Photo by Kathryn YuBaby mama and Hova's witness M.I.A. is very much back from her sabbatical and rearing to hit us with new music. Her Blaqstarr-boosted cover of Tom Waits classic/"The Wire" theme song "Way Down in the Hole" surfaced earlier this month, and now it appears she has some new tunage in Trainspotting/28 Days Later... director Danny B...

It tends to be a pretty good time when The Smoking Gun unearths these rocker tour riders. Mostly because we get to laugh at musicians' uncensored, exorbitant, diva-like demands and feel pretty good that we're nowhere near that silly as we wash down Cheetos with swigs of our Big Gulps at our sweet cubicles in offices where people never remember o...

In what's become an annual holiday tradition, the folks at France's Lacoste invite a non-designer to mock up a spin on the company's iconic polo shirt (you know, with the crocodile). This year, R.E.M. frontguy Michael Stipe became the third to take on the sartorial task, creating a shirt that hinges on, as the product description puts it, "a mon...

Here's your October Surprise, only a week or so late. Somewhere in the vast desert, Los Angeles duo Rainbow Arabia are training for battle on a makeshift assortment of Mideast-minded musical weaponry (some of it no doubt left over from the Soviets). Their war cry, however, is "Let Them Dance", so it's a good thing we won't have President Bush ar...

When she talked to Jessica Suarez about what was up a couple of weeks ago. M.I.A. told us that this was coming, a version of Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole", the track from Frank's Wild Years since known in myriad versions as the theme from "The Wire", made with Baltimore's Blaqstarr. She changes it up quite a bit here, however, making it her ...