If you enjoyed our Almost-Impossible Rock & Roll Quiz, you’ll love tonight’s episode of Jeopardy!, where there will be an entire category devoted to Rolling Stone and rock trivia in honor of that 40th anniversary you have may have read something about. Here’s a suggestion: pass the hours between now and whatever time Jeopardy! airs in your time zone by watching clips of Darrell Hammond playing Sean Connery in Saturday Night Live’s classic Jeopardy! parodies. “I’ll take months that start with Feb, Trebek.”

In an attempt to see just how “almost-impossible” Rolling Stone’s Almost-Impossible Rock & Roll Quiz is, we dared E Street Band guitarist, Sopranos consigliore and “Underground Garage” host “Little” Steven Van Zandt to give it a shot. Van Zandt — whose new music-education program Little Steven’s Rock and Roll High School will launch in middle and high schools starting next year — was up for the challenge. A week after Korn’s Munky took forty-five minutes to complete the test, we gave Little Steven a strict half-hour time limit to show off his rock smarts. Here are some of the highlights from his exam:

• “I’m gonna fail this quiz miserably,” Van Zandt said, before kicking off with six consecutive correct answers. Question seven, though, knocked Van Zandt off his streak. “Match the Character in the Beach Boys’ ‘Sloop John B’ with His Maritime Mishap,” the question asks, then lists the First Mate, Captain, Cook and Constable. “I must have listened to this song a million times,” Stevie said, before singing the song’s famed verse. He nailed the First Mate and Cook’s roles, but stumbled on the Captain and Constable, forgetting that it’s the Constable’s job, not the Captain’s, to “arrest the first mate.”
• Despite its sinister nature, Question seventeen posed no threat. “Which of the following artists did Phil Spector (allegedly) not threaten with a gun?” The choices are John Lennon, Dee Dee Ramone, Leonard Cohen and Ike Turner. “Ike Turner,” Van Zandt exclaims. “You don’t want to mess with Ike.” (more…)

Korn guitarist Munky stopped by the office yesterday to test his music knowledge on Rolling Stone’s Almost-Impossible Rock & Roll Quiz. “This is hard. Nobody told me it would be this hard,” Munky proclaimed from our cubicle computer, three questions into the exam. Almost every question on the Rock SATs inspired a hilarious explanation from Munky, but here’s a short list:

• Question eleven, which asked which one of Jerry Garcia’s fingers was partially severed, resonated with Munky, as the guitarist is also missing a sizable chunk of his right ring finger as a result of a gory motorcycle incident that gets us nauseous. Long story short, the severed digit and a doctor’s recommendation to pick up an instrument helped lead Munky to the guitar. Despite his kinship to the question, Munky answers it incorrectly.

• On Question forty-eight, “Steven Seagal movie or Tupac Shakur posthumous album,” Munky utilizes his lifeline, calling his mountainous bodyguard over to the cubicle. “He’s an expert on Tupac,” Munky boasts. (more…)

When System of a Down’s Serj Tankian spoke to Rolling Stone about the current and future state of music for our current issue, he thought globally. Literally. “In my opinion, civilization is over. It’s a dead beast,” he says. “A lot of people I talk to this about equate humanity with civilization, and I laugh, because I think, ‘Well, there were people on this planet before civilization, and yet we’re so addicted to this concept that we think that if civilization is over, we’re over.’ ” For more from Tankian on rock and rebellion, read the full Q&A here.

As you may have seen yesterday, we caught up with Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy along with his buddies — and current tourmates — Gym Class Heroes last week at our big RS Live party in New York. Things started wholesomely enough, but then Wentz started to talk about how hard it is to get some privacy on the tour bus, and things went downhill from there.

Last Thursday Pete Wentz put his DJ hat on and manned the wheels of steel — or at least the iPod of plastic — for our RS Live event at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York. Gym Class Heroes were the live entertainment; watch the video for the full story on the DJ wars going on inside the Fall Out Boy camp, plus live footage of the Heroes.

What’s Will.i.am’s solution to the record industry’s woes? “Record companies should be a tour company that sends the bands on the road and still puts the fuckin’ shits on the radio.” And why hasn’t today’s music stoked a real revolution? “There’s things for people to rebel and revolt about, but people ain’t revolting and rebelling because there’s no leaders.” Perhaps most controversially (and confusingly), Will declares that soon the lines between genres will totally disappear because “As much as racism still exists today, people don’t care. There’s no racism amongst people. There’s racism amongst corporations and what corporations think people want to buy.” Check out more of Will’s musings on the state of hip-hop and how the industry adapted to the eight-track (but not yet the Internet) by checking out his future of music interview, one of our series of Q&As with folks like Gerard Way and Marilyn Manson from our current Fortieth Anniversary issue, right here.

Does music have a social responsibility? Mary J. Blige tackled the question as part of our interviews about the future of music for our current issue. “From day one, I’ve been singing songs about women,” Blige says. “It’s my responsibility to walk what I’m talking about and say, ‘Okay, if I’m screaming about confidence, then I’ve got to be confident,’ because it’s a different job for me, it’s a different thing.” For more of Blige’s Q&A, click here, and for interviews with Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, Marilyn Manson, Gerard Way and more, click here.

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• Exclusive Audio: Mary J. Blige Tells It to Us Straight

• Marilyn Manson: “I Can’t Ever Consider Myself a Nihilist”
• My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way: “Even I Miss Going to the Record Shop”

A new documentary, “Rolling Stone: Voice of Our Generation,” is hitting PBS this month; it’s hosted by Paul Shaffer and features interview footage with RS founder and editor Jann S. Wenner, along with clips of many of the artists who’ve made the cover over the years. Check out this snippet, featuring the Police, Bruce Springsteen and U2. “Voice of Our Generation” airs tomorrow on WLIW (channel 21) in New York and nationwide next week.

We talked to a whole passel of artists for our special section on the future of music this issue, including Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance, Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and Bono. Now check out out this chat with Cee-Lo of Gnarls Barkley on why hip-hop is like a kit these days, and where technology is driving the music biz.

Twenty-one artists from Chester Bennington to Jeff Tweedy weighed in with their views on the future of music for Rolling Stone’s current issue. As a bonus, we’ve got a Q&A with Marilyn Manson, who told RS why he’s a glass-half-full guy: “Ultimately, because I’m an artist, I can’t ever consider myself a nihilist, so I suppose I’m optimistic,” he says. “We’re idealistic people who want to spend our time putting ideas into the world, which ends up fucking us over. I hate to play the martyr, but someone has to [laughs].” Click here to read the full interview, and here to check out our other Q&As with Cee-Lo, Mary J. Blige and more.

Reminder: our entire current issue, the third of our Fortieth Anniversary series, is available as a digital edition right HERE. That means full interviews with Bono, Al Gore, George Clooney, Chris Rock, William Gibson, and Meryl Streep are just a click away, as are Q&As with Justin Timberlake, John Mayer and many more.

[Sponsored by LG]

For the third installment of our Fortieth Anniversary issues, we’re featuring audio excerpts and extended interviews from notable artists, politicians, scientists and visionaries as they discuss the world they helped shape and the future.

In his interview with Anthony DeCurtis, Dave Matthews discusses the role music can play in social change, what public figures he finds most inspiring and whether he is optimistic about the future. In this exclusive audio excerpt, Matthews talks about whether albums are the thing of the past, and what the future holds for music.

As a bonus, we have Microsoft guru and one of the world’s richest men (and most giving philanthropists), Bill Gates, who sat down with Jeff Goodell to examine whether the future turned out how Gates had predicted it in the Sixties, why Gates got into computers, and his charity work in Africa. In this exclusive audio clip, Gates talks about the biggest problem the most intelligent minds of our era should address.

Click here to listen to both audio excerpts. To read the entire digital version of the new issue, click here.

As you may have noticed, the enormous third installment of our fortieth anniversary issues is now on newsstands. But you’re at work, and you can’t kick back and read the magazine at your desk without your boss making an example of you in front of your co-workers. Well, now you can. Rolling Stone is pleased to present our very first “digital edition” of the issue. Now you can read the entire issue page-to-page, cover-to-cover, without looking like a slacker at your job. So downsize the spreadsheets and flip through new interviews from Bono, Bill Clinton, Bruce Springsteen, twenty-one of the biggest indie-rock stars and many more, simply by clicking HERE.

[Sponsored by LG]

For our third Fortieth Anniversary issue, Rolling Stone is featuring audio excerpts from our interviews with notable artists, politicians, scientists and visionaries as they discuss the world they helped shape and the future. To hear Bruce Springsteen talk about his influences, Bill Clinton discuss the future problems facing this nation and more from Dave Matthews, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Bono and others, be sure to check out this special section right here.