V2 Records Company

Earlier this month, after the president of V2 Records read a widely viewed website of the influential music publication Hits Magazine, he typed a short e-mail and launched a small war. Hits' website had joked that V2, the label releasing the new White Stripes album, "ought to be renamed V 1/2 as the understaffed company makes a desperate attempt to set up the most critical release in its brief history....

Earlier this month, after the president of V2 Records read a widely viewed website of the influential music publication Hits Magazine, he typed a short e-mail and launched a small war. Hits' website had joked that V2, the label releasing the new White Stripes album, "ought to be renamed V 1/2 as the understaffed company makes a desperate attempt to set up the most critical release in its brief history....

Keith Morris is wondering whether being included as one of the patriarch acts on a show marking 25 years of punk rock might have some negative implications. "Is that 25 years too looong?" he asks, eating a Caesar salad on a restaurant patio in his Silver Lake neighborhood. The lead singer of the Circle Jerks raises his eyebrows above his round glasses and under his long dreadlocks as if daring a retort that perhaps it has been too long.

As Richard Melville Hall stands in a health-food market aisle in his rumpled sweatshirt and jeans, lunch hour shoppers have no idea this diminutive fellow rivals Beck as the hip pop auteur of the day. He looks like just another 36-year-old bald guy trying to choose between barbecue seitan and tofu. Hall, better known to pop fans as Moby, puts a wheat-based seitan sandwich in his red shopping basket, alongside a fruit drink and energy bar, and heads to the checkout counter.