Michelle Branch

It's easy to miss how unusual singer-songwriter Avril Lavigne looks in the cover photo of her hit debut album, "Let Go." The 17-year-old Canadian stands in the middle of a busy street, her dirty-blond hair looking a bit stringy. She's engulfed by an oversized black jacket and baggy pants that drape in rumples over black running shoes, a bit of a wide belt peeking out where the jacket has fallen slightly open. Her expression is nonchalant, perhaps even bored.

Pop radio is a strange place, a gathering of disparate sounds and intentions mingling on the airwaves in ways both lighthearted and unnatural. By the nature of that setting, anything lucky enough to reach the top of the pops soon flares out, filed almost immediately into the nostalgia drawer. That once again made this year's massive Jingle Ball concert, hosted Wednesday at Staples Center by Top 40 mainstay KIIS-FM (102.7), a survey in contrasting styles and abilities.

The protest sign waved outside of Sen. John F. Kerry's latest celebrity fundraiser Monday night said it all: "Where's Whoopi?'' On Thursday, actress and comedian Whoopi Goldberg sparked controversy at a New York gala for the presumed Democratic presidential nominee with a comic routine that used President Bush's surname as a sexual euphemism.

Tampa Bay Buccaneer Coach Jon Gruden may have been a no-show at his team's news conference Monday, but he was still a main topic of conversation at the Raider media session. Receiver Jerry Rice, who sat at the main podium in the absence of his coach, Bill Callahan, said he wouldn't have been sitting there, or even been in San Diego this week, were it not for Gruden. "The main reason I went to the Raiders is because of Jon Gruden," Rice said.

Movies The highly anticipated fantasy "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," the first of director Peter Jackson's adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, arrives Wednesday. Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Sean Astin, Cate Blanchett, Liv Tyler and Viggo Mortensen, right, star as the hobbits, wizards, humans and faeries that make up the world of Middle-Earth.

Who better to reach the ears of young people with a message of civic engagement than ... Q-Tip? The former frontman of the hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest is the latest celebrity to team up with the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Rock the Vote to urge young people to go to the polls in November.

New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer said Wednesday that he had subpoenaed nine of the nation's largest radio conglomerates in his investigation of claims that some major recording artists got air time because of payoffs by their labels. "A lot of the major songs have been implicated in this, and it showed how pervasive the payola infrastructure had become," Spitzer said.

Stars aplenty shone from the Wiltern stage Wednesday at the second "Stormy Weather" concert, a fund-raiser for Don Henley's Walden Woods Project. Yet despite many stellar performances among short sets by Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Reba McEntire, Trisha Yearwood, Sheryl Crow, Norah Jones, Paula Cole, Deborah Cox, Susan Tedeschi and Michelle Branch, the star of the evening wasn't a single one of them. The true headliner was the singer-songwriter tradition itself.

Far from the star-studded affair it is today, the Grammy Awards started out modestly 44 years ago -- with just 525 industry insiders attending a dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where the only entertainment was a spoof on "South Pacific" titled "How South Was My Pacific." But one thing was obvious from the start: the Grammy voters' suspicion of any artist who veered too far from the adult pop mainstream, which in 1959 meant anyone involved in rock 'n' roll, country and R&B.

INSTEAD of visiting a bounty on a single artist, the nominations announced Tuesday for the 45th Annual Grammy Awards were handed out in an unusually equitable manner -- eight artists tied for the most nominations with music as diverse as the elegiac rock of Bruce Springsteen, the gossamer, jazzy blends of newcomer Norah Jones and the whipsaw rhymes of Eminem.