This morning’s announcement of Lady Gaga as a performer at this year’s Video Music Awards is the latest sort-of confirmation of a big VMA rumor that’s been going around since reality-TV production coordinator Johnathan Woodbeck tweeted it the day after the Britney Spears VMA promo, above, premiered. According to Woodbeck’s tweet, the show will contain a star-studded tribute medley with one song from each of Britney’s albums, followed by the presentation of a Lifetime Achievement Award (presumably the Video Vanguard Award?) by none other than Madonna. The rumored performance lineup (via Lainey Gossip):
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With only three more weeks left in our 2011 Song Of The Summer Countdown, sadly, there’s little drama left as to who will take home the crown. For the eighth consecutive week, Katy Perry‘s saxoriffic “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” is sitting atop our charts, closely followed by LMFAO‘s “Party Rock Anthem” (which, as we wrote last week, could make its own claim for S.O.T.S.). However, don’t count out Foster The People quite yet!

The You Oughta Know artist’s single, “Pumped Up Kicks,” has been making an impressive late summer run at the top spot. It first entered our charts back on July 11, but buoyed by a standout set at this year’s Lollapalooza festival, the first single off the band’s Torches LP seems to have really captured the attention of the nation. Will they be able to unseat either Perry or LMFAO before Labor Day rolls around?


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Electro-sleaze goofballs LMFAO are, at this moment, the only thing standing between Katy Perry and the history books. As we told you last week, their smash single “Party Rock Anthem” is blocking “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” from ascending to the top of the Billboard 100 chart (which would be Perry’s fifth Number One off her Teenage Dream LP). LMFAO is also currently besting Perry on the YouTube and iTunes charts, while Katy is maintaining dominance on Last.fm as well as airplay on our station. And our friends over at New York Magazine‘s Vulture just named “Party Rock Anthem”—a song they described as “a contrived, effective bit of nonsense about how ‘everybody’s gonna have a good time’”—as their current Song of the Summer.

Despite this onslaught from the progeny of Motown records founder Berry Gordy, our highly scientific formula still shows Perry atop our charts for the seventh consecutive week. While it will be incredibly difficult to topple her, it’s good to see Foster The People making a run at the Top Five. After a standout performance at Lollapalooza this weekend, their outstanding single “Pumped Up Kicks” is quickly climbing the charts; if the word “alternative” still carried any weight as a genre, there’s little doubt that Mark Foster could lay claim to the “alternative” Song of the Summer crown.


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Kanye Joins Nicki Minaj Onstage For “Monster”
There are plenty of fan-shot videos of Kanye‘s surprise appearance during Minaj‘s opening set at Britney Spears‘s Nassau Coliseum show; the best one we’ve found is here. [Sound of the City]

Foo Fighters Played Fans’ Garages
The Foos recorded the eight shows for a 40-minute documentary, viewable above. [Spin]
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The dog days of summer are upon us, people. It’s August, it’s hot outside, and the news cycle is starting to slow to a crawl. The general sluggishness of the season is even affecting the music industry, as music fans don’t seem to be gravitating towards any new material. Instead, they seem to be content to play the same songs that they’ve had on repeat all summer long.

Case in point: Katy Perry‘s “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F),” which has exhibited a stranglehold on the top of our Song of the Summer Countdown for six consecutive weeks. Her song looks to have a lock on the prize at this point, but then again, maybe The Throne (aka Jay-Z and Kanye West) can mount a last-minute challenge when their highly anticipated collaboration Watch The Throne drops next week? Stay tuned!


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As we near the end of our celebration of MTV’s 30 birthday, we figured it would be apropos to look back at thirty of the moments that defined the channel. Now, we easily could’ve listed 30,000 reasons why we love our MTV, but we’ll just have to wait until MTV’s 30,000th birthday to publish that list. For now, enjoy this cornucopia of memorable reality shows, groundbreaking music videos, hilarious interviews, jaw-dropping moments of violence, and celebrity beef.


30) Kurt Loder Prevents A Full-On Brawl Between Madonna and Courtney Love
The scene: The 1995 Video Music Awards. During a post-show interview with the unflappable Kurt Loder, Madonna gets pelted with a compact thrown by the Queen of Grunge, Courtney Love. (Heroin-fueled) hilarity and awkwardness ensues.

29) “Paint The Mutha Pink”
This memorable promo for a 1984 MTV contest was pegged to the release of John Cougar Mellencamp’s album, Uh Huh, which featured the eighties heartland anthem “Pink Houses.” The grand prize winner received a house in Bloomington, Indiana (Mellencamp’s hometown), which came with a special paint job: Pink.

28) Totally Pauly
Hey buhhh-deeee, don’t go weezin’ all the juice! After landing a gig as a VJ in 1989, Pauly Shore went from being an unknown stand-up to a major motion picture star inside of two years.

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When Michael Jackson tragically and unexpectedly passed away two summers ago after an overdose of Propofol (which may or may not have been administered by Dr. Conrad Murray), the primary coping mechanism that people utilized while dealing with their grief was rekindling their love of his extensive musical legacy. People who hadn’t visited record stores in years flocked to purchase his back catalog, radio stations worldwide spun his songs for months on end and, as a result, Michael Jackson became a bigger star in death than he had been during the last 15 years of his life.

Well, in terms of her cultural relevance, it’s safe to say that Amy Winehouse was no Michael Jackson. However, her untimely (if somewhat expected) death this weekend at the age of 27 has done a lot to rekindle people’s interest in her musical output, which consists of two studio albums (2003′s Frank and 2006′s Back To Black) and a handful of B-sides. Not surprisingly, she currently occupies three of the top six spots on the iTunes album charts (see below), and “Rehab” —sadly, the song that will now forever define her career— has sold enough and been spun enough in the past three days to land it at #15 on this week’s Song Of The Summer Countdown.

As for the rest of the chart, there’s not much to say this week. The top seven spots in this week’s countdown are identical to the top seven songs from last week’s countdown; Katy Perry is still holding court at the top of the charts, and Adele is still nipping at her heels, closely trailed by Pitbull, LMFAO and Lady Gaga.


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From L to R: Rich Hil, Asher Roth and Chet Haze

In the nineties, you could count the number of commercial white rappers on one hand. Beastie Boys. Vanilla Ice. Marky Mark (and the Funky Bunch). Maybe Everlast and even 3rd Bass count too, although their “household name” reach wasn’t nearly as long. As a result, an entire generation of hip-hop fans grew up listening to a genre that was based in a primarily Urban setting, rarely poking its nichey head above ground into the pop arena. That didn’t stop the audience’s obsession with hip-hop though, and regardless of content relatability, the music managed to draw a crop of loyal, melanin-lacking disciples.

Putting his unquestionable talent aside, it’s not a huge surprise that Eminem’s Slim Shady LP was so well-received when Interscope helped him to first put take his underground music into the mainstream back in 1999. Paving the way for the constant flow of new, up-and-coming white rappers who idolized him back then, Eminem came to market with a blunt, true-to-self, lower socio-economic class character that was refreshing and different from the previous attempts of white rappers past. Looking the accidental mockery in the face, who can forget The White Rapper Show, for example? Whether you hated it or loved it, it was a trainwreck that you couldn’t resist watching, if only to laugh at the contestants’ hilarious missteps.

On Monday, it was announced that white rapper Rich Hil, son of fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, was signed to Warner Brothers Records. This news not only continues to feed the growing trend of white rapper signings, but also the perpetuates the sub-genre craze that is now commonly referred to as “Frat Rap.” Focusing less on conveying social commentary or more personal issues, Frat Rap flaunts a party lifestyle, celebrating the cliche reckless behavior associated with college fraternities, like getting hammered, bagging girls, and partaking in experimental gateway drugs. Executing lyricism and celebrating the Bronx-born culture aren’t really a priority.

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The 2011 VMA Nominations, revealed late last night, contained not a few surprises for pop music fans, many of whom flocked to Twitter (where #vmanominationfailure is still trending) or Wikipedia (where the 2011 VMAs entry is locked after hours of vandalism).

The loudest fanbase is that of Lady Gaga, who received three nominations (one for “Born This Way” and two for “Judas,” which the Little Monsters apparently prefer)—a pittance to these fans, especially in contrast to Katy Perry‘s nine and Adele‘s seven. The latter was more galling to the pop monsters, who after only a bit of Katy Perry slut-shaming moved on to “Adele is fat” jokes (or, more generously, “‘Rolling In The Deep’ is great but the video is boring” complaints). Britney Spears‘s and Rihanna‘s fans are also quite vocal about the two and zero nominations the artists got, respectively. (Rihanna is a featured artist on Eminem‘s three-times nominated—though not for Best Collaboration—”Love the Way You Lie” and Kanye West‘s four-times nominated “All of the Lights” but has no nominations for her own videos.)

Other much-observed snubs include Ke$ha (no nominations despite the eligibility of both “We R Who We R” and “Blow”), J. Cole for Best New Artist (with fans particularly surprised that Kreayshawn and Tyler, The Creator got nominated) and Jennifer Lopez‘s “On The Floor,” which, as our Song Of The Summer metrics have documented, has performed much better on YouTube than anywhere else.

Rough Cut Of Britney’s “Gimme More” Video Surfaces
The most notable contrast between this leaked cut and the official video (besides this clip’s inclusion of a sequence in which Britney is topless save for a leather jacket she holds against her chest) is the lack of the post-production wizardry that was applied to make Britney look thinner. We wonder whether that’s why the original is full of dutch angles, while delighting that, for the moment, the YouTube comments about Britney largely avoid body judgments. [Billboard]

30 Seconds To Mars Cover U2 For Unplugged
For their episode of MTV Unplugged (premiering tonight at 8PM ET on MTV.com), 30 Seconds to Mars recruited a gospel choir at the eleventh hour for a take on U2‘s “Where the Streets Have No Name.” MTV shared the video with Entertainment Weekly‘s Music Mix. We can’t help being a teensy bit disappointed that the band didn’t cover Fleetwood Mac, as they had apparently considered, but their U2 cover does the trick anyway. [EW Music Mix]
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