Around fifteen minutes ago your trusty Rolling Stone bloggers received their downloadable versions of Radiohead’s seventh studio LP, In Rainbows. While we gather our thoughts (and clean up that keyboard drool), feel free to post your first impressions in the comments. We can’t help thinking the band dropped this sucker on us at 1:30 AM on purpose …

Rolling Stone’s 2008 Hot Issue spotlights acts like Band of Horses and Vampire Weekend (more on that here). For the next week, we’ll be taking a look at Hot Issue hits and misses from the past twenty-one years (because nobody’s cultural thermometer is accurate all the time).

Hit: In 2002, just before the release of A Rush of Blood to the Head, Rolling Stone caught up with Coldplay as they toured small clubs for perhaps the last time, and named the group Hot Band. It was a pretty accurate assessment. Rush went platinum four times; its follow-up, X&Y, sold more than two million copies. Perhaps fueled by his Hot List status, Chris Martin went on to wed Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Rolling Stone’s Hot Actress of 1994, in 2003.

Miss: It was the year of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Pearl Jam’s Ten. Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. So many bands to choose from, yet we chose Chicago rockers Enuff Z’Nuff as “The Hot Band” of 1991. Maybe it was their faux-GN’R spirit that blinded us. In the end, the music of Pearl Jam and Nirvana resonated throughout the Nineties, while the only evidence of Enuff Z’Nuff’s existence, outside of that Hot Issue, is their cover of “Happy Holiday” that appears on the Monster Ballads X-Mas promo we just got in the mail.

Click above to watch the trailer for Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary Runnin’ Down a Dream, which tells the story of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ thirty-year journey and explores Petty’s own wanderings as a member of Traveling Wilburys and a solo performer. The film — which features testimonials from Eddie Vedder, Rick Rubin, Stevie Nicks, Johnny Depp and Dave Grohl, and footage of Petty playing alongside Bob Dylan, Vedder and many other artists — will screen October 14th at the 2007 New York Film Festival and in select cities the following day, and will then air on Sundance October 29th. A deluxe DVD release will hit Best Buy stores on the 16th.

Related Stories:

• Tom Petty Speaks: Profile, Playlist and More

• Tom Petty Makes George W. Bush Back Down
• Tom Petty’s Last Dance
  

Click above to check out Christian Hoard’s analysis of Kid Rock’s straight-up Rock N Roll Jesus (which Rock once described to Hoard as the equivalent of going to a bar and getting shit-faced, then discovering a gospel choir there), and tuneful indie-rock act Band of Horses, whose guitar-heavy, beautiful Cease to Begin helped them earn the title of Hot Band in the current Hot Issue.

Read the review for Kid Rock’s Rock N Roll Jesus here and Band of Horses’ Cease to Begin here.

>>Watch every episode of our weekly New Music Tuesdays video podcast by subscribing via iTunes (when prompted, click “Launch application”). Every Tuesday, a new episode will be delivered to your iTunes. [If you don’t have iTunes, download it here.]

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is turning sixty, and to celebrate, the Hillary 60th Birthday Committee is inviting 2,800 of her closest friends (err, supporters) to enjoy a concert by Elvis Costello at New York’s Beacon Theater this Thursday night — which is totally like when Pitbull entertained at Priscilla’s bday bash on My Super Sweet 16 … or not. For the pocket-change price of $2,300, you too can purchase “Rock Star” tickets, which allow you to sit in the Premium Orchestra section where, we’re assuming, you’ll sway and maybe brush elbows with “important people.” For $1,000, the “Platinum” package, you’ll get orchestra seats, which should provide a good view of Costello and the back of the former president’s silvery mane. For anyone who just wants to see Elvis, especially Republican Costello fans, $250 buys nosebleed balcony seats. Before we start throwing down our hard earned money on another campaign trail though, we want assurances that Costello will play some or all of these RS hand-picked songs for the Clintons:

“Sneaky Feelings”
“Pay It Back”
“No Action”
“(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea”
“Accidents Will Happen”
“Busy Bodies”
“You’ll Never Be A Man” (more…)

As we told you in the Maroon 5 issue of Rolling Stone, the first-ever exhibit of Bob Dylan’s original paintings will open at the Kunstsammlungen art museum in Chemnitz, Germany, on October 28th. Museum director Ingrid Mössinger first came across Dylan’s paintings in his 1994 book, Drawn Blank, which contains the singer’s sketches made between 1989 and 1992. “I was fascinated to learn of Ingrid’s interest in my work,” Dylan said in a statement. “It gave me the impetus to realize the vision I had for these paintings many years ago. If not for this interest, I don’t know if I even would have revisited them.” The exhibit runs through February 3rd. Check out another painting after the jump: (more…)

• Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé and Linkin Park grabbed three nods apiece for this year’s American Music Awards, to be held November 18th at the Nokia Theatre in L.A. JT and LP will compete against Daughtry for the show’s coveted plastic trophy in the Favorite Pop/Rock album category. Jimmy Kimmel will serve as host as for the fourth consecutive year, while Daughtry, Fergie and Rihanna are scheduled to perform.

• Moby has finished work on his new album, Late Night. The record, which is “more electronic and dance-oriented” than 2005’s Hotel, is scheduled to be released sometime in spring 2008.

• N.W.A’s genre-forming Straight Outta Compton will be reissued as an expanded album December 4th to mark its almost-twentieth anniversary. Bonus tracks include Snoop Dogg and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony covering tracks from the record.

• Counting Crows’ new album Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, which we recently Fall Previewed, has been pushed back from November to January.

• Details concerning animal-cruelty allegations against rapper DMX have been released. The specifics are too graphic for us to even type. DMX still doesn’t face any exact charges, but if the reports are correct, we predict he and Michael Vick might be sharing a jail cell in the near future.

Rock Daily enjoyed the trials and tribulations of Poison frontman Bret Michaels’ VH1 dating show Rock of Love so much, we’re sure we’ll dig it even more when it all goes down again. Next season. Look what happens when you earn a network’s highest ratings and your new galpal ditches you at the reunion show! Michaels will return for a second run at romance with a crew of boob-enhanced, tattooed rock-star girlfriends-in-the-making. (The casting announcement had described a “Tommy Lee type of rocker.” We guess Bret fits the bill … kind of.) Let the recapping begin again!

Related Stories:

• Bret Michaels Ends His Search for a Rock-Star Girlfriend on Final Episode of “Rock of Love”: Bonus Rock Reality Show Recap
• Rock Reality Show Recap: Bret Michaels Meets the Parents on an Explosive “Rock of Love”
• Rock Reality Show Recap: Bret Michaels’ Girls Rock Till They Puke on “Rock of Love”

When Radiohead first revealed to fans nine days ago that they’d be releasing a downloadable new album, In Rainbows, October 10th seemed like eons away. Thankfully, all the speculating about the album and how it would impact the music industry (Exhibit A) helped pass the time and, before we knew it, we looked in our e-mail inbox today to find this preemptive email from the band:

THANK YOU FOR ORDERING IN RAINBOWS. THIS IS AN UPDATE.

YOUR UNIQUE ACTIVATION CODE(S) WILL BE SENT OUT TOMORROW MORNING (UK TIME). THIS WILL TAKE YOU STRAIGHT TO THE DOWNLOAD AREA.

HERE IS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE DOWNLOAD:

THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.

DRM-free, so you can burn as many CDs and send it to as many friends as you want. But tomorrow morning (U.K. time)? Do they mean 10 AM (5 AM in NY) or 5 AM (midnight in NY)? Tell us, Thom! For those who are unable to download In Rainbows during this ambiguous time called “morning,” London radio station XFM will be “premiering” the new album at Noon U.K. time, or 7 AM EST. You can listen to it then via their Web site (you must have Windows Media, sorry Mac users.) Until then, check out our track-by-track preview of In Rainbows. And don’t actually salivate on your keyboard — Rolling Stone’s Joe Levy warned us about that before. Think we’re psyched about this album? Come back tomorrow, when we’ll be live-blogging our first listen to it … whatever time we actually figure out how to nab it.
Related Stories:

• Radiohead’s In Rainbows: Track-By-Track Preview
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In less than a week, Genesis will wrap up their first American tour in fifteen years. In honor of the event, the band published Genesis: Chapter & Verse, an exhaustive oral history featuring interviews with everyone to ever play in the group’s revolving-door lineup. Ever wanted to learn more about John Mayhew, the group’s third drummer who lasted from 1969-1970? They tracked him down and gave him two pages to tell his story. Click here to view a gallery of previously unseen photos from the book.

Engineering New Orleans
Born in a city where music and food are not just staples but religions, the legendary New Orleans engineer Cosimo Matassa founded his first studio in the closest thing to a church minus the Mass: his family’s French Quarter grocery. By the time of the 1951 singles by Smiley Lewis and Dave Bartholomew that open the British-import box The Cosimo Matassa Story (Proper), Matassa was churning out heaven on a daily basis, with a self-taught expertise for getting perfect takes under near-party conditions. Over the six years and 120 tracks here, Matassa engineered virtually every great local R&B and early rock & roll session, from seminal dates by Fats Domino and Little Richard to swinging footnotes by Ernest Kador (the future Ernie K-Doe) and Art Neville, later of the Meters. Matassa, now eighty-one, retired from music in the Eighties, returning to the food business. But you can live on this cuisine indefinitely.

A Hüsker’s Return
When Minneapolis punks Hüsker Dü broke up in 1988, guitarist Bob Mould and drummer Grant Hart went solo. Bassist Greg Norton quit music, becoming a chef. The Gang Font is his first band in two decades (founded with drummer Dave King of power-jazz trio the Bad Plus), and they are as hardcore as the Hüskers in their instrumental frenzy. The Gang Font Feat. Interloper (Thirsty Ear) was cut in a day, and the enthusiastic haste shows in the Font’s knot-rock zoom and free-form blowouts.

Live Hawkwind Ritual
In 1972, British stargazers Hawkwind threw the bread from their U.K. hit “Silver Machine” into a multimedia road show and lavish live album, Space Ritual (EMI). Thirty-five years later, Hawkwind’s spaced howl and vicious terra firma drive on this two-CD reissue – with a pre-Mötorhead Lemmy on bass and a bonus DVD of the original stage freakout – still make most current inner-space rock sound like prep-school drone.

In the current issue of Rolling Stone, free-spirit folkie Devendra Banhart details his run-ins with Lindsay Lohan and first experiences with breasts (they were on a hermaphrodite). Click below to listen in to select parts of his interview with Christian Hoard, where he chats about his bizarre collection of rock memorabilia and collaborations with a Stroke.

• Used goods from Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Whoopi Goldberg, Sammy Hagar — Banhart is stockpiling them all:
  

• Banhart became pals with actor Gael Garcia Bernal after discovering they had something unusual in common:
  

• On what happened to his recording of the Strokes’ Nick Valensi crooning the line “I’ve bribed the whore of babylon to lend me her waterbed”:
  

  [Photograph by Max Vadukul]

Every Tuesday Single Minded highlights new tracks hitting stores (or the Web) this week. On Fridays, come back for rarities, remixes, mash-ups and more.

Kid Rock, Rock N Roll Jesus [Full Album Stream]
All of this album’s lubricated pipe-laying sex-talk is completely subverted by the fact that it’s streaming in its entirety at VH1. That’s like The Pick-Up Artist having to work the Thursday night shift at Coldstone Creamery.

Band of Horses, “Is There a Ghost” [MySpace]
This Seattle group’s latest is called Cease to Begin, proving Kid Rock doesn’t have the market cornered on ridiculous album titles. Two words for BOH: Bob Eucharist. Take it. At the rate we’re going, we’re never going to get to use it ourselves.

Jens Lekman, “The Opposite of Hallelujah” [Secretly Canadian]
The title is a tease, so we’ll just tell you: it’s Gogurt. The opposite of hallelujah is Gogurt.

LeAnn Rimes, Family [Full Album Stream]
She’s nobody’s baby now: Rimes latest rolls out young runaways, white-trash whores and philandering dads before the (surprisingly gritty) title track winds down. It’s LeAnnRimes: SVU. And you naysayers, don’t complain — you almost got a track from the Josh Groban Christmas album.

Vanessa Carlton, “Nolita Fairytale” [Video]
Carlton’s new video opens exactly like her 2002 breakthrough “A Thousand Miles” — until a taxi smashes her piano and we’re dragged (kicking & screaming!) through a tuneless meta-narrative that deconstructs Carlton’s turbulent (we guess?) five-year career. Hey, call us old-fashioned, but we’ll take her 2004 “Silent All These Years” re-write “White Houses” over this Derrida fever-dream any day.

[Photo: Butterfield/Getty]

On Friday night, Jay-Z invited a handful of journalists up to Roc the Mike Studios in Manhattan to hear tracks from American Gangster, his new album that’s due out November 6th. Hova recorded the disc in a fit of inspiration over two weeks, after seeing the forthcoming movie of the same name, which stars Denzel Washington as legendary Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas. “I pulled the emotion of the album from the film,” Jay said, explaining that the movie helped him recall his own experiences as a drug dealer in Brooklyn. “I never thought I’d be able to get back in that zone, to be able to relive some of those emotions.”

Over several hours in the studio, the legendary MC and CEO of Def Jam Records played the album and explained his creative process while the film ran in a constant loop on a plasma screen, as it has during the whole recording process. Jay also opened up about his feelings on the Don Imus controversy, the current state of hip-hop and the recent 50 Cent-Kanye showdown. Before it was all over, Jay was toasting “L’Chaim,” to round after round of Patron shots, as guests including Beyoncé stopped by to check up on the proceedings.

The album follows an arc that echoes aspects of the film and also Jay’s life. Opener “Pray” describes a young boy in school who sees that the girls love the drug dealers, and that the cops look the other way — police corruption is a major theme of the film — and decides to follow their examples. “I’m goin’ in, so pray for me,” says Jay. “Pray” is one of six tracks produced by Diddy and his legendary team the Hitmen, who, coincidentally, had already been working on several songs inspired by Seventies blaxploitation films. “It fit the time period and everything,” said Jay, who adds that other producers, including Just Blaze, Jermaine Dupri, and the Neptunes work around Diddy’s soul-sampling template. (more…)