Slash Speaks After Hollywood Walk of Fame Dedication

 

Slash was honored yesterday with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Coming just three months after his induction with Guns N' Roses into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it makes for quite a year – tributes that would cap many a rocker's career. But Slash, who turns 47 this month, is feeling quite the opposite.

"I definitely feel like I'm cresting a certain wave in my career where I'm having a really great time, I love what I'm doing, I love the people I'm working with and I'm feeling very energized," he told Rolling Stone after the star ceremony. "I haven't had that feeling since when Guns started."

He's feeling so motivated, he and his current band, featuring Myles Kennedy on vocals, are already looking ahead. "We've got the tour that's gonna go into next year, we're starting work on the next record," Slash says. It will be with the same band with which he made the current Apocalyptic Love album.

"It's kind of a Cinderella story," he said. "I had no idea this was going to be a band I was going to do things with – I thought it was a pickup band. It turned out to be really, from the get-go, this kickass band, and now it's more like a group."

Academy of Country Music donates $2.5 million to Country Music Hall of Fame

Southern California-based Academy of Country Music will donate $2.5 million to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum to open a new gallery showcasing trends in modern country music, the two organizations confirmed to "The Tennessean" on Tuesday.

The contribution will help underwrite a new “ACM Contemporary Gallery” at the downtown museum.

The pledge brings to $70 million the total in cash and pledges collected since last summer for the museum’s expansion plans. Those include doubling the size of the 140,000-square-foot museum by 2014 and integrating it into a wide downtown campus that encompasses the still-under-construction Music City Center, Omni Nashville Hotel and a hoped-for proliferation of restaurants and retail shops.

The Academy’s gift follows May’s announcement from artist Taylor Swift of a $4 million pledge to underwrite a 7,500-square-foot Taylor Swift Education Center. It will have two floors, three classrooms and a children’s exhibit gallery.

In December, the Country Music Association announced it had pledged $10 million to help underwrite an 800-seat CMA Theater.

The ACM Contemporary Gallery will consist of 5,000 square feet of exhibition space, located on the museum’s second floor. It will be a flexible space, continually updated, museum officials said.

Museum director Kyle Young said establishing a gallery devoted to contemporary country in a museum dedicated to the history of the American music form is key to charting the constant changes in the genre.
“The music is dynamic,” Young said. “It’s always changing. Maintaining relevance is really important to us. I think the general feeling out there are that museums are old and dusty. We want to tell the story as it develops.”

The Academy of Country Music is the West Coast outpost of country music. It was established in 1964 and hosts the longest-running country music show, the ACM Awards, broadcast from Las Vegas. The show earns the academy about $750,000 per year in ticket revenues, in addition to TV licensing fees and corporate sponsorships.

Blare LeVoir- "Broken"- Music Video

Diamond Jubilee: Music stars celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's reign

 

 

  lton John sang "I'm Still Standing," Stevie Wonder crooned "Isn't She Lovely," and Paul McCartney sent "All My Loving" as musical royalty celebrated Queen Elizabeth II's 60-year reign with a concert outside Buckingham Palace on Monday. But the joy was tempered by news that the queen's husband, Prince Philip, had been hospitalized with a bladder infection.

Palace officials said the prince, who will turn 91 on Saturday, was taken to the King Edward VII Hospital in London from Windsor Castle on Monday as a precaution and will remain under observation for a few days.

As the Diamond Jubilee show ended, Prince Charles took the stage and encouraged concertgoers to make some noise for his father. The crowd responded with a roar and chants of "Philip."

The heir to the throne paid tribute to his mother, addressing her as "Your Majesty — Mummy" and leading the crowd in three cheers for the monarch.

Despite Philip's illness, many members of the royal family, including Charles, his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and Princes William and Harry sat in a royal box to watch the show, performed on a specially erected stage outside the palace.

The queen was cheered as she arrived partway through the show, wearing a gold lame cocktail dress under a dark cape. It was decided before Philip's illness that she would watch only part of the concert.

The queen is not a noted pop music fan, and appeared to be wearing yellow ear plugs as she observed the concert.

Some 12,000 contest winners watched the show from an enclosed area, while a huge crowd stretched down the Mall, the wide boulevard leading up to the palace.

Lea Michele Gets Tattooed

Her Glee alter ego doesn't get much edgier than a Madonna dance routine, but off camera, Lea Michele's inner bad girl makes an outward appearance – 14 times.

The actress, who plays Rachel Berry on the Fox series (whose finale season airs Tuesday night), flaunts more than a dozen tattoos and says her ink addiction runs in the family.

"I come from a very big Italian family, and tattoos are very popular," Michele, 25, said on Monday's Late Show with David Letterman. "We'll be like, 'Let's all get tattoos.' "

She added: "Then we get super sentimental, and then the next day I wake up with, like, another butterfly on my foot. And I'm like, it seemed more important in the moment."

Their latest outing? Easter, said the Broadway-turned-TV star, whose skin decor includes a bird on her hip and a butterfly – a nod to her 2006 role in Spring Awakening – on her right foot.

"Some people go hunting for eggs," she told Letterman. "We go get tattoos."

So will Michele take a family outing to the tattoo parlor to commemorate her character's pending graduation on Glee?

"All my secret hidden spots are done," said Michele, who was spotted smooching costar Cory Monteith last week. "My real estate is over."

Is Britney Spears "Coming Undone" on the X Factor Set?

 

Quick, hide the umbrellas and electric razors, because we may be time-warping back to 2008.

A source told Us Weekly Britney Spears may be heading for another public meltdown after her rocky start as a judge on The X Factor.

"She gets extremely nervous and anxious," an insider says of the 30-year-old. "She's hard on herself and not very confident."
Spears' engagement to Jason Trawick may also be an added pressure. "For her, it's all an input as stress," the source explained. "This is a lot of change at once for Britney. She's coming undone."

But not everyone thinks Spears is heading towards another downward spiral. "Jason and Britney's family wouldn't let her do X Factor if she couldn't handle it," a second source told Us Weekly. "At first they weren't going to let her because she couldn't do live TV -- they didn't know what she would say. But they went over it with Britney, and they trust her."

X Factor creator and fellow judge, Simon Cowell, doesn’t seem concerned about Spears, either. Just last week, he dismissed rumours that Spears had walked off the set on her first day.

"There was no walking off," Cowell told E! News. "We have breaks every five or six songs. You can go have a cigarette, you can go to the loo. So as soon as anyone left their chairs, it was reported... that someone had left the show – and they hadn't!"

Despite the breakdown murmurs, Spears "wants to do a good job," the second source told Us Weekly.

"There is always apprehension about something you haven't done before, but she's looking forward to proving all the doubters wrong."

Drake's Deal With The Weeknd 'Being Worked Out'

The Weeknd has a ton of fans, but Drake may be the biggest fan of them all. Of course, there is some bias: Drizzy embraced the Toronto singer last year and has since worked with him on fan favorites like "Crew Love," "The Ride" and "The Zone."

The two have even brought their respective OVO and XO cliques together to form OVOXO. So what's the real deal with Drake and the Weeknd?

"As far as on paper, it's all being worked out, but that's not really what counts anyway. What counts to me is the fact that the affiliation is so known, and that's all I really care about," Drake told MTV News correspondent Sway Calloway during his May 17 tour stop in Houston.