Right away, it's easy to see something's bothering Kid Cudi on Man On The Moon II: The Legend Of Mr. Rager. There's the Cleveland native's troubled slouch on the album cover, and his drab reflections throughout the recording. He's crying for an intervention.

But just as suddenly, Cudi shrugs you off with nonchalant arrogance, and you realize that he's OK, that the drugs he's taking are all in a day's work.

That's cool, right?

Maybe.

Honestly, he doesn't know.

Overall, Man On The Moon II is an irony-heavy, disoriented, and brooding project that encourages listeners to remain positive, chastises caregivers for giving a damn, and romanticizes various pharmaceutical addictions. Ultimately, the rhythms are the showcase, as Cudi's mumbled musings and tone-deaf babbling make for an insufferable product that is best served during weed time at your supplier's house.

Not surprisingly, the second Man On The Moon installment is much darker than its predecessor, due mostly to Cudi's much publicized struggles with cocaine use. In June, he was arrested in Manhattan for possession of a controlled substance. Then, there was the spat with Wale, who referenced in a freestyle an altercation between Cudi and a fan. Cudi called the rhyme "simple," and Wale quipped on Twitter about the artist's addiction to "liquid cocaine."

In his own sarcastic way, it sounds like Cudi is trying to atone on the quirky "Revofev," a groggy nursery rhyme that belongs in an R-rated Sesame Street. "Wake up, things might get rough/No need to stress, keeps you down too much," Cudi sings. The artist quickly shifts from penitence to indifference on the casual "Don't Play This Song," featuring Mary J. Blige, which is driven by scant drums and edgy synths. Here, Cudi and Blige sing: "People think they're really being helpful/By telling me, 'Please be careful,' yeah right." Other songs are more direct, like "Marijuana," for instance, which finds Cudi referencing other noted weed smokers over a piano laced track that summons the musical spirit of fellow Cleveland act Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.

History shows that the best artists wear emotions on their sleeves. They often tap into bottled experiences to present brutally honest portraits of the people they see in the mirror each day. John Lennon's tortured early solo work is one of the best examples of such aspirations. Nowadays, Cudi collaborator Kanye West has similar goals—though you wish he'd shut up more when he's outside the recording studio. On Man On The Moon II, Cudi emits that same raw honesty, presenting a no-frills look into his warped temperament. But unlike other artists who bare their souls, Cudi's still might be too fragile for public dissection.

Beatles fans are all familiar with the "Paul is dead" urban legend. The rumors, which surfaced in September of 1969, claimed that Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a double. Despite the fact that McCartney gave an interview to Life magazine in November 1969 stating that he was "very much alive," the whisperings of his death 44 years ago have never quite died down.

Labor Day weekend, the film Paul McCartney Really is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison makes its East Coast debut in National Harbor at Abbey Road on the River, which bills itself as the world's largest Beatles festival.

The film starts in the summer of 2005, when a package, sent from London with no return address, arrived at the Hollywood offices of Highway 61 Entertainment. Inside were two cassette tapes dated December 30, 1999 and labeled “The Last Testament of George Harrison.” The voice relates that McCartney was killed in a car crash in November of 1966. British intelligence, MI5, forced the Beatles to cover up McCartney's death and replace him with a double in order to prevent mass suicides of Beatles fans. "Harrison," who died in 2001, also claims that John Lennon was assassinated in 1980 because he threatened to expose the cover-up.

Reaction to the trailer on YouTube has been decidedly skeptical. A sampling:

"this is incredibly disrespectful to george harrison, may he rest in peace."

"What a load of shit! that doesnt sound a thing like george harrison!"

"Any real Beatles fan will know that is certainly not George Harrison's voice."

The unauthorized documentary, which, according to the press release, "may prove to be the most important document in rock and roll history," debuts Friday, September 3, with a screening and Q&A session with director Joel Gilbert. The film will subsequently be on view Saturday, September 4 and Sunday, September 5.

Morning, readers.

*John Prine gets a lot of love on a new star-packed tribute record called Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine. Conor Oberst, Deer Tick, My Morning Jacket, and the DBT are all, apparently, implicated. Sounds like a recipe for awesome. (Via Pitchfork, which also has the track listing.)

*The Independent zings the Tories ("will there be a new era of protest music?") and also zings Brian May, who, after a dispute between nine-month-old twins and a malevolent fox, sided with the fox.

*THE DEPARTMENT OF THE ONLY TWITTERER THAT MATTERERS: Dude's been on a tear recently. Like, mocking people who use lame genre signifiers, or noting certain ironies embedded in Pride Weekend, or maybe even using the unlikely contraction, "I'ma." Sure, maybe he doesn't write in our Curtain Calls section any more, but who said prolificacy had to come with semicolons? Resistance is futile. FOLLOW THIS MAN.

*...aaand if you don't have a Google alert set up for the words "modest," "mouse," or "Mayor of Portland," you probably missed the Mercury's item on Alexander Rokoff, an artist who painted a portrait of Isaac Brock and then submitted it to Sam Adams (really his name!), the august Mayor of Portland. Whether Mr. Adams is a fan of Modest Mouse, it is not for us to speculate. But in the unlikely event that the portrait grows ever more sallow & depraved-looking with each passing year...well, we'd have an explanation for Brock's perma-semi-youthfulness. Non?

*Tonight in City Lights: "One Life: Echoes of Elvis" at the National Portrait Gallery. I wrote a brief preview of the exhibit and should apologize to any readers confused as to why my blurb concerns John Lennon as much as it does Elvis Presley.

Sorry.

Photograph of fox by Darrow Montgomery

*Sundance starts today! Briefly noted: Film on Proposition 8, Mormons screens in Utah(!); Banksy paints the town in anticipation of Exit Through the Giftshop; Nowhere Boy, film on John Lennon's adolescence, to screen (video); this year's judges include Karyn Kusama and Parker Posey; Snoop Dogg, Nas, and Slightly Stoopid to perform; James Franco plays Allen Ginsberg in Howl (more of a stretch than David Cross, methinks); the Boston Globe tackles last year's best shorts; the Salt Lake City Tribune spends 9 graphs explaining why we shouldn't try to predict "buzz" films, predicts 6 "buzz films."

*ON SALE NOW: Hitherto unseen Lucian Freud self-portrait now on market. And it's a steal: "It is only the third time a self-portrait of Freud, now 87, has become available through an auction and it is expected to fetch between £3m and £4m when Sotheby’s sells it next month," the Independent reports.

*MGMT releases new record, Celebration, sans single. "Does this make the band the new Led Zeppelin?" asks the Guardian. And less irrelevantly: Will this shut Celebration out of iTunes?

*After Billboard predicted last week that Vampire Weekend's Contra was "on track to have U.S. No. 1 album," certain individuals declared the "mainstreaming of indie" complete. Now, the Times reports that the band's second record has moved 124,000 units, seizing the number one spot over...Susan Boyle, who sold ca. 77k. Trailing those two is Ke$ha (67k). Someone get these three onstage together—we could smash more YouTube records than those baby videos!

*The LA Times' Todd Martin declares Eminem's Relapse a shoo-in for the Grammy; 94% of readers agree, putting Em over Common, Q-Tip, Mos Def, and Flo Rida. If Martin's right, I'll be about as bummed as I could be about any Grammy. (Which is to say, mildly; my take on the record here.)

*In this week’s paper, hitting streets today: Reviews of Imperial China, Major Stars, Myra Melford, Creation (the new Chas. Darwin biopic starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly), and a three-fer of theater reviews: Stick Fly, In the Red and Brown Water, and I Am My Own Wife.

- Before the Washington Times said it will kill its Sunday edition, the paper announced the end of its Sunday comics page, ComicsDC and the Daily Cartoonist both note. Says a Daily Cartoonist commenter: "Having first scrapped the intentionally humorous part of their Sunday coverage, they’re now dropping the unintentionally funny stuff, too."

- D.C.-based lo-fi label Underwater Peoples is dropping its free winter compilation on Christmas Day. Check out the label's Sawyer Carter Jacobs making the announcement—from Vietnam:

- Regulators approved the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger in the U.K., while the U.S. Department of Justice should finish its review of the proposal soon. (Meanwhile, opponents of the merger launched this Web site last week.)

- Lists! The year's biggest art auctions! Actual sales figures of albums on Pitchfork's Best of 2009 list! The most memorable critical dustups! (This last one via Roger Ebert's Twitter, which has become as essential as his wonderful blog.)

- On song covers.

- John Lennon's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is missing. Hardly as bad as stealing the Auschwitz sign, but still...

- Venomous turkeys! Possibly related: Half of Sweden watches a Donald Duck special every Christmas Eve.

That's all! Have a good day! Follow me on Twitter!

The Last Waltz is a remarkable film, but it shouldn’t take a Scorsese to make a concert movie that repays repeat viewing. Even in a year that offered marketers many routes to consumers’ wallets—the 40th anniversary of Woodstock! the eighth anniversary of Bonnaroo!—there were few glimmers of hope—and enough turkeys to sate the enhanced appetites of audiences at Bonnaroo, Gathering of the Vibes, and Burning Man combined.

He looks at newly released—and rereleased—footage of John Lennon, Woodstock, Otis Redding, and more. Read the full article here.

Also! According to this blog post on Slate, the alien anatomy in Avatar is pretty whack. Key paragraph:

Finally, about those boobs: It's good that they're purely decorative. Since the Na'vi seem to have zero fat on their bodies, those mammary glands almost certainly don't work. Relatedly, the fact that the Na'vi aren't placental mammals makes the presence of bellybuttons something of a curiosity.

Finally, about those boobs: It's good that they're purely decorative. Since the Na'vi seem to have zero fat on their bodies, those mammary glands almost certainly don't work. Relatedly, the fact that the Na'vi aren't placental mammals makes the presence of bellybuttons something of a curiosity.

- Our 2009 Music in Review issue is on stands today! On Arts Desk, we'll be highlighting articles from it throughout the day. Also, now I don't feel bad that the rest of the roundup only contains music stuff.

- Local music! Electro-indie-pop outfit Bluebrain just posted its first music video online (the group has a pair of EPs out now; the album drops in February). The video has lots of weird, digitally animated jellyfish and snakes and, I dunno, is probably the type of thing James Cameron's animation people cook up when they're bored on a Sunday:

- A once-lost interview with John Lennon, from 1968.

That's all I've got! I'm listening to Roxy Music all morning! Follow me on Twitter!

...or, as numerous rock critics as well as the PR wing of Shout! Factory would have us believe, was it the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival in September, 1969?

Yesterday, Shout! rereleased D.A. Pennebaker's film of the Toronto concert (it's been off the shelves since BMG pulled a 2002 iteration), and in a wise marketing move the company has answered the above question with stirring finality: this concert, they assure us, "signalled the end of the Beatles."

Pennebaker knows something about milestones and spent some of his best reel on them, including the game-changing vérité of Monterey Pop and, before that, Don't Look Back, the finest portrait of Dylan ever filmed. One question, then, is why the Toronto film fails so miserably. (Hint: it's cuz Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and others get little to no screentime. Also because of Ono.) But the real question (if we are to indulge Shout!), is: the Beatles broke up for this?

The first segment of the concert plays to Pennebaker's strengths—a lip-service sequence dedicated to the rock 'n' roll legends who formed the pantheon of Lennon's youth. As Bo Diddley's off-camera voice bellows, "We gonna take you back to the year 1955," Pennebaker inches you from Lennon's motorcade to the bikers to the exultant hippie crowd, as Diddley and his co. launch into one of his eponymous anthems. Next is Jerry Lee Lewis with a flip "Hound Dog." (One shot catches the country-roller awkwardly craning his leg around the mic stand to play the upper register with his cowboy boot. Magnificent.) Available elsewhere, but not on this disc, is Chuck Berry's performance, which, according to Robert Christgau, "several experienced Berry-watchers adjudged one of his finest shows ever." Another highlight: Little Richard striding out, caked in make-up, grinning suggestively under his pencil-thin mustache and reveling in his return to rock 'n' roll after remembering that it'd always paid better than Gospel, anyway. Good performances all, but tossed off like a prelude—because, you know, this isn't a festival film; it's a film about John Lennon.

Perhaps as a transitional gesture, easing out of throwback rock 'n' roll into avant garde strokes, Lennon begins his set with covers from the Beatles' very early setlists: "Blue Suede Shoes," "Money," and "Dizzy Miss Lizzy." A lack of mirth is apparent from the outset: John hadn't given a concert since the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, and Toronto was his first performance without the Beatles since the '50s...besides which, symptoms of heroin withdrawal had kept him retching for hours leading up to the performance. (Eric Clapton, who flew over to play solos, found himself similarly afflicted.) Next is the new material: "Yer Blues," during which Ono appears onstage, huddles under a sheet, and lets out possessed, Sybilline caterwauling, which she continues into "Cold Turkey." "Primal Scream"? Hogwash; she sounds like a dying sheep. (During "Cold Turkey," even Lennon looks annoyed.)

Thanks to poor lighting and the fact that half of the musicians were too strung out to be having fun, Pennebaker doesn't have much to work with as far as stage presence, and the camerawork suffers accordingly. The homespun, freehand shooting that allowed Monterey Pop's intimate sequences—no fixed camera could ever keep Jimi Hendrix caged in the frame—feels simply sloppy here.

Not as sloppy, though, as the band's indulgences towards Ono—more shrieking through "Give Peace a Chance" (the words to which Lennon half-mumbles; "This is what we came here for, really.... I've forgotten all those bits in between, but I know the chorus," he explains to the audience). Then "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)," a song with more words in its title than it has lyrics, and "John, John (Let's Hope for Peace)," the kind of atonal arrhythmia that passed for "experimentation" on Two Virgins with none of the discipline John would soon apply to his viscerality on Plastic Ono Band. Clapton, dutiful, scrubs his guitar strings against the amplifier to create hissing feedback under Ono's wailing. (The artless distorted theatrics are arguably more interesting from a musical standpoint than Ono's strident "self-expression.")

And into this one, 10-plus-minute "song," any of the early rock 'n' rollers who open the film could have fit half a dozen performances of their economic, knockout singles—the songs that liberated Lennon from his Liverpool fastness in the first place. When Lennon traipses off stage to light a cigarette, leaving his guitar propped against an amp to deliver feedback even after he's gone, it's a big (if inadvertent; remember that whole "YOU are the Plastic Ono Band!" come-on) middle finger brandished at the audience. Forget the Beatles—in Toronto, in 1969, John Lennon abandoned rock 'n' roll.

Lennon's eventual cold-turkey success at quitting heroin was a rejection of the self-destructive behavior that had darkened his last years with the Beatles, and a springboard into Primal Scream therapy and a marriage that doubled as so much pop-psych performance art. But the Beatles' breakup was far from cold turkey—really, this concert is no more useful a milestone than any other Fab Four flare-up one can pinpoint, post-Pepper. Marketing aside, though, Live in Toronto '69 draws a clear line in the sand: This is the sort of rock travesty Paul would've had to stomach if the Beatles were to abide.

"Trying to show a link between rock stars and drugs is like trying to make a link between mouths and tooth decay," writes R.U. Sirius—the nom de fume of 10 Zen Monkeys' Ken Goffman. This is but one of the many mangy comparisons that frontload Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars on Drugs*, and when you skim the book's list-heavy 200+ pages, tooth decay starts to sound like an attractive alternative. OK, maybe that's not entirely fair—there's some funny writing amid the run-on analogies, and a few of the anecdotes are worth their weight in angel dust. Hell, it'd probably make a nice coffee table book, if you're David Crosby.

To save you the buyer's remorse, here are our favorite factoids, trivia, apocrypha, or whatever:

• Pro-bullet goblin/chemical puritan Ted Nugent claims that his strategy for avoiding Vietnam service involved shooting meth and relieving himself in his pants. "[At the] army physical, Nugent was so sick that he passed out during his blood test.... And when it came time to give them some excrement, he got it all over his hands and arm." The most interesting part here is that the army requested a stool sample.
• Courtney Love on motherhood: "If there ever was a time when people should do drugs, it's when they're pregnant. Because it sucks." Ugh.
• Robert Hunter, in his 1984 "10 Commandments of Rock & Roll": "Destroy yourself physically and mentally and insist that all true brothers do likewise as an expression of unity."
• Some story about Grace Slick bringing Abbie Hoffman as a date to Nixon's White House with, like, many micrograms of LSD hidden under her fingernail (that's where they lose me, honestly) in the hopes of spiking Nixon's sweet tea. Mission Not Accomplished.
• John Lennon wrote "Come Together" for Timothy Leary's unsuccessful run against Ronald Reagan in California's 1968 gubernatorial race.
• Steely Dan took its name from a dildo in William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.

And that's about it. Save your $12.95 ($15.45 in Canada!) and spend it on one of the small baggies from your guy across the street.

*The worst example, as Mike Riggs has rightly observed, comes two paragraphs to the south: "And so, like the proverbial girl with her finger in the dike while ripped to the tits on X, Vitamin K, and a couple of Vicodin while trying to play guitar during a guest appearance on Ellen, I have attempted to take a vast ocean of rock-and-roll drug data and reduce it down to a book form that you can be amused, upset, offended, and/or informed by."

It's heavy as a motherfucker, the screaming made me cry, and there's not a smidgeon of electronica.