Bloc Party: We Did Not Fire Our Singer

Kele Okereke of Bloc Party performs during the Coachella Festival.

C Flanigan/FilmMagic

The members of Bloc Party are insisting that they have not fired frontman Kele Okereke, despite recently heading into the studio without the singer. "Kele's been pretty busy doing solo stuff and it looks like he's going to be doing that a bit longer," guitarist Russell Lissack told the NME. "The other three of us wanted to meet up and make music. We were talking about just doing an instrumental thing, but now we might get a singer as well, to properly put some music out and play some shows."

Photos: Bloc Party at Siren Festival 2010
The band further clarified that they have not changed their lineup in a post to their website, which depicted the four members of the group as cartoon characters with the caption "See you soon." Okereke, who had speculated that he had been quietly fired from the band in a recent interview with the NME, responded with a post on his blog in which he wrote, "A big part of me is laughing HARD at all of this but another part of me is all like WTF?"

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Song Stories

“Baby Got Back”

Sir Mix-a-Lot | 1992

While watching a Budweiser commercial during the Super Bowl, Sir Mix-a-Lot thought the skinny female models in the ad didn’t represent reality. So he wrote this ode to ample bottoms, featuring its famous to-the-point lyric: “I like big butts and I cannot lie.” MTV banished the video, featuring shaking booties and sexually suggestive fruit, to 9 p.m. or later. “I thought my career was over,” he told Rolling Stone. “Then I called Rick Rubin, and I told him the video was banned, and he was like, 'Great!' We sold another 2 million records.”

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