Nashville, U.S.A. — Released less than a month ago, Taylor Swift’s fourth studio album, ’Red’, is already approaching the 2.8 million album worldwide sales mark.

After debuting with music’s highest first-week album sales in over a decade, ’Red’ is currently in its third consecutive week in the #1 position atop Billboard ’s 200 top albums chart, and as of this week ‘Red’ will have scanned more than 1.8 million albums in the U.S. since its October 22 release.

‘Red’, released on Big Machine Records, has topped the sales charts in 42 countries worldwide, with international sales topping 920,000 albums thus far. Taylor now has worldwide career record sales in excess of 26 million albums and 75 million song downloads.

This weekend, tickets went on sale for Taylor’s two July ‘Red’ Tour stops at Foxborough, Mass.’s Gillette Stadium, with the back to back stadium shows selling out in just 5 minutes.

On Friday, Taylor sold out three stadiums: Toronto’s Rogers Centre (sold out in 5 minutes), Detroit’s Ford Field (sold out in 10 minutes), and Chicago’s Soldier Field (sold out in 25 minutes), as well as arenas in Los Angeles (2 shows in 1 minute), Washington DC (2 shows in 5 minutes), Atlanta (2 shows in 5 minutes), Miami, Tampa, Columbus, San Diego and Sacramento. Tickets for Taylor’s two August shows in Kansas City also sold out over the weekend.

Taylor Swift’s The ‘Red’ Tour will now include 11 stadium stops, for a total of 62 shows in 45 cities in 29 states and 3 provinces in 2013.  A complete listing of tour dates, including future onsale information, is available at www.taylorswift.com .

Last night, Taylor brought home her 11th career American Music Award, winning Favorite Female Artist (Country) for the fifth consecutive year. Just a week earlier, Taylor won three European Music Awards, taking top honors for Best Female Act, Best Live Act, and Best Look.

The fan response to Taylor’s ’Red’ album and tour has been matched by the project’s critical acclaim, with the album earning rave reviews from critics around the globe. Just this weekend, Vanity Fair dubbed Taylor “officially the new Mick Jagger,” calling her international chart-topper “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” “the year’s best pop song.” VF asks, “Who is more interesting in pop right now?” and praises Taylor’s “hooks and insouciance,” lauding her music as “canny and knowing.”

Lauded by The New York Times as “one of the most important pop artists of the last decade,” and byRolling Stone as “one of the few genuine rock stars we’ve got these days,” 22 year-old Taylor Swift is a six-time GRAMMY winner, and is the youngest winner in history of the music industry’s highest honor, the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Taylor is the only female artist in music history (and just the fourth artist ever) to twice have an album hit the 1 million first-week sales figure. She holds the record for the biggest digital sales week ever for a song by a woman, and for the second-largest song sales week overall, as well as the worldwide iTunes record for highest ever first-week album sales.

Taylor, who writes all of her own songs, has an album on Rolling Stone’s prestigious The 50 Greatest Albums of All Time (by women) list, and Time magazine has named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is Billboard’s youngest-ever Woman of the Year, and her more than 100 industry award wins have included the American Music Awards’ Artist of the Year, the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music’s Entertainer of the Year and three European Music Awards.

Taylor’s two most recent albums are two of only 18 albums in the entire history of music to sell more than 1 million copies in a single week. She has had singles top both the country and pop radio charts around the globe, and has thus far scored 11 #1 singles across multiple radio formats. She is one of the top 5-selling digital music artists worldwide, and is the top-selling digital artist in country music history.

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The Rolling Stones performed for the first time in London on July 12, 1962, and they had been expected to celebrate their 50^th anniversary on a world tour later this year.

But the legendary rock ‘n’ roll band delayed its 50^th anniversary world tour until 2013. That’s when band members said at the London Film Festival that they are going to perform. The festival was where their documentary film “Crossfire Hurricane” was shown.

The film, made by director Brett Morgen, will be screened in cinemas in October and then broadcast by BBC2 later in the year. It includes some exclusive material about the band which has never been revealed. Moreover, there are comments from both present and former band members.

Charlie Watts, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Mick Jagger arrived to attend the gala screening of “Crossfire Hurricane.” They were joined on the red carpet by former Stone Bill Wyman, who said he hoped that the film captured the influence of founder member and guitarist Brian Jones, who died in 1969. He said: “I’m glad he’s remembered, that’s the most important thing.”

Recording in the studio and performing

Earlier it was reported that health of Keith Richards is the reason for the delay, as there were doubts that he would be able to commit to a full world tour. But he insisted that playing in 2013 would be a more fitting half-century anniversary, “The Stones always considered 1963 to be 50 years, because Charlie [Watts, drummer] didn’t actually join until January,” he said. “We look upon 2012 as sort of the year of conception, but the birth is next year.”

Keith Richards said, ”Basically, we’re just not ready. I have a feeling that’s [2013] more realistic.”

But a couple of days ago the guitarist said the band are sounding “up to and above par” in rehearsals in Paris. He added: “I can’t believe how well the band is sounding.”

Wood said, ”You would think it would be boring doing the same thing over and over again but it’s not. It’s totally fresh and totally new every time we get together. There’s a chemistry between us every time we get together and I don’t know what the hell it is but it’s magic”.

He was also asked about a possible tour: “Once this wheel is turning I don’t think it will be able to stop so hopefully the momentum it gathers by doing the O2 and the gigs in Newark, we won’t be able to stop.”

The band will play to 40,000 people during their two nights at the O2 in London, on November 25 and November 29. These concerts are dedicated to the 50^th anniversary of the first performance of the band on the stage. Also the Stones will play two more shows in Newark, New Jersey in December.

The cheapest tickets were sold out to the concerts, taking place at London O2 Arena and costing £106, in three minutes. The most expensive tickets, costing £406, were also sold out too fast, in just four minutes. Right at the advent of tickets fans of the band rushed to buy them.

Image Courtesy of  The Rolling Stones

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This past week saw what would have been Hunter S. Thompson’s 75th birthday. Born July 18, 1937, the writer committed suicide in 2005 after suffering from poor health.

Novelist, sports columnist, political commentator, drug addict: as far as writers go, he was quite rare, able to keep up with his writing as he lived a life that would have destroyed others. In fact, it was his rampant alcohol and drug use that gave him material for his writings, which have proven to be profoundly influential.

His most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is a “roman a clef” of him and his friend traveling to Las Vegas to compose a report on a car race that ultimately would not be written. The two instead take heavy drugs, ruminate on American culture, and go looking for the American dream. Nothing is taboo here: rape and kidnapping play a part in the story, and Thompson himself knows that he is not above the people he satirizes. Terry Gilliam adapted it into a film in 1998, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro.

The novel is probably the most well-known example of gonzo journalism, a style of journalism that Thompson popularized and was itself a part of the New Journalism movement of the 70s. Other writers who took part in this movement include the acclaimed Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. While traditional journalism is more about simply the facts, gonzo journalism is about first-person narratives; more about telling a story than reporting something. Thompson frequently wrote for Rolling Stone, and many of his articles were in that style, including his first, entitled “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” which can be found here online.

Thompson also wrote about politics. Much of this stemmed from his own personal interests. In 1970, he ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado. In 1972, he followed the election campaigns of Richard Nixon and George McGovern and wrote a series of article which were later collected in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. He also wrote a book, Kingdom of Fear, featuring detailed essays and stories about rebelling against authority in a post-9/11 world.

Although toward the end of his life Thompson’s work consisted mainly of potboilers and collections of material he had done in his prime, he remained a figure to be reckoned with. He is, in a sense, much like Henry Miller. Although Thompson did not face censorship issues like Miller did, both pushed the envelope of what was considered acceptable for publication. Miller wrote about sex, Thompson drugs and madness and politics, often blending them together to create works that had a political commentary. Most times, it would have been impossible to create the same effect through other means.

Last year his novel The Rum Diary, which he had written during his twenties but which was only published in the 90s, was made into a feature film starring Johnny Depp. Although it received a mixed reception and failed at the box office, it proves that Thompson is still remembered. And with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas still widely read, it seems we will be in the shadow of Hunter S. Thompson for some time yet.

Image Courtesy of   MDCarchives (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

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New York, U.S.A. – Columbia Records have announced that Bob Dylan’s new studio album, Tempest, will be released on September 11, 2012. Featuring ten new and original Bob Dylan songs, the release of Tempest coincides with the 50th Anniversary of the artist’s eponymous debut album, which was released by Columbia in 1962.

The new album, produced by Jack Frost, is the 35th studio set from Bob Dylan, and follows 2009′s worldwide best-seller, Together Through Life.

Bob Dylan’s four previous studio albums have been universally hailed as among the best of his storied career, achieving new levels of commercial success and critical acclaim for the artist. The Platinum-selling Time Out Of Mind from 1997 earned multiple Grammy Awards, including Album Of The Year, while “Love and Theft” continued Dylan’s Platinum streak and earned several Grammy nominations and a statue for Best Contemporary Folk album.

Modern Times, released in 2006, became one of the artist’s most popular albums, selling more than 2.5 million copies worldwide and earning Dylan two more Grammys. Together Through Life became the artist’s first album to debut at #1 in both the U.S. and the UK, as well as in five other countries, on its way to surpassing sales of one million copies.

Those four releases fell within a 12-year creative span that also included the recording of an Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning composition, “Things Have Changed,” from the film Wonder Boys, in 2001; a worldwide best-selling memoir, Chronicles Vol. 1, which spent 19 weeks on the

New York Times Best Seller List, in 2004, and a Martin Scorsese-directed documentary, No Direction Home, in 2005. Bob Dylan also released his first collection of holiday standards, Christmas In The Heart, in 2009, with all of the artist’s royalties from that album being donated to hunger charities around the world.

This year, Bob Dylan was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. He was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” He was also the recipient of the French Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1990, Sweden’s Polar Music Award in 2000 and several Doctorates including the University of St. Andrews and Princeton University as well as numerous other honors.

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In Africa, homosexuality is frequently treated as a taboo subject, and outspoken opposition to it is a political vote winner. However, according to Richard Dowden, director at the Royal African Society, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that homosexuality was accepted in many societies throughout Africa in pre-colonial times. In his article, ‘Getting Gay Rights Wrong in Africa,’ Dowden wonders if the missionaries in Africa were to blame.

“So, is it the fault of the missionaries? But, the missionaries also preached against theft and corruption, against sex before marriage, against marrying several wives, or covetousness. Why do so many Africans get outraged and censorious about homosexuality, something that isn’t even one of the Ten Commandments, while tolerating so many sins that are?” ponders Dowden in his article.

Homosexuality on the African continent is frowned upon, and those suspected of being gay face dire consequences. Thirty-eight African countries criminalize same-sex conduct, and LGBT people run the risk of lengthy prison sentences for expressing their sexuality. Sudan, Mauritania, and northern Nigeria even impose the death penalty. Despite variations in enforcement, what many African countries have in common is the criminalization of private acts between consenting adults whose sexuality and gender identity are considered “abnormal.”

Like many other nations, new legislation in Liberia calls for punishing homosexuality with longer jail time. Anti-LGBT rhetoric is escalating outside of the Liberian government with a group calling itself the Movement Against Gays in Liberia, or MOGAL, distributing a hit list of people who support gay rights, stating that these people “should not be given space to get a gulp of air.”

Gay rights debate in Liberia began getting this sort of unprecedented attention in the newspapers and radio stations after the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, announced in December 2011 that America’s foreign aid budget would promote the protection of gay rights. This, according to Tamasin Ford—a freelance reporter for the BBC and Britain’s newspaper, The Guardian, based in Monrovia —prompted speculation that funds would be tied to countries’ rights records and prompting two new laws.

In the two new bills, one would amend the penal code to make a person guilty of second degree felony if he or she “seduces, encourages, promotes another person of the same gender to engage in sexual activities, or purposefully engages in acts that arouse or tend to arouse another person of the same gender to have sexual intercourse.” The second bill put forward by Jewel Howard Taylor, a senator in Liberia, would make gay marriage a first degree crime punishable by up to 10 years in jail.

Over the years, gay people have been attacked and activists for gay rights killed. In 2010, at least four gay men were attacked in Uganda after a newspaper ran a front-page story listing 100 ‘top’ homosexuals with a heading that read ‘Hang Them’, and a gay activist was killed in 2011.

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Rumors about a possible Rolling Stones world tour and maybe even a new album in 2012–the year that marks the 50th anniversary of the English rock ’n’ roll band’s career–have been circulating in the internet for the entire past year.

At first the tour was billed as the farewell of the historical rock band to the music scene: after fifty years of greatness everybody deserves some rest. However, this is not the idea that the Rolling Stones have in mind. Ronnie Wood, one of the band guitarists, declared: “We have all agreed this won’t be the last time.

Everyone’s rocking. We’ll rock ’till we drop!” This declaration not only clears the mind of those who were worried about the band leaving the scene, but it confirms that the talks about the tour are realistic. What is certain is that the band is discussing it.

Keith Richards, for example, expressed his wish to tour with the old band mates in more than one interview. He wants it to be a different tour, to innovate the idea behind their last live performances accompanying it by a coming back to their blues roots. “It doesn’t have to be the whole spectacle bullshit again, but we’ve got to find our own way through this” said Richards to the almost homonymous “Rolling Stone” magazine.

Sir Mick Jagger on the other hand has addressed the issue in contradictory ways. In September he declared to “USA Today” that a tour was “not on the table”, and was more concentrated on exploring his “SuperHeavy” project; he then told “Rolling Stone” in late November about the possibility of the Stones tour “It is quite amazing when you think about it, anything’s possible.”

What is due to be solved, though, is the relationship between Richards and Jagger. In his autobiography, Richards addresses his “frenemy” Jagger in an unkind way; it seems that Sir Mick did not take this well, and band mates are trying to guide them through a reconciliation.

In December a meeting in London took place: the band members jammed during a three day session. Nothing was recorded, but all the members participated. Jagger joined only the last day of the sessions. There is nothing official about what came out of the meeting between the guitarist and the frontman, but rumors say that they got along pretty well, giving hopes to those who are waiting for this year’s event to take place.

Additionally, in late December, a tour date was announced by “Event & Ticket Shop Ltd.” to take place at the “Ernst Happel Stadion” in Vienna (Austria), giving no precise indication about the time but only a general “Summer 2012.” That was enough, though, to create excitement among the world fans and regenerate their hopes.

Hence, even if there is nothing official confirming the world tour by the Rolling Stones in 2012, the signs of one happening seem to be promising. In the meanwhile fans can enjoy themselves with the new material that the band recently made available at www.stonesarchive.com, opening the doors to its archive, with film, memorabilia and music, including previously unheard tracks.

Fans also have the opportunity to buy personalized merchandise, tour gear and much more in the online shop. It seems to be a lot of new stuff to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the band, and fans are hopefully waiting for the tour to happen.

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