MTV.com reported that Rage Against the Machine's two Los Angeles shows on Tuesday (9/12) and Wednesday (9/13) will be recorded for a live album.

Riffage.com will webcast live concerts at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Imperial Teen will headline on Sept. 15, and Man or Astro-Man will headline on Sept. 16. The concerts are part of the ChangeMusic music conference.

Allstar reported that Marc Anthony has canceled his appearance at the Latin Grammys, claiming that he must tend to his pregnant wife. MTV.com reported that Ricky Martin and Carlos Santana will appear.

MP3.com says that its My.MP3.com service will soon be back in business, Sonicnet reported. MP3.com made distribution deals with Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, Warner Music Group and BMG Entertainment, but not with Universal Music Group, which recently won a copyright infringement judgement against MP3.com. That means that a My.MP3.com user can store music from one of the other four labels, but not from Universal.

Have you received one of these e-mail advertisements?

"There is a California Hiphop artist that stands to make millions from lyrics we believe have gone to far.

Boycott the following site: [The link takes you to an MP3.com page.]

Please dont buy his CD.

Thank You Please send this letter to 10 friends.

This letter will be sent one time only."

Styx [ tickets ] and REO Speedwagon will release a joint double album titled "Arch Allies--Live at Riverport," recorded during the bands' 1999 tour.

Johnny Cash [ tickets ]'s album "Solitary Man" is due on CD on Oct. 17, and on vinyl sometime in late September. Produced by Rick Rubin, who produced Cash's last two albums, the album features songs by Neil Diamond and Nick Cave & Mick Harvey, as well as songs by Cash himself.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman "warned they would seek new federal authority to regulate the marketing of violent entertainment to young people if Hollywood, the recording industry and video-game manufacturers did not voluntarily do so themselves."

The Democrats, of course, are always looking for a way to preach against moral decay and still remain Democrats. And there you go: regulation. You can't say you want to regulate content without appearing to be against freedom of expression, but saying you want to regulate marketing is just murky enough to obscure most attempts at criticism.

Gore has a particularly nifty bit of rhetorical magic:

The FTC can regulate against "false and deceptive advertising." So Gore, speaking at an Illinois elementary school, says "If [entertainment companies] are saying to parents in one breath, 'We're going to work with you, we're going to protect children,' and then behind the scenes they're advertising directly to children to attract them to the material they're not ready to handle, that is false and deceptive as an advertising strategy [italics ours]." So either Gore is stupid enough to think that he and Lieberman can actually regulate marketing, or the whole thing is just another stepping stone toward Nov. 7, to be forgotten on Nov. 8.

Meanwhile, Bush still sounds like a high school student trying to improvise his way through a speech tournament, and the culture still sucks.

On the other hand: Johnny Cash covering Nick Cave. How bad can life be?

From staff reports, compiled by James Woster.