• Lambert Responds to Critics on Early Show
• John Mayer’s Battle Studies Wins Number One
• Fall Out Boy, Anthrax Unite in New Band
• Lambert Unveils “For Your Entertainment” Clip
• News Ticker: Beyoncé, Coldplay
• New Moon’s Taylor Lautner: The New Issue
• Lambert Loses GMA Gig Due to Racy AMAs
• Vote for the Best Music of 2009
• Bob Dylan on Christmas, Hip-Hop
• 1,500 Complain Over Lambert’s AMAs Set
• Lady Gaga Brings “Bad Romance” to Leno
• Paramore Dig a Grave in “Brick” Clip
• Pixies’ Minotaur Set Unveiled
• Fricke’s Picks: O’Rourke’s Long Song
• Rihanna Brings Her “Umbrella” to GMA
• Lambert Breaks Down AMAs “Controversy”
• Springsteen Wraps Epic Tour in Buffalo
• U2 to Headline Glastonbury 2010
• Can Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine Rescue Sound?
• Grammys: Gaga Won’t Compete for New Artist
• New Reviews: Lambert, Gaga, Rihanna

Scroll down for full news stories, commentary and much more in Rock Daily.

The Big News: John Mayer proved to be well versed in the art of sales warfare as his Battle Studies slaughtered all of its big-name competitors, selling 286,000 copies to give the singer his first Billboard Top 200 Number One album since 2003’s Heavier Things. According to Nielsen SoundScan, Battle Studies also came in just shy of the 300,000 copies 2006’s Continuum sold in its Number Two debut week, so Mayer has demonstrated he has some consistency in these days of declining sales. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart!! What a way to spend Thanksgiving,” Mayer wrote to fans on Twitter in celebration of his win.

Six albums managed to surpass 100,000 in sales this week, with five of the six debuts this week. Andrea Bocelli’s My Christmas, apparently the frontrunner for this year’s go-to seasonal album, remained at Number Two for the second consecutive week, while Norah Jones’ The Fall entered the charts at Number Three with 180,000 copies. Casting Crowns’ Until the Whole World Hears finished fourth, surprisingly ahead of 50 Cent’s Before I Self Destruct. Fiddy’s oft-delayed album moved 160,000 units, a major league drop from the 691,000 copies Curtis sold in its debut week in 2007. In case you don’t have a calculator handy, Self Destruct managed less than a quarter of the sales of Curtis in its first week. (more…)

Gary Lucas is a modern guitar miracle, an alchemical soloist with monster technique and a rare collaborative touch. He is especially good with master voices; his work with Captain Beefheart and the late Jeff Buckley is a master lesson in aggressive invention and supportive electricity. That empathy is half the pleasure of Lucas’ Indo-blues venture, Rishte (World Village), with British-born Indian vocalist Najma Akhtar. The other half is the sharp, soaring way she threads his space-fuzz dynamics and pungent Delta settings on National steel. Akhtar, who sang with Robert Plant and Jimmy Page on their 1994 Unledded TV special, sounds perfectly at home in Skip James’ “Special Rider Blues,” while Lucas makes the Mississippi ghosts dance.

Adam Lambert grabbed headlines for his racy rendition of “For Your Entertainment” on Sunday’s American Music Awards, and now the American Idol star is giving fans a more PG-13 version of that performance in the song’s video, which debuted on Adam Official. Lambert, his spiked shoulder pads and his cadre of dancers take to a grimy subterranean nightclub for title track from his debut album, and it’s easy to see how the AMAs performance riffed off the clip: some of the choreography is the same, as is the general theme — a sexy Lambert on the prowl after hours. As an added bonus, Lambert brings back the green snake that was his costar on the cover of Rolling Stone.

See photos of the AMAs Glambglory plus more from the big show.

Compared to Glambert’s controversial AMAs set, the “For Your Entertainment” video is pretty tame. (more…)

Photo: Mike Coppola/FilmMagic

There’s another new supergroup of sorts on the horizon: two members of Fall Out Boy are using their time away from the band to provide riffs and beats for a new heavy metal side project called the Damned Things. FOB guitarist Joe Trohman and drummer Andy Hurley have teamed with Anthrax’s Scott Ian and Rob Caggiano, Every Time I Die’s Keith Buckley and bassist David Karon in the new band, which Ian describes to Rock Sound as “Kyuss meeting Thin Lizzy.”

Check out supergroups from Cream to Them Crooked Vultures.

According to Rock Sound, the Damned Things have already written and demoed 15 songs with the hope of entering the studio in December. “It’s super fun and it’s something that we do totally take seriously because we love the music we’ve created,” Ian said, describing new song “A Great Reckoning” as worthy of “any Thin Lizzy record.” The band’s roots can be traced back to at least October 2008, when the Damned Things’ MySpace page was created. Judging by the comments on that page, a Damned Things song was initially posted there but has since been deleted. (more…)

Photo: Cohen/WireImage.com

Adam Lambert defended his controversial American Music Awards performance on The Early Show this morning, telling host Maggie Rodriguez the AMAs were filled with content that wasn’t kid-friendly. “I think it’s up to the parents to discern what their child is watching on television. Lady Gaga smashing whiskey bottles, Janet Jackson grabbing a male dancer’s crotch, Eminem talking about how Slim Shady has 17 rapes under his belt — there was a lot of very adult material on the AMAs this year and I know I wasn’t the only one.”

Adam Lambert shocks, Taylor Swift soars: see the 2009 AMAs in photos.

Lambert was the only star to face a major backlash following the ceremony, which aired from 8 to 11 p.m. ET on ABC Sunday night. After ABC received 1,500 complaints over Lambert’s simulated oral sex and make-out session with a male bandmate, the network nixed his appearance on Good Morning America. Lambert argued that female pop stars wouldn’t have received the same scrutiny, and that being gay and a man was a “double whammy” because audiences “haven’t seen that before.” He concluded, “I’m not a babysitter. I’m a performer.” (more…)

Photo: Mazur/WireImage.com

• Beyoncé ended her British “I Am …” tour with a promise to be back next year with a new album, and producer Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins tweeted he is indeed working on tracks for the superstar’s next LP, Billboard reports.

• Coldplay bassist Guy Berryman has started a side project called Apparatjik with Mew’s Jonas Bjerre and A-Ha’s keyboardist Magne Furuholmen and producer Martin Terefe, Spinner reports. The group plans to release its debut November 30th, and already has an official Website.
• iTunes is teaming with concert giant Live Nation to present Live Nation Studios, where music recorded and filmed at Live Nation venues will be available for purchase on Apple’s digital store. So far, concerts from OK Go, Duffy and Plain White T’s have gone up for sale.
• Creed will commemorate their Full Circle reunion tour with a December 8th DVD called Creed Live. The band’s September 25th show in Houston was captured by 239 cameras for the disc, which will also feature band interviews and more than 100 photos from the trek.

Pixies fever has swept into New York as the reunited rockers played the first of four Doolittle shows last night at the Hammerstein Ballroom. With Black Friday looming, the perfect gift for the Pixies fan in all of us is the band’s mammoth Minotaur box set. In the video above, check out the limited-edition version of Minotaur, which boasts artwork from the Pixies’ longtime graphic designer Vaughan Oliver. This 26-pound mega box features all five of the band’s studio albums — Come On Pilgrim, Surfer Rosa, Doolittle, Bossanova and Trompe le Monde — on 24K gold-plated discs and 180-gram vinyl. (more…)

We’ve already started soliciting your opinion for the best album, song and artist of the 2000s in our massive Greatest Music of the Decade Readers Poll — but the voting doesn’t end there. On December 15th we’ll reveal our picks for the best music of 2009, and we want to hear your selections, too. Click here for the 2009 Readers Poll ballot and get your voice heard (you have from now until December 8th to vote!). Follow the jump to see who’s up for Artist of the Year: (more…)

When Rihanna took the stage early today for an appearance on Good Morning America, she faced a crowd that had been waiting in the misty morning for several hours to catch a glimpse of the star the day after Rated R hit stores. When she emerged from behind a black backdrop, they erupted. She half-smiled, then asked, “What’s happening, New York?”

Get a look at Rihanna’s fiercest fashions, onstage and off.

Rihanna kept a black coat on during sound check and seemed reserved, standing wooden during run-throughs of “Wait Your Turn,” “Russian Roulette” and her mega-hit “Umbrella.” But then she disappeared behind the backdrop for hair and makeup. At 8:30 a.m., she emerged looking radically different, in a white tuxedo mini-dress that became the subject of one of her between-take interviews. “I’m a little too fat right now — the zip busted in the back!” she told host Robin Roberts of her original outfit. “They wanted to stitch it up, but I couldn’t.” (more…)

During a recent visit to Rolling Stone, Paramore’s Hayley Williams was reluctant to talk about the new video for the band’s Brand New Eyes single “Brick By Boring Brick” — to be fair, Williams was reluctant to talk in general, as she was still suffering from laryngitis — hoping instead to keep the band’s long-in-the-works clip under wraps. But now the secret is out and the video is streaming on Paramore’s official Website.

The CGI-heavy, autumn-washed video finds a young girl wearing butterfly wings and carrying a doll — apparently a representation of Hayley’s own psyche — running carelessly around a dream world while the now-blonde Hayley sings alongside a newly dug grave. (more…)

Photo: Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty
To the surprise of fans and critics alike, Bob Dylan released his holiday-inspired album Christmas in the Heart last month, an unexpected first in the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s discography. Now Dylan is talking about the inspiration behind the album and responding to skeptics in a new interview posted on Street Newspaper (via Twenty Four Bit).

Check out RS’ collection of Bob Dylan photos.

The first question many asked when Dylan announced Christmas in the Heart was “Isn’t he Jewish?” Dylan tells SNS’ Bill Flannigan that he didn’t feel left out of the holiday’s celebrations despite his Jewish roots growing up, and that his childhood is full of memories of “plenty of snow, jingle bells, Christmas carolers going from house to house, sleighs in the streets, town bells ringing, nativity plays.” Dylan also said that he was approached in the past to do a Christmas album, but due to a glut of albums on the market he held off until now. Dylan must really be in the Christmas spirit, considering his“Must Be Santa” video marks the first time he’s appeared in his own non-soundtrack music video in over a decade. (more…)

Photograph by Mark Seliger

Taylor Lautner’s body is a temple. The 17-year-old New Moon star with the eight-pack abs and tan, chiseled face tells Rolling Stone’s Neil Strauss he’s never smoked pot, never tried cigarettes and never snorted a line of cocaine in our new issue dated December 10, 2009, on stands tomorrow.

Check out exclusive shots from Taylor Lautner’s hot RS cover shoot on the beach.

What Lautner has done is turn his love of martial arts into superstardom as werewolf Jacob in the Twilight series. “This could have happened to anyone who played Jacob,” Lautner tells RS. “It’s Twilight. It’s not me personally.” But his hard work is inescapable: he started learning karate at age six and moved on to Xtreme Martial Arts, relocating with his family to Los Angeles to pursue acting and stomaching the bullying that came along with it. He put on 30 pounds of muscle between the first two Twilight films. He found time to shoot the upcoming Valentine’s Day with Taylor Swift, with whom he “instantly clicked,” he admits. (more…)

Photo: Tomatis/BuzzFoto/FilmMagic

Adam Lambert’s racy performance on the American Music Awards has led ABC to scrap his scheduled concert tomorrow on Good Morning America. “Given his controversial live performance on the AMAs we were concerned about airing a similar concert so early in the morning,” an ABC spokesperson told Rolling Stone while confirming news of the Lambert cancellation.

Adam Lambert shocks, Taylor Swift soars: the 2009 AMAs in photos.

It’s not all bad news for the Wild Idol, however: Lambert will instead perform on tomorrow’s episode of CBS’ The Early Show. It’ll be a double dose of Lambert on CBS tomorrow, as he also recorded a performance yesterday at New York’s Ed Sullivan Theatre that will be broadcast tomorrow night on The Late Show With David Letterman. In an interview with Ryan Seacrest, Lambert indicated he wasn’t taking ABC’s decision to nix his morning appearance personally, adding, “Obviously I respect their decision, they gotta do what they gotta do. It’s too bad, I think there were a lot of fans who were excited to come see me. They probably had a lot of pressure coming at them from certain people who weren’t happy about it. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but they need to do what they need to do.”

Infamous crotch-rock moments, from Lambert’s AMAs to “Dick in a Box.” (more…)

Guitarist-composer and avant-rock provocateur Jim O’Rourke is notorious for his collaborations with Faust, drone pioneer Tony Conrad and the late guitarist John Fahey, and infamous in the mainstream for his noise-and-pathos mix of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But O’Rourke’s new truly solo album — he played, produced and engineered every note — is one long confession of his true rapture for melody and instrumental detail. The Visitor (Drag City) is a continuous 38-minute piece that winds through buoyant tangles of acoustic guitar, piano and percussion; gorgeous spells of rippling suspended chords; and, halfway in, a cocky, eccentric Americana of banjo, reeds, swooping pedal steel guitar and marching drums, as if Charles Ives had rolled into an instrumental session for the Beach Boys‘ Pet Sounds. There are no track breaks here, just sparkling sustained delight.