Answer: however long it’s taken Guns N’ Roses to record Chinese Democracy. Today is the day that many never thought they’d see in their lifetime – the day that the first single from Chinese Democracy by Guns N’ Roses got officially played on the radio.

There’s a link to the song – also entitled Chinese Democracy – after the jump, but if you can’t be bothered, just imagine the background music from a 1980s regional ITV show about speedboats, but with a painfully long muttered intro that lasts for about an hour and doesn’t really go anywhere performed by a Stars In Their Eyes Axl Rose impersonator. Dr Pepper for everyone!

Chinese Democracy by Guns N’ Roses was always going to be Axl Rose’s masterpiece. For close to 15 years now, he’s hunkered down in his studio, tweaking and primping his opus. Guest stars like Brian May, Shaquille O’Neal and the last 18 line-ups of Guns N’ Roses have been hired and fired. Even before a note of it was heard by anyone, it was clear enough that Chinese Democracy was going to be the most long-awaited overblown directionless muddle ever recorded.

And now it’s time to see exactly how much of a let-down Chinese Democracy by Guns N’ Roses is going to be. After countless decade-long set-backs, Chinese Democracy is being released next month and, as is traditional, it is being preceded by a single, which is also called Chinese Democracy.

People, that single got its first radio play today. Reuters reports:

The title track from the upcoming Guns N’ Roses’ album “Chinese Democracy” will be available to download by U.S. radio outlets on Wednesday. Although some album tracks leaked this summer, this is the first authorized new music from the rock band in nine years.

Since Chinese Democracy has been sweated over for so long, it’s bound to throw the entire music industry spinning off into a thrilling brand new direction or – failing that – the 37-year-old men who liked Appetite For Destruction when they were 16 will buy it, listen to it once, maybe download two songs from it onto their iPod and never listen to it again.

Which will it be? Well, why don’t you listen to Chinese Democracy by Guns N’ Roses now and find out.

What do we think of Chinese Democracy? Funny you should ask. Well, aside from the fact that a full minute of the song is wasted between the guffy scene-setting intro and the widdly-woo explosion ending, and the fact that we’re almost certain that Axl Rose is singing “All I’ve got is Princess Di” in the chorus – which is factually incorrect because all he’s actually got is a set of rubbishy ginger dreadlocks and a bit of a tummy – we’re confident in saying that Chinese Democracy is certainly one of the best songs of the year.

It’s just a shame that the year in question is 1991.

It’s true – Britney Spears’ new single got its official radio debut today, and she basically only does two things in it. First, Britney Spears just goes “Oh oh ooh ooh ah-ah-ah” over and over again like C-3PO getting a stinging nettle handjob, and secondly she says the word ‘womanizer’ 41 times in a row. We’ve forgotten what the song’s called.

So is Womanizer by Britney Spears going to be another hit? It had better be – we’ve always said that what Britney Spears is to be violently thrust into the spotlight a bit more.

We can’t overstate this enough – Britney Spears needs a hit. As things stand, Britney Spears is actually the third most famous member of the Spears family, after noted author Lynne Spears and inadvertent underage topless model Jamie-Lynn Spears.

So Britney Spears needs to do something big to reclaim her title, and not big in the ‘cut all your hair off, pretend you’re the devil and terrify your own children’ sense, either. That’s so Old Britney. And now we’ve got New Britney – a woman who can wear clothes and mumble about God. You know, like a normal person. That big something needs to be more like that, please.

And maybe it’s Womanizer, the new single from Britney Spears’ new album Circus. Just the other day we played you a clip of Womanizer that was played on a radio station unofficially and got a DJ suspended, but now the full glorious version of Womanizer by Britney Spears has been aired in America and, well, it’s sort of OK.

Sort of. Womanizer shows a daring progression in Britney Spears’ sound, and not just because she’s flagrantly pinching from Katy Perry, either. It’s her voice. Apart for the 41 instances where Britney Spears says the word ‘womanizer’ in the manner that an aggressive cyborg would say the word ‘humanoid’ right before it shot you with its eye-lasers, Britney has developed a new voice trick.

Gone is that weird throaty noise that sounded like a kitten overdosing on cough medicine and in is a new noise – one that can only be described as ‘Flipper searching for hidden uranium with a broken Geiger counter’.

It’s hard to describe, so instead have a listen to Womanizer by Britney Spears for yourself.

We’re going out on a limb here, but Womanizer could be Britney Spears’ biggest hit for years. But only so long as she doesn’t screw it all up this time by covering her lovely blonde hair up or making a tacky video about a slutty waitress or anything. E! Online reports:

Earlier this week, the pop princess shot the song’s music video at L.A. hot spot Elevate and in the kitchen of the hip eatery Takami Sushi & Robata. A source tells E! News that she dons a long black wig for the video, adding, “Britney was wearing tight leather pants and a tuxedo top and vest, and she had fake tattoos running up and down her arms.”

Oh.

Even we don’t have to go in to much detail about the potential arse-up that this could bring to the innocent people of London. Granted, there are a few cockney people like the So Solid Crew and Danny Dyer who we’d like to exterminate but that’s another kettle of onions.

We have our own plans for those individuals and don’t want Amy Winehouse to jump in and spoil our fun.

Unless you only read The Financial Times and have only stumbled upon hecklerspray through mistyping something in to Google, you won’t know who Amy Winehouse is.

In a nutshell, she’s a girl with tattoos who sings songs by other people, has her Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake locked up in prison and occasionally dabbles in drugs. Actually, the term “hunting down every dealer in London to eat up their stash of pills and powders quicker then a bear hunts down salmon” comes to mind.

So how is she getting this potential gig? Let us explain.

During the billion previous times that Amy falls over and starts dribbling up pink liquid with chunks all over herself, it’s up to her father Mitch to tell the media all about it. Was it heroin, lighter fuel, crack or some twat spiking her with ecstasy that caused this latest set back or trip to the hospital?

Whatever the case, you can rely on him – kind of like the world’s worst superhero, to deliver the news.

Obviously not immune to publicity thanks to all the speeches he’s had to give on his moronic daughter’s health, he has been offered a co-host job on BBC Radio London whilst another professional twat Danny Baker buggers off for a caravan holiday.

Frankly, we weren’t amazed to learn that he was offered the job after being a guest so many times on the show. There are other reasons, which were probably that he was a) a cheap replacement, b) someone to give live updates on Amy’s health and most likely, c) a fill in while the producers go about exploiting Barry George for airtime.

Despite being literally told to bugger off from recording studios, taking drugs or touring Amy couldn’t contain her excitement about being in our faces again. A source told Heat:

“Amy has always been nifty with the advice. Although she often gets herself into pickles, she is very honest, very caring and very perceptive when it comes to dealing with other people’s problems.”

Erm…if she’s that good then we’d like to ask a few questions on her current well-being. It’s not exactly what we’d call peachy. Skeletor-like figures and the inability to walk straight isn’t exactly the look we want to see in an agony aunt-authority.

But could you imagine the sort of advice you’d get on one of her radio spots?

Caller – “Hi, I have this small pain in my arm – what should I do about it?”

Amy – “First I’d ring Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake. If he didn’t answer I’d neck a bottle of painkillers to numb the pain. If that didn’t work, I’d down about half a bottle of vodka and see the GP in the morning.”

Nothing about Amy Winehouse causes us to bat an eyelid anymore. Like an old, crippled drunk in a pub we can say “we’ve heard all the tales.” When she releases a make believe autobiography telling her story of sharing an underground prison with an elf and a talking jar of strawberry jam caused from a drug hallucination – then we’ll get curious.

To be fair, anyone can get on the radio and offer advice to messed up kids and confused adults. Kelly Osbourne manages to scrape through the Sunday Surgery on Radio One most weeks. And she used to be addicted to drugs and booze too, so with Amy on the radio, she wouldn’t really be the first.

At the moment, drug stories are a bit boring. Well apart from the one Heath Ledger and Mary-Kate Olsen.

Wait, did we say 'unstoppably racist dimwit'? We meant 'rapier-like skewerer of societal prejudices'. You see, Don Imus is in trouble again, this time for apparently alluding to the fact that an American footballer committed lots of crimes because he's black. But Don Imus says that's not the case.

Don Imus has come forward to point out that actually he was making a sarcastic point about how suspicious policemen are of black people. He was on their side all along! So which is it – is Don Imus a racist or a sarcastic campaigner for social justice? It's too hard to decide – can't we go with 'tedious Worzel-faced old gasbag' and be done with it?

They say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit – to which we say, no it isn't. It's the highest form of wit. And nice haircut, too, granddad. But if there's anyone who can do sarcasm so perfectly it's like watching a Russian ballet master in full flight, it's Don Imus.

When it comes to sarcasm, Don Imus has got all the poise and style and flair of a Renaissance painter, of Sir Thomas Beecham midway through Berlioz's Carnaval Romain Overture, of Jesus Christ himself riding around on his special Palm Sunday donkey. Take this example of textbook sarcasm, as provided by Don Imus earlier this week when discussing an athlete who wants to drop his nickname because it reminds people that he's been arrested a lot:

"What color is he?" [Co-host] Wolf said "African-American," and Imus responded, "There you go. Now we know."

Oh that's perfect, that's so sarcastic. That's… actually, wait a minute, isn't that a bit racist? You wouldn't be the only one to think so – Don Imus has already attracted a giant shitstorm about his comments. But the problem isn't that Don Imus couldn't stop being racist if you put his willy in a mousetrap, it's that every single person who heard Don Imus is an idiot who doesn't even understand when someone's being sarcastic.

You see, Don Imus has already lost a job once because he was foolishly racist about black athletes, and he's buggered if he's going to let that happen to him again. That's why, this time, Don Imus isn't going down without a fight. Newsday reports:

During yesterday's show, Imus said the point he wanted to make was that Jones was effectively being harassed by the police, saying, "What people should be outraged about is that they arrest blacks for no reason. I mean, there's no reason to arrest this kid six times. Maybe he did something once, but everyone does something once."

Thank heavens that Don Imus has been so quick to point out something that was obviously completely true all along – it seems to have got him off the hook with his bosses at the radio station, too. Case closed.

It's just a shame that this whole sarcasm excuse explanation hadn't been thought up earlier. Just think of all the fuss that would have been avoided if Mel Gibson would have come forward right after that whole Jew-slagging arrest thing and just admitted to the world that he was really making an important pro-Israel statement via sarcasm and extensive use of the phrase 'Sugartits' all along. We don't know about you, but we'd have swum to Malibu just to hug his big adorable face.

Anyway, we're thrilled that Don Imus has decided to fight back against these new claims of racism. He really is very good at his job and a perfect model to all of God's children.

It wasn't so long ago that Don Imus was hauled from his long-running radio show in shame because he decided to tell his entire audience that a particular black female basketball team were a bunch of 'nappy-headed hos'. Although it cost him his job, this incident enlightened Don Imus to the plight of people of colour, and he vowed never to be racist again.

Unless you define 'racist' as 'appearing to imply that black people are inherently criminal', that is, in which case Don Imus might have just dropped himself in the crapper again. Will Don Imus lose yet another radio show? It doesn't matter, because so long as birds are still eating seeds from farmers' fields, Don Imus will never be fully unemployed.

If we could give celebrities one piece of advice, it'd be to think carefully before opening their mouths. Actually, thinking about it the one piece of advice we'd give Shane Ritchie is 'go and work in a shop or something', but for everyone else the thinking carefully thing holds up.

All too often celebrity careers are undone by a thoughtlessly insensitive slip of the tongue – Dog The Bounty Hunter was undone by racism, Isaiah Washington was undone by homophobia and Jerry Lewis was undone by something about illiterate faggots. But Don Imus is the daddy of being uncomfortably outspoken in public.

After the big 'nappy-headed ho' outcry got him turfed out into the radio wilderness, leaving him with nothing to do but shop for outlandishly-sized cowboy hats on eBay and claw at the barnacles that have been embedded in his face for upwards of 12 decades, Don Imus had to really search his soul. It didn't take particularly long – we hear it's not that big – but when Imus was offered a new job, he was quick to publicly explain his regret over the incident.

And Don Imus was never racist again. The end.

Unless Don Imus was being racist on his radio show yesterday, which he may well could have been. Yesterday morning Don Imus and his sportscaster Warner Wolf were discussing black American football player Adam Jones, a man who doesn't want to be known by his 'Pacman' nickname any more because it reminds people that he's been arrested a number of times in the past. And that's when things got messy.

As the New York Times reports:

Mr. Imus asked, “What color is he?” “He’s African-American,” Mr. Wolf responded. “Well, there you go,” Mr. Imus said. “Now we know.”

Interesting that Warner Wolf answered Imus' question by saying "He's African-American" rather than going with the more logical answer of screaming "Lalalalalala" into the microphone, launching himself across the desk and clamping Don Imus' mouth shut with packing tape before anything too racially-questionable squeaked out of it.

Anyway, Don Imus has tasted the sour side of people hating you because you seem a bit racist, so this time he isn't going down without a fight. in an email to the New York Times, Imus wrote:

“I meant he was being picked on because he’s black.” He added that the veteran black comedian and activist Dick Gregory would be a guest on his show on Tuesday, to discuss the death of George Carlin. “We’ll see what he thinks,” Mr. Imus wrote. “I mean … come on!”

Perhaps his frank, head-on confrontation of the incident will mean Don Imus will be allowed to keep his radio show – that remains to be seen – but it probably spells curtains for his forthcoming TV clips show Black People Do The Funniest Things (Because They're Genetically Inferior To Me, Don Imus).

So god bless Howard Stern’s tubby and slightly psychotic-seeming sidekick Artie Lange for having an honestly disturbing argument with his assistant, before apparently trying to attack him and then resigning, all live on air. It’s what we’ve wanted to happen to Chris Moyles for years. Hats off to you, Artie Lange, you crazy, crazy bastard.

And, yes, we’ve got the whole of Artie Lange’s berserkoid meltdown after the jump.

This is the difference between Britain and America – in America, radio shows are in part hosted by aggressive chainsmoking overweight ex-convicts with debilitating cocaine and heroin addictions, while in Britain they’re hosted by Jo Whiley. America sounds better, to be honest.

And as far as aggressive chainsmoking overweight ex-convicts with debilitating cocaine and heroin addictions go, none were better than Howard Stern’s sidekick Artie Lange, for he was fatter and more aggressive than everyone else put together. We say was – technically he is still fat and aggressive, but he just isn’t Howard Stern’s sidekick any more.

That’s because, at some point during yesterday’s show, Artie Lange got into a fight with his assistant that spilled out into the studio, ended up with Artie Lange apparently trying to attack the assistant and then caused Lange’s immediate on-air resignation. Which, it’s fair to say, sounds slightly more exciting than The Archers. The Chicago Sun Times reports:

Comedian Artie Lange quit his 7-year-run as Howard Stern’s sidekick during a violent outburst on Thursday’s Sirius Satellite Radio broadcast… The incident appears to have left the “shock jock” Stern stunned. Replays of the show scheduled throughout Thursday were replaced with programming from earlier in the week. “I’m flabbergasted … Artie is clearly out of control with this,” Stern said on the air after Lange charged after his assistant in what the comic claimed was a dispute over money. “That was crazy what I just saw. I don’t understand it. I don’t approve of it and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.”

But that’s enough reading for you. You want to hear Artie Lange going going apeshit and resigning on air, don’t you. Well, OK, here it is – Artie Lange’s meltdown in all its glory.

Personally, we can’t see what the problem is – if a grown man can’t call his employee a motherfucker and try to attack him in front of millions of listeners then can he really call himself a man?

However, this weird on-air incident has left Howard Stern with the problem of finding a suitable replacement for Artie Lange. He’ll need to find someone who’ll effortlessly slip into Artie Lange’s old role and have the same kind of persona and attitudes. And that’ll be hard, because foul-mouthed crack-addicted grizzly attack-bears have been quite hard to come by since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Read more:

Howard Stern’s sidekick quits show - CST

Back in the springtime, Don Imus briefly became the new Mel Gibson when he attracted a racial firestorm by claiming that a female basketball team all looked a bit like Pampers-loving pieces of horticultural equipment or something, and he was promptly sacked from his radio show as a result. But now Don Imus is back, and presented his first show on WABC-AM just hours ago. And to show how much he's progressed, Don Imus unveiled a brand-new non-racist team including two black comedians. True, they spent the entirety of Don Imus' show locked in a cage wearing loincloths, eating watermelons and singing My Mammy, but a start's a start.

Don Imus is basically the Montel Williams of spring 07, only instead of threatening to blow up teenage girls, Imus referred to an all-black female basketball team as a bunch of "nappy-headed hos." In a world still reeling from Mel Gibson's anti-Jew "sugartits" rant and Michael Richards' less inventive racism, that vaguely obscure insult was a step too far and Don Imus was speedily fired from his CBS radio show.

Not that Don Imus has been completely inactive since then, though – he's used his self-enforced unemployment to blowtorch the limpets off his face, sue CBS for firing him on the grounds that he was only employed by the broadcaster to spout off a relentless torrent of racist woman-hating nonsense in the first place, and plot his comeback like some sort of Machiavellian scarecrow with an especially large amount of time on its hands.

And now it's paid off. As reported back last month, Don Imus has got himself a new radio show on WABC-AM, and it started just a few hours ago. Recorded live at Manhattan City Hall – and featuring the shitstorm-quashing stylings of black comedians Karith Foster and Tony Powell – Don Imus seemed to spend most of the show pleading with the audience to forgive him for being such a foolish old racist. Seattle PI quotes:

"I didn't see any point in going on some sort of Larry King tour to offer a bunch of lame excuses for making an essentially reprehensible remark about innocent people who did not deserve to be made fun of … I will never say anything in my lifetime that will make any of these young women at Rutgers regret or feel foolish that they accepted my apology and forgave me. And no one else will say anything else on my program that will make anyone think that I didn't deserve a second chance… Other than that, not much has changed. Dick Cheney is still a war criminal, Hillary Clinton is still Satan and I'm back on the radio."

These next few days will be among the toughest that Don Imus has ever faced, at least professionally – personally he still has to top that time a dog mistook his sleeping face for an old shoe and started gnawing at it – as he will discover whether his audience of angry rednecks will forgive him for saying something the bulk of them probably agreed with in the first place, and whether he can maintain his shock-jock reputation without resorting to racism again.

That second one will be a piece of cake, though – we read in Don Imus' notebook that he's going to steer clear of trouble from now on by just making a lot of jokes about Jordan's disabled son.

Read more:

Don Imus Back On The Air – Seattle PI 

No, wait, our mistake – Britney Spears would want to cut a mumbled half-interview with Ryan Seacrest short to take a shower. Yesterday morning in what appears to be her only piece of actual promotion for the album that could make or break her future as an artist, Britney Spears had a telephone interview with Ryan Seacrest in which she exclusively revealed her love of cookies and how she thinks the world is slightly cruel. Then Britney abruptly cut it short to listlessly meander off to shower.

Still, at least we know that Britney Spears showers now. We had wondered.

Call us old-fashioned, but if we had spent the last three years of our lives thumping out accidental redneck babies from our vagina, divorcing the redneck who put them up there in the first place and having disquieting bald-headed suicide attempts in rehab where we honestly believed ourselves to be the devil, we'd want the promotion of our comeback album to be bulletproof.

You know the kind of thing – wall-to-wall interviews, maybe a TV special, a big tour – just to reassure the world that we were still the pleather-loving virginal schoolgirl of a pop star they came to love a decade ago. But that's just us. Britney Spears, you see, has other ideas.  

So far Britney Spears has announced her comeback by miming to songs in clubs, miming to songs in front of the whole world looking like a concussed prostitute, wiping dog turds on expensive dresses and losing her children to a cornrowed pirate thanks to a judge calling her a giant drug addict. All Britney needs to do now is send a hungry bear into a post-natal clinic and she'll have completed the full house of badly-advised album promotion techniques.

But yesterday Britney Spears decided to change this by doing some actual promotion for Blackout by letting Ryan Seacrest interview her on his radio show. And, yes, Britney was in bed at the time. And she didn't seem to have a clue about anything going on around her. And she cut the interview short without saying goodbye so she could go and have a shower. But it still counts as an interview, OK? Take 40 reports on what few full sentences Britney Spears did manage to murmur out before she realised how dirty she was:

Seacrest asked her all about her custody case, and if she is doing everything she can to regain some custody of her children, to which she replied, "Oh God yeah. People say what they want and do what they do and it's sad how people, how cruel our world can be… At the end of the day… you've just got to know in your heart that you're doing the best you can and that's basically it." Britney, clearly not across the details of her court case, said, "That's like, all in the court. Stuff like that, my lawyers know all that stuff." 

Then Britney was gone, leaving her cousin Alli Sim to blurt some halfhearted excuses about her whereabouts before hanging up.

But, as much as she basically managed to reinforce every single negative preconception about her during the interview without managing to look even slightly self-aware, it does go to show what a class act Britney Spears is. After all, it took Heather Mills a full day of berserk self-promotion to get the planet to realise what an idiot she is, but Britney Spears achieved the same reaction just by mumbling four sentences about nothing in bed and then taking a shower.

We should really be applauding this woman for her efficiency, if anything.

Read more:

Britney's Quick Pre-Shower Interview - Take 40