Singer/songwriter Lady GaGa appears on the cover of the current issue of Rolling Stone. The cover is shot by photographer David LaChapelle. David LaChapelle has shot many Rolling Stone covers, is known for his bright colors and elaborate sets, and started in photography taking naked pictures of club kids. Lady GaGa went to an Upper West Side high school and became a New York club kid. Maybe I am biased because I enjoy Lady GaGa’s work and I enjoy David LaChapelle’s work and I’ve spent a fair amount of time inside edgy nightclubs, but I don’t get what all the fuss is about.

Rolling Stone has certainly run nakeder covers than the Lady GaGa one. Anyone remember the full nude of model Laetitia Casta on a bed of petals? It is not like you’d find artistic nudes likes these on PukingOnPenis.com. Seriously don’t click that, but you get what I mean. Today, in a world where all sorts of depravity is a click away, why does a teensy bit of authentic club culture make so many people hyperventilate?

Although a certain sort of bohemian club culture has existed since time immemorial and that artistic counterculture has always made some people uncomfortable, is it really that big a deal? Or is the problem that we have come to expect pop stars to be the best-looking possible actresses hired by management teams with songwriters and stylists and something which came about more organically now seems wrong? Lady GaGa is widely credited as having written on songs for Akon, Britney Spears, Fergie, Pussycat Dolls, and oddly enough New Kids on the Block. Although I’m not sure how or if Lady GaGa is credited in ASCAP, I’d be happier if I could find her songwriting credits. Still, I tend to believe that she actually writes songs. Even if you don’t find bluffin with one’s muffin as entertaining as I do, surely the combination of artist and performer is still better than solely artist or solely performer. At the very least, it is not worse, is it?

From my point of view, the most controversial thing about the David LaChapelle Rolling Stone cover featuring Lady GaGa is that New York fashionistas credit the whole bubble outfit look to designer Hussein Chalayan. Although neither a bubble dress or bubble corset appear on the web site for Hussein Chalayan’s 2007 collections, I’ve seen credible photos from his runway show stuff for that year. The designer was reportedly disappointed that Lady GaGa knocked off his design, rather than wearing the original.

So, if you’d like to recreate Lady GaGa’s Rolling Stone look, you now know where to commission your own bubble outfit, if you don’t feel crafty enough to make one. Then all you have to do is round up a bunch of your naked and barely-clad friends and get wet and messy. Photos optional.

Rolling Stone #1080 is on newsstands now.

The new issue of Marquis is hitting European newsstands now. This makes twenty-seven or twenty-eight issues in a row of Marquis, the highest circulation glossy fetish magazine in the world, which have featured work by yours truly and Forrest Black. As you probably know, Forrest Black and I of course do the Big in America column.

For Marquis No. 45, Big in America was a spotlight on fetish photographer Larry Bradby. I first met Larry Bradby at the Richmond, Virginia home of fetish model Mistress Kali. Mistress Kali modeled back when everyone was still shooting film, so her name is perhaps not as known outside of the DC/Baltimore/Richmond corridor, but she was very compelling. In my own personal experience, a photograph Forrest Black and I shot of Mistress Kali ran in Tattoo Savage and readers wrote in to say they were getting our photo of her inked permanently into their flesh. That is how compelling Mistress Kali was. If digital photography and the internet had really been around then, she would definitely be even more well known. Larry says of Mistress Kali, “I owe my fetish photography success to her. She was the one that pushed me into fetish photography. Being a very good friend, I took her advice and put all of her ideas on film with my Pentax ME Super.”

Larry Bradby’s first big photo credit was, poetically enough, when he won the Marquis readers contest back in Marquis No. 11. Blue Blood has just inked a deal with Larry Bradby to run a huge number of erotic sets by him on BlueBlood.com. You all can expect the first one of sexy Nicotine, who you all know from the forums, to post this week.

Blue Blood hottie April Flores is on the cover of the new issue of Bizarre. First, Topco does a mold of her to make a lovedoll and now this! The curvaceous cutie writes in her blog:

“I woke up to wonderful news that I am on the cover of the latest issue of Bizarre Magazine!!! What a wonderful honor it is especially since I’ve been a fan of that magazine for the past 7 years. :)

I can’t wait to see the pictures inside. Bizarre was wonderful to me! They flew me out to Montreal to shoot with photographer Martin Perreault. The theme of the shoot was all things sweet. I loved it! They had various candies and lollipops for me to suck on and play with. There was a wall of pink and blue balloons, and another set up with bubbles flying all around me. My favorite set up was with me laying on the floor with 6000 candies covering and surrounding my body! It was like a little girl’s dream come true and I kept getting distracted by the cuteness of it all.

I’ve been waiting to see this issue for months now and I am just bursting with excitement. I am off to my local newstand to buy a copy….. YAY!!!”

One thing I have to admit I am troubled by, however, is what a big deal so many people make about April’s weight. It doesn’t take an open-minded person to find April Flores hot. She is hot. So I am kind of sick of folks congratulating themselves for finding her hot even though she is plus-sized. It just still strikes me as prejudiced for someone who is not particularly kinked for big girls to make a gigantic thing of finding a big fine girl attractive.

Anyway, congrats to April Flores for making the cover of Bizarre. Blue Blood girls are covergirls.

Finding great new music is always a good thing. It seems like it should happen all the time in this glorious digital age we are living in. I mean, artists can go straight to fans without the intervention of stodgy labels and, because everybody can post their opinion online, the fans can be the ones to say whether they like something or not. That is the utopian ideal there anyway.

When people actually go looking for music today, I think it is actually often more difficult to find what one likes. Somehow modern distribution has made it so that a very few recording artists sell record-breaking amounts of swag and tunes. Many thousands of musicians who would once only have been heard by friends can now get out to hundreds of people who appreciate what they do. But the midlist bands seem to have disappeared. Where are the solid enjoyable bands, in the genres I enjoy, who once could definitely have charted high, but maybe wouldn’t be #1 on the charts?

Without major label support, mid-sized high quality bands can get really lost in a sea of user-generated content on sites like MySpace and YouTube. MySpace, for example, allows fan profiles, so NIN shows up five times on the first page of top industrial bands on MySpace. I enjoy Nine Inch Nails, but what if I am looking for similar bands I am not familiar with yet? More on YouTube in a moment.

Given how popular music magazines once were on the newsstand, why are music websites not more popular online? I know one thing I personally do not like is that most sites devoted to music are owned by one or another record label. While I realize that there are only really six significant media companies in the world and all, these record label-run music sites seem to only cover what is on their own labels. I do not know whether they think it would be unethical to seriously comment on music from multiple labels or whether they are competitive, but there are rarely reviews. There are independent exceptions to this, but most of them are very limited in reach. Generally, the only music news is about who is sleeping with who, who is in rehab, and who is having legal problems for their temper. If anyone has any good recommendations for music sites, I’d love to see them.

I admit that I usually come across new music in one of three ways. Number one, I get a press kit about a band. Number two, said new music is done by a friend of mine or occasionally a friend of a friend. Number three, I see a band play live with another band I already like or found out about via getting a press kit or a friend being in the band.

Today, I thought I’d cruise around YouTube to see if I could find some new bands to enjoy. I quickly discovered that there is no goth-industrial category on YouTube. The options, are rock, pop, indie & alternative, rap & hip-hop, R&B & soul, country & folk, blues, electronic, jazz, classical, world music, religious, and lastly more/other mostly for random soundtrack stuff and nonspecific lip-syncing. It is not terribly uncommon for there to either be no goth-industrial category or for a site like MySpace to have one category for gothic and another for industrial. But YouTube has no punk category either and that seems pretty odd.

So I guess the indie & alternative category is the one goth-industrial music videos would fall under. When I look at the most popular indie & alternative music videos of all time on YouTube, Marilyn Manson does make the front page with “Heart Shaped Glasses“. Yes, I know that if I were a “real” goth, then I would hate Marilyn Manson and say his music doesn’t count. Yes, I know that if I were a “real” Manson fan, then my favorite Marilyn Manson album would not be Mechanical Animals. Yes, I’ve heard that Marilyn Manson may have a bug up his butt about Blue Blood for not covering him way back when or something, but sometimes a PR agency called Nasty Little Man won’t get on everyone’s good side and I really did not care for the first track on Smells Like Children. I would have checked out the others, but NLM sent me a cassette instead of a CD at a time when CDs were the norm. But I digress. If one wishes to debate whether Marilyn Manson’s artistic and political motivations come from the same creative place as Nine Inch Nails and Ministry and Combichrist, that is certainly a discussion and a half. But I’m pretty sure that finding Manson in the indie & alternative category on YouTube means that is the cat where goth-industrial bands would be, if they had any traction on YouTube.

Clocking in higher-ranked than “Heart Shaped Glasses” are My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Boys Like Girls, Boys Like Girls, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Good Charlotte. For me, My Chemical Romance has their moments and I like some of the later styling on their lead singer, and Lord knows not enough bands dress like that today, but I would never have expected that the most watched indie & alternative music video ever would be a song about fearing teenagers by Warner Bros recording artist My Chemical Romance with 54,130,096 views. I occasionally slow down the TiVo fast forward on video countdown shows on FUSE to watch Fall Out Boy videos. I find the stuff by Universal Music Group recording artist Fall Out Boy much more visually interesting than most of what plays on those shows, but they seem to view the world as a bleak place where nobody has anybody else’s back so you’d better just look out for number one. I find Fall Out Boy’s worldview negative in a depressing way. I’m not familiar with Sony recording artist Boys Like Girls. I enjoy Sony recording artist Good Charlotte. I’ve been ironically amused watching them evolve from “Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous” not understanding how any successful musician could complain in the Rolling Stone to “The River” where they realize that Hollywood tinsel is not genuine precious metal.

I suspect that, if I were to go down the whole all time countdown for indie & alternative on YouTube, I’d be seeing a lot of Warner, Universal, and Sony. This is not to say that tools like MySpace and YouTube can not greatly increase the social and professional reach of the individual and the little guy. They can and they do. They just also increase the reach of the big guy.

I’m okay with this. I’ve worked on a lot of successful web sites and magazines, so it makes sense that I’ve learned some things along the way and would be likely to be successful with future media projects. A record label which has worked on a huuuuuuuuge number of successful bands has probably learned some things along the way and would be likely to be successful launching future bands.

But I am troubled by the big guy pretending to be the indie little guy to make sales. Sometimes fans seem to have the notion that, because modern emo music deals with themes of feeling like the underdog, then emo bands must all be underdogs. I know that, in the movies, audiences are supposed to want the person who has worked hard all their life and always been successful to fail and the longshot who just started training to succeed. News bulletin: Warner Bros, Universal Music Group, and Sony BMG are not longshot underdogs looking for their first big break.

Maybe, if consumers did not ask large media conglomerates to be misleading and present faux underdogs, then they would not. Maybe it would be helpful if record labels and bands approached music press like professionals. Maybe it would be helpful if music journalists behaved like professionals instead of like envious gossipy children or corrupt businesspeople. Then it might be easier to find new good music. Or maybe humans are just evolutionarily incapable of adapting to the intense infostream of the internet and we are going to go the way of the dinosaurs and get extinct now.

Sorta felt like listening to some cool new music tonight. Oh well. I wrote this instead. (Note to illuminati: it might be advisable to send me some good new stuff to enjoy (or a gold parachute), before I give all the secrets away.)

Speaking of Rachel Kramer Bussel, some of you who get various newsletters already know this, but Rachel did a really kickass interview with yours truly for the October 2007 issue of Penthouse Variations. It was a really good interview because Rachel asked really thought-provoking questions.

Oddly enough, you can order a subscription to Variations through Amazon, but you need to hit the newsstand in the next couple of days to get the October 2007 issue with the BlueBlood.com photos and Rachel’s and my brilliant words. Due to the way newsstand distro works, November starts the first week of October. Sort of. Then again, if you end up with the November 2007 issue of Penthouse Variations, then you will have the lovely Justine Joli on the cover and that is always a good thing too. The October edition says “DEEP INSIDE BLUE BLOOD’S CUTTING EDGE GOTH SCENE” on the cover, though, so you should be able to pick it out okay.