Weekend reading: R.E.M., Adam Duritz, and the Mexican emo riots

I can’t really overstate the importance of reading the profile of Adam Duritz, the frontman for Counting Crows, that I link to below.

It’s a relatively short but surprisingly revealing article.

Anyway, I won’t waste more of your time. There’s too many good articles to check out.

Riots in Mexico are targeting emo kids, Time Magazine says, either due to homophobia or because emo is “overly sentimental” and “robbing from other music genres.”

Newsweek talks with Brendan Benson, the Raconteurs frontman that isn’t Jack White, about how Apple commericials are so the new SNL. (And, not to get nit-picky, but in the photo caption for this story, they call White a singer-guitarist and Benson – the dude they’re freaking featuring – only a guitarist. But he sings lead with White, and also co-writes the songs.

R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe finally — finally! — gets a stitch out of his mouth while talking with PitchforkMedia.com.

In a 1,300 word blog post he made for the New York Times, Andrew Bird writes that he’s “not the most forthcoming person.” Wait, really?

We find out in a New Yorker article about the new Erykah Badu album that “10 percent of people are enlightened but self-interested and creepy.”

It’s hard not to like Adam Duritz after reading this profile in Rolling Stone, if only for the whole platonic-relationship-with-a-blond-California-girl-who-lost-her-mom-to-cancer thing. The stuff about how he lost 60 pounds on protein cookies, or his concussion, or the lifelong mental illness, also intrigue.

That in-depth story the Los Angeles Times ran last week, about an attack on Tupac that kicked off the East-West rap rivalry? Well, ends up, they had a few things wrong . That’s what you get for implicating Puff Daddy. Everybody knows that man’s only true crime is wearing white after Labor Day.