Pop & Hiss

A back lot at Paramount Studios shook from the bass of classic rap records pumping through speakers as members of the crowd picked up free bandannas, sunglasses and faux gold chains.

The strip of brownstones and storefronts that often stand in for New York — or whatever metropolis filmmakers see fit — had been transformed into a Brooklyn block party on Sunday for VH1’s “Hip Hop Honors.”

The Side Eyes, “So Sick” (In the Red). Earlier in the summer, this L.A. band celebrated its roots with a gig titled “Punk is Dad.” They shared the bill with iconic L.A. punk band Redd Kross, whose co-founder, Jeff McDonald, is Side Eyes singer Astrid McDonald’s dad. Her mom? Guitarist Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go’s.

Lineage noted, Side Eyes’ debut album for the lauded northeast L.A.

Byrds co-founder and ace musician Chris Hillman is on the verge of releasing “Bidin’ My Time,” a new album he’s recorded with Tom Petty co-producing, but at his home office and study in Ventura this August, the artist is in a reflective mood.

He reaches down toward a phalanx of instrument cases lining one wall of the building in which he conducts much of his business these days.

For more than a decade, Green Day has been perhaps the most explicitly political American stadium rock band.

Ever since 2004’s “American Idiot” — Green Day’s multi-platinum, Broadway-adapted album that skewered the George W. Bush era — the pop-punk group has grafted more or less leftist rhetoric into some of the defining rock songs of the decade.

If “Tommy” is the Who’s great rock opera, its successor, “Quadrophenia,” might more accurately be described as the rock group’s great opera.

A mass of people with red noses and faces covered in white paint descended Saturday on Washington. They hoisted signs declaring “Clown Lives Matter” and posters decorated with doctored images of President Trump.

Also highly visible were numerous images of a wild-haired man wielding a hatchet. One was plastered on an American flag.