Smashing Pumpkins name new album

Smashing Pumpkins

For the first Smashing Pumpkins album in seven years, frontman Billy Corgan is aiming high. Corgan and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain, the only two original members involved with the band's reunion, said today that their forthcoming new album will be called Zeitgeist. In a message sent to the band's MySpace friends, the group also said the album will hit stores July 7, an odd choice given that it is a Saturday, and records usually hit stores on Tuesdays. Corgan and Chamberlain have been working in the studio with producers Roy Thomas Baker and Terry Date on the first album under the Pumpkins name since 2000's MACHINA/The Machines of God. As previously reported, the band has booked a handful of European live dates this summer.

Urban sues man with same name

Kidman and Urban

Country singer Keith Urban has filed a lawsuit against a New Jersey-based oil painter of the same name, claiming that the lesser-known Keith Urban's Web site infringes on trademark and cyber-squatting laws. In a complaint filed in US District Court in Nashville, Tennessee, the country star claims the painter's Web site is being used "in a manner likely to deceive the public into believing that the Web site has a connection to Plaintiff that does not exist." Urban, who married Nicole Kidman last year and who recently ended a stint in rehab for alcohol abuse, wants the other Web site to be shut down and its domain name transferred to his ownership. He also seeks unspecified monetary damages.

London museum holds Kylie exhibit

Kylie Minogue

Following a year that saw her successfully battle breast cancer, Aussie pop singer Kylie Minogue is now the subject of an exhibit at London's the Victoria and Albert Museum. The exhibit, the first the museum has ever dedicated to a pop star, drew record crowds to its opening, features a host of outfits worn by the pop diva, including leopard-skin catsuits, pink-bejeweled corsets, and the overalls she wore in 1988 as Charlene in the Australian soap opera Neighbours, which first propelled her to fame. "It is a very strange feeling," the 38-year-old Minogue told Reuters. "I am honored and overwhelmed." Minogue was forced to abandon a world tour in 2005 after being diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent successful surgery in Melbourne in May 2005 and a course of chemotherapy in Paris, where her former boyfriend, French actor Olivier Martinez, has a home.

Dupri tapped to head urban music at Island

Janet Jackson and Jermaine Dupri

After a sudden departure from Virgin Records, producer/music mogul Jermaine Dupri has landed at Island Records, where he will be president of urban music, the label said today. Dupri, who left Virgin following poor sales of 20 Y.O., the latest release by his girlfriend Janet Jackson, stepped down as president of urban music at Virgin last October. In his new post, Dupri will report directly to Island Def Jam Music Group Chairman Antonio "L.A." Reid. "Jermaine's career has grown from strength to strength over the years, as a producer and songwriter and recording artist in his own right, as a respected label executive and entrepreneur, and as a highly esteemed developer of new talent," Reid said in a statement. "His deep ties to Atlanta's creative R&B and hip-hop community have been the springboard to working with the greatest names in contemporary music."

Gary Glitter sees sentence reduced

Gary Glitter

A Vietnamese court reduced former British rocker Gary Glitter's child molestation sentence Wednesday, cutting his three-year term by three months as part of a nationwide Lunar New Year prison amnesty, a judge said. Glitter, convicted of molesting two Vietnamese girls, will now be released in August 2008, said Tran Thi Thien Huong, a judge on the deciding panel. As previously reported, Vietnam traditionally reduces the sentences of inmates with good prison records just before Tet, as the Lunar New Year is known in Vietnam. The 62-year-old Glitter, whose real name is Paul Francis Gadd, was convicted in March 2006 of committing "obscene acts with children." The incidents involved two girls, ages 10 and 11, from the southern coastal city of Vung Tau.