By Kathleen Newman-Bremang and Melanie Wolfson

Most interns fetch coffee, file papers and do other mindless tasks, but here at MTV News, we have to be up for just about anything. Today, that meant dancing in front of a green screen. That's right — we were asked (read: forced) to break it down "stanky leg"-style in order to bring Dallas dance moves to the masses.

We kicked off our shoes and jumped in front of the camera as part of a video that imitates dances from the Dallas scene. We're not sure which dance was more embarrassing: the "stanky leg" or the "Ricky Bobby." Both involve moves we never thought we'd be making when we came into work today.

We thought we'd share our experience, because it was just too ridiculous to keep to ourselves. Dancing around like you're in an iPod commercial sounds like fun, right? Try terrifying. Read more...

Our Saturday recap is up and bursting with raves about Jim James, Robyn and Kate Nash, but you can also check out more detailed accounts at the You R Here blog. What happened yesterday? Well...

· Comeback-making pop singer
Robyn wowed Perez Hilton's party with glitchy electro-beats and profane lyrics

· Young British songstress Kate Nash overcame marble floors and obnoxious concertgoers

· Jim James and M. Ward got reverent at an intimate concert held in a church

· The Night Marchers rocked in the daylight at Waterloo Park

· Grand Ole Party drummed up some new fans at the Mess With Texas fest

· Black Tide rolled into Red Seven with waves of hair and metal riffs

· Foxy Shazam bled onstage at Emo's and delivered a fabulously unsexy pole dance

We've been subjecting a variety of artists to our 5X5 @ SWSX interrogation down here in Austin this week, and one of the most interesting answers so far comes from Pharrell Williams. Not only did he say he thought he heard some accordion in Vampire Weekend's music, but he came up with his own label for the style that the band itself calls "Upper West Side Soweto." Take a look.

Read more...

Every year South by Southwest is like a big Lone Star and pulled-pork trough filled with bands to discover and write about. But it’s also the place where those of us who don’t live on a coast can go to find out what the hipsters are wearing and what we should start looking for at our local Salvation Army. Last year it was the throwback moon boot. The year before brought the onslaught of the painted-on boy jeans.

This year’s must-have accessory, for boys and girls? The headband. Whether it’s bejeweled, a bright orange, gold braid or just plain old sweat, the headband is what all the cool kids are rocking this year.

Check back with the Newsroom blog throughout SXSW for more highlights, and be sure to visit our sister blog You R Here for concert reviews, photos and more.

We’ve said it before, people, but it bears repeating. Along with your sound, the second most important thing any band has to do, maybe even more important than your sound in the beginning, is choose a name that’s either: a) instantly cool and/or intriguing (Nirvana, Radiohead) or so lame it’s back to being great again (Weezer, Panic at the Disco).

Clearly, many of the bands who played showcases Friday night at South by Southwest didn’t get this memo. Among them: Vancougar, Coconut Coolouts, the Show Is a Rainbow, Mittens on Strings, We Versus the Shark, Everlovely Lightningheart, Psychedelic Horses---, the Homosexuals, the Crash That Took Me, and Goat the Head.

Honorary mentions go to other bands playing the festival, including What Laura Says, Thinks and Feels, 43 Songs about 43 Presidencies, Songs for Moms, Til We’re Blue or Destroy, Ringo Deathstarr, Gorch Fock, Woodpigeon, Uh Huh Her, Death Sentence: Panda!, Collections of Colonies of Bees, I Was a Cub Scout, Does It Offend You, Yeah? and one of my favorites, DJ Pube$.

Then, there’s the names that guarantee that the band will probably never make it beyond SXSW, but we appreciate their creativity and we applaud their awesome, if scary, imaginations: A Thousand Knives of Fire, Dixie Witch, Tennessee Boltsmokers and Bible of the Devil.

Check back with the Newsroom blog throughout SXSW for more highlights, and be sure to visit our sister blog You R Here for concert reviews, photos and more.

There is a long-running joke in the industry about so-called "hip-hop time," which basically means that if you have an interview scheduled with a rapper, it will never, ever start on time.

So, not surprisingly, when MTV super-producer Andrew Millard and I arrived at the Austin Convention Center for our 12:45 chat with the legendary Ice Cube, who's headlining a showcase tonight, we knew we'd have some time to kill. After all, Cube is one of the guys who practically invented "hip-hop time" (and gangsta rap too). But little did we know that we'd be killing that time in a sparse "dressing room," which was little more than a giant bathroom with some potted plants thrown in for good measure.

So we waited. We rearranged the potted plants. We adjusted the camera. And then we readjusted it. Finally, at roughly 1:30 p.m., Cube himself strode into the room, laughed at a joke we made about the place looking like a florist's bathroom, threw on the microphone and got down to business.

We spoke about his politically charged new album, Raw Footage, about George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, and even about his experiences at South by Southwest (he checked out the Clipse and Kid Sister, and marveled "at some band that set up in a parking lot and started playing next to our car"). We also put him through our 5X5 @ SXSW questions:

We only got about 10 minutes before his publicist told us he had to go, but the wait was totally worth it. And as he left the room, he forgot to unhook his mic, and his motion sent the whole thing tumbling to the linoleum floor. Cube stopped, laughed for a second, and exited the room by saying, "Damn, that's the only mic I ever dropped. "

We told you the dude was a legend.

Check in with the Newsroom blog throughout SXSW for more highlights, and be sure to visit our sister blog You R Here for concert reviews, photos and more.

Our Friday recap is up and bursting with raves about Paramore, N.E.R.D. and Working for a Nuclear Free City, but you can also check out more detailed accounts at the You R Here blog. What happened yesterday? Well...

· The Clipse delivered a hit-packed performance that showed why they've won the love of the indie-rock kids

· N.E.R.D. whipped up a punk-funk frenzy that proved that Pharrell's as comfortable onstage as he is in the studio

· Paramore squashed rumors of a breakup and put on a high-energy show for a crowd of mostly local teenage scene kids

· Manchester's Working for a Nuclear Free City made a musical shake by putting hometown heroes Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses and Kasabian in a virtual blender

So it's Friday night in Austin, you're three days into a total indulgence of bands, booze and music. You've seen Yeasayer or some other hipster band four times already, you've memorized Santogold's set, you've had too much beer at the Blender magazine building, and some weird guy is trying to coax you to his friend's band's 2 a.m. performance with free burgers. It's the end of the night and you're just looking for something ... different.

Well, tonight was different. A free show by two great bands, No Age and F***** Up, on a pedestrian walkway bridge about two miles away from where the rest of SXSW is happening, at 3 a.m. (THREE A. M.!), under the cover of darkness. These are the things that happen when determined hipsters coagulate into a critical mass of creative thinking. Most of the kids made the trek by foot, rather than cab, thugging it out for short-but-sweet sets by the two bands, amongst a cavalcade of dedicated music-lovers not quite ready to call it a night. Sightlines were poor but the music was great. Mostly, we just love that something this ... illicit ... can still happen at such a major music festival in a big city. Above, a picture of the crowd (um, like we said, the sightlines were POOR).

If you’ve ever read any of my reports from multi-day festivals, such as August’s Lollapalooza, you know I hate hot weather. Like, really, really hate.

Well, luckily for us down here in Austin at South by Southwest, Friday brought record high temperatures in the low to mid-90s to the city and, well, frankly the only smell worse than Sixth Street at midnight halfway through the festival (think stale beer, sweat, a bit of upchuck and unwashed hipsters) is the hellish stench of thousands of dudes in skinny jeans, embroidered thrift store cowboy shirts and matted hair crushed into a venue with no air conditioning at 3 p.m. You’ll want to plead for a slow death, preferably one in which your olfactory senses are somehow disconnected.

So, while trying to walk from one shady sliver to another, I took some photos for an essay I like to call Cool/ Not Cool. I tried to find people who were appropriately dressed for the heat (thanks, Perry Farrell, for setting a good example in your black mesh sleeveless T-shirt; you too, guy in the white pants and panama hat).

Read more...

You’ll have to excuse the gentlemen in Seattle's Fleet Foxes for looking a bit confused when their Friday afternoon set at Emo’s was bum rushed by a pair of dudes from “Human Giant” wielding what looked like homemade T-shirt cannons. When Rob Huebel and Aziz Ansari rushed the stage before the set of pastoral freak folk from the recent Sub Pop signing (debut album due in June), they warned the crowd to watch out.

“We’re the T-shirt squad!” Huebel barked as he loaded his cannon.

“Cover her eyes … don’t sue us!” added Ansari as the members of the Foxes looked on with a mix of bemusement and perplexity.

Check back with the Newsroom blog throughout SXSW for more highlights, and be sure to visit our sister blog You R Here for concert reviews, photos and more.