a hero.

Man, what a horrible time for us to get a nasty DMCA notice. Apparently us sharing news of some Justin Beiber song was enough to get a nastygram from some lawyers, and being on vacation and not being able to receive these notices in a timely fashion was enough to have earsucker.com suspended.

Yeah, we know… sucks all around. Anyways, everything is back to being cool and again we’re past all that. As a quick reminder we will resume regular posting on Monday. Have an awesome weekend folks!

True story: I once saw Betty White when I worked at ***** hotel in Santa Monica back in 1995 or 1996. I was delivering a fax or some delivery to her room and she seemed really cool and it was awesome to meet a real life celebrity. Well, I was about to go, and out of nowhere she throws a bunch of quarters at me (for the tip). They bounced off me and rolled all over the hallway. I looked at her stunned, and she just smiles at me, little old Betty White, like nothing at all is weird about throwing quarters at the delivery boy. I ask her if everything is okay and she slams the door in my face. I picked up the quarters, but I felt really dirty for the rest of the day.

I’m just glad that she finally snapped on TV so everyone can see just how crazy she really is. (continue reading…)

I just wanted to share this wonderful (and then abruptly disturbing) Lonely Island/SNL Short: Boombox with the boiled goose afficionados of the internet. (continue reading…)

Happy St. Patty’s day boys and girls! One of the perks of running your own blog-o-site intarweb thing like my girlfriend and I here at EarSucker do is that we can enjoy the drinking holidays by actually going out and listening to all that awesome Irish music in person while getting drunk to boot. We’ll share our drunken stories if you share yours…

But right now, I really need some Irish music suggestions from you guys and gals in the comments to get the pre-bar festivities going here, so if you know of any Irish punk, rap, rock, indie or whetever you can think of, post that shit in the comments! (continue reading…)

I just love this video by Foxy Shazam!, and think they sound a lot like the ballads of Queen mashed with the more mellow Aerosmith guitar journeys with maybe a little of that Anthony Keidis funk for good measure. Take a listen for yourself after the jump. (continue reading…)

I honestly thought I posted this here before, but I guess this will be the first time, my bad. I saw Kid Cudi’s “party video” version for his new song Pursuit of Happiness about a week ago and it struck me as a very cerebral subject that breaks away from the hip-hop pack in a very refreshing way. And now I learned that he made an alternate video version of the same song and to be honest, this one is so much better. I’ve embedded both here with my thoughts, enjoy! (continue reading…)