Noticias

Mayfield Depot, Manchester

It's an irony, given his obsession with our surveillance culture, that if you were to cast the voice of Orwell's Big Brother, Adam Curtis would be hard to beat. The BBC documentary-maker – justly celebrated for series that include The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace – speaks with such paternal conviction, such stylish wisdom, that given half a day in a film archive you suspect he could have you believe pretty much anything. This Manchester international festival collaboration with Bristol-based trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack is billed as a playful showdown, a versus, in the manner of a rap contest or a prize fight; the vast derelict train depot in which this battle is being staged over 10 nights offers a suitably raw-boned backdrop for the high-decibel stand-off – earplugs are given out at the door – but it quickly becomes...

These past few months, I've grown weary trying to find albums that engage me from start to finish. In fact, I've yet to find one album in the past few months I can listen to top to bottom. I truly believe that we are back in the land of "singles." Not saying that a Blood on the Tracks, Dark Side of the Moon, Ok Computer, or (What's The Story) Morning Glory? isn't lurking in the shadows, but.... I'm old enough to have bought 45s back in the '60s when I was a young pup; my first was The Beatles' "Rain"/"Paperback Writer." In the land of digital, I'm happy to download one song from some new noteworthy act and let it fall into my enormous random shuffle playlist (over 8,700 songs and counting). And that "single" is not always the band or label's choice; in the age of iTunes, we...

The October release will come in a standard edition as well as a 2-disc Special Edition featuring DJ remixes of the shooter's score.

More details after the jump.

Coming on October 22nd, the Halo 4 Original Soundtrack will feature 15 tracks and around 75 minutes of music from Massive Attack's Neil Davidge, 343 Industries and 7Hz Productions, marking the first time series regular Marty O'Donnell has not been responsible for the music of the long-running shooter series. We'll be running our interview with Davidge about his work on the score later today as well as a brief chat with producer DJ Skee about his contribution to the remix album.

Here's the track list (along with links to samples of selected tracks) which doesn't appear to have any spoilers:

1. Awakening

2. Belly Of The Beast

3. Requiem

4. Legacy

5. Faithless

6. Nemesis

7. Haven

8. Ascendancy

9. Solace

10. To Galaxy

11. Immaterial

12. 117

13. Arrival

14. Revival

15. Green And Blue

Besides the standard edition release,...

Pandora already acts like an all-knowing DJ. This week, it launched tools and tweaks to its Music Genome Project algorithm that could factor your friends' song choices into a streaming social megamix. Founder Tim Westergren and Cto Tom Conrad explain.

Pandora got social this week. Now your friends are coming along on the Choose Your Own Adventure-style ride through an 800,000-plus song catalog.

The predictive streaming music service is rolling out a new look, new guts, and, most importantly new social features that will slowly transform the personalized Internet radio experience into a tool for sharing tastes.

The magic of Pandora is that you tell it you like the Clash, and it spits out five other artists you probably love but might not have known or listened to in years. Behind it all is Pandora's algorithm, or "Music Genome Project." It's powered by two sets of people: Pandora's music experts...

Photograph by Robert Maxwell

Photograph by Sasha Nialla

Coca-Cola bet that an unknown Somali rapper could support its biggest marketing campaign ever. The company was right, and it may have launched a new star. Or not.

Soccer Player, Shark: Coke's Seugé, left, and A&M/Octone's Diener crafted a deal that accelerated K'Naan's career by "a year and a half," says Diener. | Photographs by David Stuart (Seugé), Danny Clinch (Diener)

Infographic: K'Naan's World Tour

Somalia. Spring 1989. On a dusty street in a Mogadishu district known as Wardhiigleey (Somali for "river of blood"), three 10-year-old boys, known in the neighborhood as K'naan the Skinny, Shorty, and La'ib, are washing wooden tablets. Each tablet, or loh, is used for note taking at school; pupils write their alphabets and math equations, as well as the phrases they are learning from the Qu'ran, in ink on these tablets. At the end of the day,...

'She's one of the top people I wanted to work with,' the beatsmith says about the Young Money Mc.

By Shaheem Reid

Nicki Minaj

Photo: Bryan Bedder/ Getty Images

Nicki Minaj's "Massive Attack" producer Alex Da Kid — who has also worked with Rihanna, Rob Thomas, Jazmine Sullivan and B.o.B — said you can expect more collaborations between him and the Young Money Mc.

"She wants to be an artist like a Rihanna or a Lady Gaga that translates all over the world," Kid told MTV News about Minaj's aspirations.

"She's dope. She's super creative," he continued. "She knows what she likes to hear. I'll put a idea down [and] she'll be like, 'I like that idea. I don't like that idea.' We'll just go back and forth. You get in the studio with some artists and they don't know what they want until they hear it. She understands production.