Michael Been, lead singer for Santa Cruz band, 'The Call,' dead at age 60

He played John the Baptist in a Martin Scorsese film. He once beat John Belushi in a comedy competition. He counted as friends Bono and Peter Gabriel. Al Gore borrowed one of his songs as the theme for his 2000 presidential campaign.But before all that, Michael Been began his eccentric and brilliant career as a musician in Santa Cruz, arriving in the mid '70s and maintaining a residence here for nearly 20 years.Been died Thursday at the age of 60 at a music festival in Belgium where he was working as a sound engineer for the band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, which includes his son Robert Levon Been.He was best known as the lead singer for the 1980s rock band The Call, which during a period in the Reagan era was poised to break into post-punk rock 'n' roll stardom. But despite a high-profile...

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Scissor Sisters In Concert

Formed in 2001, Scissor Sisters may well be the last band standing from the New York electroclash scene that blew up in 2004. That year, the group's B-side "Comfortably Numb," a cover of the Pink Floyd track, become a worldwide hit and pushed vocalists Jake Shears and Ana Matronic, multi-instrumentalist Baby Daddy and guitarist Del Marquis to the top of pop's A-list. U2's Bono even called Scissor Sisters "the best pop group in the world at the moment." Today at noon ET, Scissor Sisters will bring a stadium-sized sound to the relatively tiny World Cafe Live stage in Philadelphia — and you can listen to the whole show live as it happens. You can bet the band will perform songs from its new record, Night Work, which has already sold a million copies in the U.K. ...

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Arcade Fire take The Suburbs to The Daily Show

America's funniest fake news programme is filmed in an unassuming building in the middle of the unremittingly bleak stretch of run-down brownstones and warehouses just west of Midtown Manhattan known as Hell's Kitchen. Once you've obtained backstage clearance, however (with a wristband printed with the words "I am not a threat to The Daily Show"), the place opens up like a Tardis to reveal a rabbit's warren of hallways that appear to meander for miles. There are dogs everywhere: lounging in empty offices, hanging out by the water cooler, possibly running the control room. Open offices reveal huddled writers, TVs all tuned to different channels, and bespectacled comic John Hodgman straightening his tie. Near the Green Room, meanwhile, members of Arcade Fire are spilling out into...

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Does Linkin Park's 'The Catalyst' Rank Among Their Best Videos?

At 12:01 a.m. on Thursday (August 26), Linkin Park premiered their brand-new video for "The Catalyst," the first single off their upcoming A Thousand Suns album. It's a dark, moody, abstract affair, full of swirling smoke, charred earth and rising tides, and, judging from the comments we got on MTVNews.com, Linkin Park fans totally love it. So that got us thinking: Is it good enough to rank among their all-time best videos?Even though "The Catalyst" is barely 13 hours old at this point, it's clear the clip takes the band to places they've never gone before. But the short answer is ... no, not just yet. Sure, the video would probably land in the LP top 10, but we're talking about the best of the best here. So while it's undoubtedly good, it's not quite good enough to crack the band's...

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