THE LADIES CAN ROCK! + Rock Music News Headlines

On today's episode of the Rock it Out! Blog, we talk about Garbage releasing a new album, stream a new song from Evanescence, Portishead headlines All Tomorrows Parties, Florence + The Machine release a new video, Radiohead releasing a remix album, Decemberists releasing a new EP and new recordings of The Beatles.

Nirvana's Nevermind, By The Numbers

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the iconic album, we crunch the numbers to measure its huge impact.

Twenty years ago today (September 24), Nirvana released Nevermind, and the world hasn't been the same since.

The album would go on to usher in rock's great renaissance, cause a seismic shift in popular culture, bring the underground to the mainstream and make unwilling stars out of three rather scruffy guys from the Pacific Northwest (OK, so Dave Grohl was technically from Northern Virginia, but he lived in Seattle while they were making the album).

And while we'd like to say the earth shifted slightly on its axis the moment that first box ofNeverminds was cracked open, we'd be exaggerating. Back then, Nirvana were relative unknowns, and with popular music dominated by the likes of Whitney Houston, Natalie Cole and Color Me Badd (not to mention rock behemoths like Metallica and Guns N' Roses), the odds of them making an impact of anysort seemed long, at best.

Of course, we all know how things turned out. All week long, we've been paying tribute to Nevermind's 20th anniversary on MTVNews.com, but today, the album's actual birthday, we've decided to honor its legacy in a slightly different way: by crunching the numbers. Because unlike the countless biographies, as-told-to features and behind-the-scenes tell-alls that came in the album's wake, the numbers don't exaggerate: Nevermindwas (and still is) huge. Even if it probably never was supposed to be. Here are some vital stats about Nirvana's seminal album:

7,305: Number of days since Nevermind was released. In case you're wondering, that's 175,320 hours, or 10,519,200 minutes, or 631,152,000 seconds.

46,521: Number of copies of Nevermind originally shipped to retailers by Geffen Records, which hoped the album would eventually sell 200,000 copies.

144: Nevermind's debut position on the Billboard Top 200.

9: Number of weeks after its release that Nevermind was certified platinum (for shipment of 1 million units) by the Recording Industry Association of America.

1: Nevermind's position on theBillboard Top 200 during the week of January 11, 1992, when it overtook Michael Jackson's Dangerous to become the nation's highest-selling album.

253: Total number of weeks Nevermind spent on the Billboard Top 200.

30 million: Number of copies Nevermind has sold, worldwide. In the U.S., it's certified as diamond by the RIAA, for shipment of 10 million copies.

0: Number of Grammys Nevermind won (it was nominated for two).

4:30: Total length of first single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The album version runs 5:01, making it the second-longest song on Nevermind (after aptly named hidden track "Endless, Nameless").

9: Number of times Kurt Cobain shouts "a denial" at the end of "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

6: Highest position "Smells Like Teen Spirit" held on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

$670 million: Amount, in cash and stock, Colgate-Palmolive paid to acquire Mennen, manufacturers of Teen Spirit anti-perspirant, in February 1992, six months after the release of "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

2: Fragrances of Teen Spirit currently available: "Sweet Strawberry" and "Pink Crush." During the height of the brand's popularity, there were as many as 10.

$30,000-$50,000: Estimated budget of the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video.

$7 million: Estimated budget of Michael and Janet Jackson's "Scream" video, widely reported to be the most expensive of all time.

18-25: Age of extras in the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video, according to the casting call. Extras were instructed to "adapt a high-school persona, i.e. preppy, punk, nerd, jock" and "be prepared to stay for several hours."

4: Number of nominations "Smells Like Teen Spirit" received at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. It won two, for Best Alternative Video and Best New Artist in a Video.

1: Number of nominations "Weird" Al Yankovic's "Smells Like Nirvana" received at the same show.

$50,000,000: Amount earned by the Kurt Cobain Estate in 2006, when he topped Forbes magazine's annual Top-Earning Dead Celebrities list 12 years after his suicide.

MTV News reveals the Nevermind You Never Knew, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's definitive album with classic footage, new interviews and much more.

preview : SuperHeavy

SuperHeavy

SuperHeavy

A&M/Universal Republic

Rolling Stone: star rating

Community: star rating

Comment12

At this point, it would seem that Mick Jagger's only burden is having to be Mick Jagger all the time. The terrifically fun SuperHeavy solves that problem. Jagger passes frontman duties around like a spliff, with a spectacularly motley crew: reggae royalty Damian Marley, son of Bob; New Wave survivor Dave Stewart; also-ran U.K. soul diva Joss Stone; and Bollywood singer and composer A.R. Rahman.  Imagine an awards-show-scale revue on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly with musical direction by M.I.A., and you've got some idea of the glitzy craziness here.  On "Satyameva Jayathe," Jagger and Rahman trade Hindi verses over Celtic-Indian fiddle. On "Energy," a U2-style synth-pop jam with a leadoff by Marley, Jagger raps – raps! – and sounds positively hot-wired. On "One Day One Night," Jagger comes on like a broken hearted drunk in a Bukowski novel, smearing vocal vibrato all over.  If the songs sometimes feel a bit undercooked, the spirit is dazzling. On "I Can’t Take It No More," Stone yells, "Whatthe fuck is going on?" which pretty much sums the album up.  That song – where Jagger shouts, "I can’t fake it no more!"- may or may not be an answer to Keith's shit-talking memoir.  One thing's for sure: SuperHeavy is the wildest thing he's ever done outside of the Stones. 

Pearl Jam

Twenty (Soundtrack)

Columbia

Rolling Stone: star rating

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B

Click here to listen to Pearl Jam's two-disc 'Pearl Jam Twenty'

One of the most stunning moments in Cameron Crowe's new Pearl Jam documentary comes near the end, when the band plays "Better Man" at Madison Square Garden and the audience euphorically screams along to every word. The soundtrack to the film – which contains that "Better Man" – is for those hardcore fans. There's no "Jeremy," "Daughter" or "Even Flow" here. But there is a gorgeous demo of "Nothing as It Seems" from 1999, a demo of the 1990 Temple of the Dog track "Say Hello 2 Heaven" and an early version of "Alive," from Pearl Jam's second show, in December 1990. The emotional high point may be "Crown of Thorns," from a gig in 2000. The song was first cut by Mother Love Bone shortly before their frontman Andrew Wood died; the group recruited Vedder and changed its name to Pearl Jam. Wood always dreamed that his band would be hugely famous, and in Vedder's hands his greatest song is reborn as the arena-rock anthem it was meant to be.

Sleeper Agent, 'Celebrasion'

Sleeper Agent, 'Celebrasion'

Courtesy of BB Gun Press

Click to listen to Sleeper Agent's 'Get It Daddy'

"We gonna have a ball/But we ain't got no need for chains," Sleeper Agent shout on their debut. The Kentucky sextet aren't the first band to hearken back to bygone notions of teenage abandon—they're just really great at it. In their retro paradise,Strokes guitars and Pixies power surges bump up against overheated Sixties-rock riffs, lusty Seventies bubblegum bluster and girl-group cuteness, while 18-year-old frontwoman Alex Kandel sings about raunchy hookups ("Get It Daddy") and her restless legs ("Love Blood"). If lines like "And this lust was built in/Straight into my bones" imply extracurricular interests that keep her parents up nights, the band's musical know-how would do its elders proud.

The Prodigy remix of 'white limo'/ foo fighters!!

Prodigy ''heres my remix of 'white limo'/ foo fighters that dave asked me to do , heres the instrumental for yo ass aswell ! Master H''

R.E.M. Breaks Up After Three Decades

Michael Stipe of REM performs during the Voodoo Experience Festival in New Orleans.

Sean Gardner/Getty Images

R.E.M. announced today that they have broken up after 31 years together. "As lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band," the band said in a statement on their official website. "We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished."

In just over three decades as a band, R.E.M. released 15 albums including landmark works such as Murmur, Reckoning, Document, Out of Time andAutomatic For the People. The band's final album, Collapse Into Now, was released in March of this year. The band have plans to release a career-spanning greatest hits collection later this year, which will include a handful of new songs finished after the band completed Collapse Into Now.


Photos: R.E.M. Through the Years

"During our last tour, and while making Collapse Into Now and putting together this greatest hits retrospective, we started asking ourselves, 'what next'?," bassist Mike Mills wrote on the R.E.M. site. "Working through our music and memories from over three decades was a hell of a journey. We realized that these songs seemed to draw a natural line under the last 31 years of our working together."

Mills insists that the band have ended their working relationship on very good terms. "We feel kind of like pioneers in this," he says. "There's no disharmony here, no falling-outs, no lawyers squaring-off. We've made this decision together, amicably and with each other's best interests at heart. The time just feels right."

Interview: R.E.M. Roars Back With 'Collapse Into Now'

"I hope our fans realize this wasn't an easy decision; but all things must end, and we wanted to do it right, to do it our way," says frontman Michael Stipe.


Ethan Kaplan, owner of the R.E.M. fan community Murmurs and former Senior Vice President of Emerging Technology at Warner Bros. Records, says that the band's decision was influenced in part by label politics. "I suspected this was coming last fall," Kaplan tellsRolling Stone. "If you remember, they weathered a lot of storms in this business, and have always operated on their own terms. [Warner Bros.] changed starting last September, and I think the demands on a band now to get a record out were more than they might have wanted to commit. I can understand that after how hard they worked for how long, the thought of going back to 'paying dues' with new label staff, in a very weird industry, was too much."

In a 2007 Rolling Stone interview, Stipe summed it up nicely. "We didn't set out for this to be a career. We just knew it was something we wanted to do, and we would stop when we didn't want to do it anymore.