Ever since Jay-Z called off his retirement to get back into the rap game, he has been teasing the idea of doing a threequel to The Blueprint, and even after he announced that he was working on tracks for the album with Kanye West, it still didn't feel real. But now that the release date is closing in, the inevitability of Jigga's second follow-up to his instant classic The Blueprint actually coming out is becoming thrilling. And it's only getting more real: Today, Hova put the album cover up on the front page of his Web site.

It's one of the rapper's more inventive covers, eschewing an image of himself for a piece of conceptual art that features a bunch of instruments (including keyboards, saxophones and French horns) with an overlay of three red bars. Those bars appear again in the top corner of the cover, suggesting that it is going to be some sort of logo for the album.

Jay-Z's The Blueprint 3 is set for a release on September 11, eight years to the day after the drop of the original Blueprint. The album will be primarily be produced by Kanye West (whose production style really shone brightly on the first Blueprint and turned him into the most in-demand producer in the hip-hop world) and will feature the already-huge tracks "D.O.A. (Death of Autotune)" and "Run This Town." Also along for the ride are producer No I.D., West protég&233; Mr. Hudson and Brooklyn indie rockers MGMT. Jigga also had himself a triumphant weekend filling in for the Beastie Boys in a headlining slot at the All Points West festival in New Jersey, where he paid tribute to Adam "MCA" Yauch (whose cancer diagnosis derailed their appearance at the fest) and blew through a few Blueprint 3 tunes.

If I've ever had a complaint about Beck, it's that the guy is not nearly as prolific as he should be. I've always imagined that there are rooms full of songs that he has never shared with us that are every bit as good as the stuff he has officially released. But that all could change. His official site will be undergoing an overhaul over the next month, and when it relaunches it will have a new section called "Record Club."

According to his peeps, whenever one of the Beck's musically inclined friends is in Los Angeles and has a bit of free time (some of the names that are dropped in the press release include Devendra Banhart, MGMT, Jamie Lidell and producer Nigel Godrich), they've been invited to drop into his home studio to record an entire classic album in one day, with no rehearsals or arrangements ahead of time.

"Record Club will be an ongoing experiment visitors to the site will be able to follow from week to week," read the release announcing the Club. "Due to the time constraints involved in recording a record in a day, an album will be chosen to be covered and used as a framework for the proceedings." The first experiment will be the 1967 classic The Velvet Underground & Nico. No announcement has been made yet about when fans will start hearing the results, but according to plans, one track per week will be uploaded once the site relaunches.

Here's hoping that Beck and his pals decide to delve into Funkadelic's 1971 classic Maggot Brain, the Rolling Stones' twisted 1967 mindwarp Their Satanic Majesties Request, *NSYNC's No Strings Attached (just for the challenge) and Metallica's black album (with Banhart on vocals, of course). What classics do you hope Beck and his buds put down on wax?

I had heard the stories — you don’t wanna interview MGMT, they’re sorta jerks, they’ll cackle at your questions, ice you with their hipster glares. So, understandably, when I was penciled in to talk with guys backstage at Lollapalooza, I was a little on edge.

But, as it turns out, those stories couldn’t be further from the truth. The duo — Andrew vanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser — have certainly made the festival rounds this summer, and they’d heard all manner of stupid questions, but they were actually super nice, in a sort of glazed, Haight Ashbury kind of
way.

Watch the video after the jump!
Read more...

Ah, fortunes continues to smile upon those playing world music for the indie set.

Hot off the heels of a gorgeous contribution on Stereogum's tribute to Bjork's Post, Brooklyn-based Dirty Projectors have stayed super-busy as of late.

Wait! Still don't know who we're talking about? Alongside MGMT, Yeasayer, and Vampire Weekend, they're one of the many bands we focused on earlier this year making waves from across the water. (Check out the clip below.)

And things are looking up for the Dirty P's -- apparently, the band has just signed to Domino Records and is currently working on not just one, but two albums. One's for Domino, and the other's their final release for their Dead Oceans label. The latter, according to their PR peeps, will be ""an album expanding upon and inspired by the arrangements of Rise Above," their critically acclaimed 2007 album. But don’t get too worked up yet: it won't drop until fall of 2009.

MTV News shooter (and math rock aficionado) Brendan Kennedy had a heartfelt reaction to this week's "Gossip Girl" season premiere -- and it was a reaction full of haterade. You see, Brendan has discovered a British series that he's convinced is far superior. Perhaps, even, the greatest small-screen drama of all time...

Let me explain something to you: There is no stopping "Skins."

Except that you can't watch it unless you've got some international television scam cooked up with PAL, region-free DVDs, or the Internet. Because it's English, and super-racy. Maybe that's why it's so good. Maybe it's the chase, the hunt, and the love of the exotic.

A born New Yorker, I can honestly say I never wished I was a crazy-rich teenager fighting for my life through the newest fashions, like on "Gossip Girl." Then again, my first girlfriend did go to Brearley [Ed: Classic UES all-girls private school.], so that totally makes me the Brooklyn boy who struck it high-class. See also the movie Metropolitan.

However, I was and still am a crazy Anglophile, with the region-free DVD player to prove it. And as an Anglophile, I spent my high school years dreaming of all things punk, pop, and pulp about English tween life. And "Skins" -- maybe my favorite show ever -- is all that, everything I wanted my teenage life to be, even down to the amazing music supervision. I mean, The Magnetic Fields, MGMT, and The Teenagers in one series -- along with much better clothes, and smarter plot points. [Ed: You wish, Kennedy!]

"Gossip Girl" might be able to use The Teenagers in their soundtrack (as in the season premiere) and "OMFG" as their ads, but the show doesn't even come close to what "Skins" does for little me's wishing life could be just that much sleeker, sexier, and stylized.

Yeah, wow.

Brendan

P.S. I'm such a nerd, the show open is my ringtone.

The "Skins" trailer after the jump. Read more...

MTV News producer Elena Torres reports on her experience getting roped into MGMT's "Electric Feels" video in New York:

The last thing I expected two months ago, while I was blasting MGMT in my car with my two best friends, was that we'd spend this weekend in full costume and makeup on the set of their new video.

That day in LA traffic, my friends Abby and Rafael confessed that they had starred in an amateur version of MGMT’s "Kids" video. Being two film-production students, they are strictly behind-the-camera people, not actors, and were pretty embarrassed about the whole thing. They explained how John Salmon, a fellow student from their music video class needed two people to be in his final project at the last minute, and how they reluctantly agreed under the condition that they could wear full makeup and not be recognized.

John later posted the video online, behind their backs, and his final project became an Internet sensation, now with nearly 275,000 hits. Somewhere in that mix, the director of MGMT’s next video saw Abby and Rafael and gave them a call asking them to be in the official thing.

Which brings me to this weekend. I couldn’t pass up this opportunity and decided to be a groupie and fly out to New York to check out the shoot. (Snapshots and more, after the jump.) Read more...

So I am sitting here at my always cluttered desk and on it, oddly and appropriately sitting next to one another, are “Peace: The Biography of a Symbol” (a book marking the 50th anniversary of the peace symbol), and a press release from Columbia Records touting the fact that their breakout band MGMT will be playing the Big Three US festivals this summer: Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Lollapalooza. Plus, in June, they’ll play Glastonbury and open for a little band by the name of Radiohead. But I digress. Back to the peace symbol book being next to MGMT --

"Hippie" is, I think, a much-maligned and none-too-fashionable word -- one that probably has never applied to me, but I wouldn't mind if it were. And it’s a term that's been thrown liberally about in describing Ben and Andrew of MGMT, as well as folks like their erstwhile tourmates Yeasayer. (Ohio punk band Psychedelic Horses--- even dedicated a not-so-flattering song to Yeasayer called "New Wave Hippies." But more on that indie beef another time...)

Now, certainly there are psychedelic elements to MGMT, and certainly they have politically lefty roots (Wesleyan U, plus Andrew’s dad Bruce VanWyngarden is the editor of Memphis alt paper The Memphis Flyer). The press release calls MGMT "mind-bending" and "futurist" -– OK, but what about the "h" word?

How does the band feel about the term? Find out after the jump. Read more...

Hi, New York Times. Do you remember when we did that story a couple of months ago on how great it was to be artsy and living cheap and starting a band in Brooklyn?

Sure you do.

No, just joshin' (or as we like to say here, just Josh Horowitzin'). We love the New York Times. And we love that some amazing bands in our backyard are getting some big-time love (seriously, if you're reading this and want to have your mind blow, please buy you some Yeasayer).

Also, watch this: