By the time his new album, It's a Beautiful Thing, hits stores in December, rapper Keith Murray will likely have a very different worldview -- one from behind bars. The artist turned himself in Monday to begin serving a three-year prison term for assaulting a teenage fan with a barstool in 1995. Murray had been on the lam since Sept. 24, when he failed to appear at New Britain, Conn.'s Superior Court to commence his sentence. That delay could end up costing Murray, as it amounts to a felony charge carrying a $5,000 fine and/or up to five years incarceration...

How do you get Isaac Hayes, Next, Montell Jordan, country star Steve Wariner and a pack of NFL stars huddled together in one room? Simple: throw a New York press conference celebrating their new theme song for the United Way, "We're All In This Together." The Wariner-penned track, which also features Faith Hill, Foxy Brown, Randy Travis and a host of others, appears on both NFL Jams and NFL Country, and will be used in a series of United Way public service announcements scheduled to air during the rest of the NFL season. The commercials will feature footage of the song's recording as well as NFL players performing various good Samaritan duties...

Ten months on the road would turn anyone into a couch potato, so it's little surprise that when road warriors Portishead got home from supporting their self-titled sophomore release they promptly logged onto their computers. Yesterday, keyboardist Geoff Barrow and guitarist Adrian Utley chatted with cyber-journalists about their upcoming live album, PNYC, which will be released Nov. 3 in the States. Among the revelations: No gigs planned, no studio album planned, no hint of new directions, no idea what they're going to do with their free time and no fave albums of '98. We did learn that Adrian's got Radiohead in his disc player and that Geoff's spinning Nirvana. At least we didn't pay for an overseas call...

If you're as tired as we are of cookie-cutter music videos (choreographed rows of scantily clad dancers, preening rockers and divas, lightning edits and the like), hold onto your remote for "Rabbit In Your Headlights," the Jonathan Glaser-directed clip for Thom Yorke's contribution to the U.N.K.L.E. compilation. This pint-size slice of cinema makes Glaser's video for "Karma Police" seem as comforting as a Hallmark card...

Had the roof of Manhattan's Roseland Ballroom caved in Sunday night, there'd be some serious shoes to fill on the Who's Who List of Media Mongers. Madonna, Puff Daddy and Lenny Kravitz waved royally from the VIP balcony at common people in attendance to see little miss Queen of Angst Alanis Morissette. Five hundred of the attendees won tickets from New York's Z-100; the remaining two thousand picked up free wristbands for entrance earlier that day. The rest of the world will have to wait for Nov. 2, when the performance will be aired as MTV Presents Alanis Morissette ...

Speaking of Kravitz, it took considerably longer than a haircut, but the retro-rocker's latest album, 5 (released May 13), has finally been certified gold by the RIAA. This is Kravitz's fifth album to break the half-million mark; his best-seller to date remains '93's multiplatinum Are You Gonna Go My Way. Apparently most of the people that did back then have since taken a detour ...

You know you're the Boss when your home state throws up a slavish "shrine" to you on their website. At New Jersey Online's brand new "Bruce Springsteen -- New Jersey Local Hero Website" (www.nj.com/springsteen), you'll find a wealth of N.J. newspaper clippings on Bruuuce, as well as photos, interactive tours of old Boss haunts like the Stone Pony, and something called the "Fantasy Concert Builder," in which you compile your dream setlist, pick a bootleg CD cover, and email it to all your Bruce buddies to compare and contrast. All this and a little human touch courtesy of Real Audio interviews with "Boss experts" like original E-Street drummer Vini Lopez...

Tuesday sees the release of Welcome to the Videos, a thirteen song compilation of Guns n' Roses clips ranging from "Sweet Child of Mine" to "Since I Don't Have You." Axl Rose, meanwhile, continues to whittle away at the mythical new G n'R album, sifting through upwards of three-hundred tapes of material...

Is it just us, or does the Eels' "Last Stop: This Town" off their latest effort, Electro-shock Blues, sound eerily reminiscent of a certain painfully popular Hanson tune?

The RSN staff
(update October 27, 1998)